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Nature metaphors speak of top dogs, queen bees and kings of the
jungle, but not many senators of the savannah and voter bees. Is
democracy unnatural?

Actually, democracy, in the sense of collective decisions based on
the motivations of the majority, guides the social interactions and
group behavior of many species from honey bees to
chimpanzees.

Though they have a queen, honey bees don’t live in a
monarchy.

“There is no social hierarchy in a bee colony,” said Brian Johnson,
a professor of entomology at the University of California at Davis
told Discovery News. “The queen is just an egg laying machine. She
is more important than the average worker to colony survival, but
she is not a governor in any sense of the word.”

Though there is no formal voting process, the hive acts according
to the information gathered by the majority of hive members.

“This is crucial for bees because they have limited information at
the individual level and can only make good decisions when they
pool their information-gathering and processing skills,” Johnson
said.

Calling bee social behavior, “democracy” or even saying that they
make decisions runs the risk of anthropomorphism, or assigning
human qualities to animals, said Norman Gary, Professor Emeritus in
entomology at UC Davis.

“Decision making requires awareness of options and insects don’t
have that,” said Gary in an interview. “The bees are programmed to
go out and react to stimuli.”

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Flip-Flops



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Bees may not have developed a hive republic, but is there a deer
democracy governing the forests?

“In red deer, it is in the interest of group members to stay
together (e.g., in order to detect predators better),” Larissa
Conradt of the University of Sussex told Discovery News.
“Therefore, individuals benefit if they synchronize their
activities and movements, and they have to decide such things
collectively.”

Honey bees share the collective goal of hive survival at the
expense of the individual, but life is not so simple for red deer
groups, said Conradt. Individual deer have different physiological
needs, and not every herd movement will benefit each
individual.

“In such circumstances, there is a conflict of interest, and
individuals pay a ‘cost’ when synchronizing (they might forgo their
own optimal activity in order to stay with the group),” said
Conradt.

So, like members of a political party who don’t agree with
everything their candidate says, yet vote for him anyway, red deer
stick with the herd because it’s better than being abandoned.
Human’s closest relative, the chimpanzee, takes decision making
beyond the party politics of the deer-mocracy.

BLOG: Mother Nature Gets Her Day in
Court

“I describe in Chimpanzee Politics how the alpha male
needs broad support to reach the top spot,” Frans de Waal, Director
of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Primate Center and
psychology professor at Emory University. “He needs some close
allies and he needs many group members to be on his side.”

Although chimpanzee strong men can rise to power, they often become
bullies and are eventually deposed and exiled or even killed. Chimp
consensus builders form more stable social structures by offering
perks to supporters.

“The majority of alpha males seems rather of the supported type,
may be quite small (although not too small or unhealthy), and
spends a lot of time grooming allies, sharing meat or females with
them, and other ways of keeping them on his side,” de Waal
said.

“This sounds democratic to me, as well as the fact that the group
puts limits on alpha behavior,” said de Waal. “For example if the
alpha male attacks a juvenile using his canine teeth, the group may
revolt, thus showing the limits of alpha’s power.”

Human democracy may have analogues in the natural world, but no
other animal has taken collective decision making as far as
humans.

“One big difference between collective decision making between
humans and animals is deliberation,” said Conradt. “Human can
discuss issues prior to making collective decisions in a
sophisticated manner that is not open to animals.”

For all our complexity, humans make decisions using brains evolved
through eons of survival in the natural world.

Instinctual reactions to stimuli guide human behavior more than
many appreciate, Gary said.

“People are more like insects than insects are like people,” Gary
said.

Democracy, as a political system, seems to grow from instincts
inherited from our ape ancestors, which were forged by ages of
natural selection for optimized group decision making.

© 2012 Discovery Channel