I ran across a reference yesterday to the “group mind” phenomenon documented by Thomas D. Steeley in his decades-long study of honey bees. Having no particular interest in honey bees but a long-standing interest in the potential power of group consciousness, I bought a “Kindle Shorts” version of one of his books to see if it might help me understand his findings.
Seeley, Thomas D.. The Five Habits of Highly Effective Honeybees (and What We Can Learn from Them): From “Honeybee Democracy” (Princeton Shorts). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
In its first chapter I found this statement regarding the efficiency of the decision-making process of honey bees:
“… it is a solution that has been honed by natural selection for many millions of years—fossils from the oligocene epoch indicate that honeybees have existed for at least 30 million years…”
Now, that in itself is for me, only modestly interesting. I wouldn’t necessarily spend much time thinking about it. But it happens that I read another article earlier this week reporting the finding in Morocco of fossilized human remains substantially older than had been previously found.
As it was reported in the New York Times:
“Until now, the oldest known fossils of our species dated back just 195,000 years. The Moroccan fossils, by contrast, are roughly 300,000 years old.”
The 300,000-year number came to mind as I read about Seeley’s bees and their 30-million-year documented history. The bees have been around 100 times as long as even the newly lengthened estimate of man’s history!
Seeley’s suggestion that natural selection has been operating to increase the effectiveness of the group decisions of bees is interesting and intuitive. But natural selection, as I understand it, is observed over generations; and so it presumably occurs over generations. On the surface, then, the 30-million-year history of the honey bee isn’t the relevant comparison to the newly-discovered 300,000-year human experience.
If we use 30 years as a measure of a human generation – just to keep numbers round – humans have been around for about 10,000 generations. How does that compare to honey bees?
Googling “What is the life of a honey bee?” returns a variety of answers. If we except the queen bees, which live for 3 or 4 years, the average life of the other bees is reported to be between a few weeks and a few months. Since we’re just looking for rough comparisons here, I’ll pick a middle ground of 100 days, again just for round numbers.
If a honey-bee generation is 100 days, there are 3.65 generations in a year. In 30 million years, then, there are 109,500,000 generations or almost 11,000 times the number of human generations.
Looking at it another way, it would take 3.285 billion years for there to be as many human generations as there have been honey bee generations.
Now, there’s nothing to say that natural selection and species advancement in humans has, does or will proceed at a rate similar to that in honey bees. It might be much faster or much slower. It might be linear in one and exponential in the other.
But if humans are to catch up to the meticulously ordered and rational behavior of honey bees it seems that some sort of massive discontinuity in the pattern of natural selection is going to be required.
©Charles R. Lightner