Social Construction & Biology

One of the key ideas in modern sociology is social construction.  This indicates that a person’s perception of reality is to a large extent constructed by the society in which that person lives.  For example, if I perceive the people downstream to be untrustworthy, that may have nothing to do with how they actually behave; it is all to do with how my own people teach me to look at them.  

When the biopolitical sciences emerged in the 1970’s, they seemed to present a stark alternative to that idea.  The way we perceive reality is largely conditioned by natural selection.  My genes determine how I will react in any context because those genes were selected for: the coded traits are the ones that got their genes into my mother and father. 

It has been clear for some time that this dichotomy was an obstacle to the truth.  In even the simplest creatures, genes code for a range of responses to the environment.  Even a tree can learn when to shed its leaves by responding to the coming of winter. 

As I noted in a previous post, cleaner fish are more likely to be honest when they are observed by a number of potential client fish.  The client fish want a cleaner who will confine his appetites to the ectoparasites, thus performing the cleaning.  Doing just that when potential clients are looking on is a good business model. 

That is social construction.  Their perception of the situation is constructed, to some degree, by the social situation.  In this case, the social situation includes non-conspecific organisms. 

I have been reading recently about Norwegian rats (Rattus norvegicus).  These rats are very good at gauging reciprocal exchanges.  They share food, but are more likely to share with an individual depending on the quality of food that the latter shared in the past.  If he/she gave me good stuff last time, he/she is worth repaying. 

That is direct reciprocity.  You return a favor based on your record of past exchanges.  Another kind of relationship is indirect reciprocity.  If C sees A doing a favor for B, C is more likely to do a favor for A.  A is a standup guy.  We see something of this in the cleaner fish example.  Strong reciprocity adds an element of punishment.  If A doesn’t play by the rules, I won’t play with A.  That seems to be at work in vampire bats who refuse to share with a stingy roost mate. 

But there is another kind of reciprocity that is very interesting because it makes fewer demands on the cognitive development of the participants.  In all of the above cases, you have to have a brain sophisticated enough to keep track of individual encounters.  It is difficult to see how that develops unless there is already a lot of cooperation going on. 

Perhaps an easier route to reciprocity is just to measure the general level of cooperation in the group that you happen to be in at the time.  The more cooperative partners you encounter, the more you cooperate and vice versa. 

That is generalized reciprocity, and it has been observed in rats.  In a piece by Claudia Rutte and Michael Taborsky, female rats where more likely to cooperate if they had received help in the past, regardless of the identity of the potential partner.  Once they sensed they were in a good neighborhood, they became good neighbors.  Of course, if the neighborhood is bad…

It struck me tonight as I was reading a very interesting book‑Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith‑that this an example of the primary social mechanism in living organisms.  Godfrey-Smith offers the example of a glowing squid.  Luminescence provides a big advantage to this creature.  It allows it to blend in with the moonlit background (upground), so that its shadow doesn’t warn its prey.  How does it manage this trick?

The squid provides a home to bacteria that can luminesce.  That, however, is expensive, biologically speaking.  There is no point in bothering if there aren’t enough of your clones around to produce a descent bit of light.  The bacteria rely on their ability to both sense and produce an “inducer” molecule.  That allows each little bacterium to tell how many of his fellows are around.  This is called quorum sensing, a remarkably political term.  When the inducer molecules reach a certain density in the local environment (the Hawaiian squid) the bacteria turn on their lights. 

The rats are much more advanced creatures than the bacteria but the mechanism seems only a little more advanced.  What the rat needs to know isn’t how big the local population is but what is its moral character?  Its own moral behavior (cooperate or not) is determined by its finding.  This doesn’t require anything more sophisticated than the ability to sample and effectively draw conclusions. 

The social construction of individual character is pervasive among living organisms.  It is clearly developed in a high degree in human organisms.  The sociologists were right to put a strong emphasis on social construction.  They were wrong to suppose that this mechanism somehow freed human beings from biological causation or that it could be properly understood without biology. 

I fear that it will take a change of guard across the social sciences for the full integration of biology and the former to more fully and fruitfully integrate.  The general fields of sociology and political science are still very resistant to this type of research.  This may amount to a tragedy.  Higher education is changing in ways that are not favorable to either the social sciences or the humanities.  It would be a tragedy indeed if the former would diminished just when the greatest potential for discover and application was at hand.