#sociobiology

[posting-stuffies]

Experiencing a CTM (close to male) intersex variation doesn't mean having Wolffian duct, and intersex Wolffians can be CTF.

Intersex people can be neither CTM or CTF while still experiencing Müllerian and/or Wolffian ducts.

People can experience neither Mullerian or Wolffian traits too.

[lindahall]

E. O. Wilson – Scientist of the Day 

Edward Osborne Wilson, an American biologist, entomologist, and ecologist, was born in Alabama on June 10, 1929.

read more...

[gothhabiba]

If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them... Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like 'Men are stronger than women.' We should be asking: 'Which men?' and 'What do they do?' There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.

Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“

[hojpojjery]

Decent explanation of the waggle dance mechanics.

The waggl dance is how foragers in a honey bee colony communicate about food sources. Using a combination of the angle of dance from a vertical line, the duration of the dance, and the tempo of the dance, bees communicate to other foragers:

A. The direction of the food source relative to the sun.

B. The distance to the food source.

C. The quality of the food source.

What's great about this is that it is universal, and every foragers can understand it. The workers, however, do not understand the dance, because they have a different brain morphology. When signaled by low food availability, a select number of workers will undergo developmental changes causing their brain morphology to grow more complex, cementing their transition into foragers.

It had also been discovered that in addition to being used to communicate judgements about food sources, the waggle dance is used when a swarm is moving to a new nesting location. In this particular case, honey bees employ another signal. Once a prime nesting location had been discovered and agreed upon to be the best option, dancers for the better nesting site will headbutt dancers for less desirable sites and make a short, loud buzz to indicate that they should stop dancing. By this method, the entire swarm comes to a single decision, and moves as one.

This methodology for communication in honey bees had contributed to the super organism hypothesis in eusocial insects.

[earlgraytay]

fhttps://stalinistqueens.tumblr.com/post/164703983094/taxloopholes-too-many-people-really-view-humans

So regarding this post... there’s two problems with this whole “humans are EITHER naturally good and cooperative and social animals who want to help each other but are corrupted by unnatural capitalism OR they’re naturally nasty dominance-based hierarchical brutes who beat each other down, nature is red in tooth and claw!!!” thing.

The first problem: 

Just because something is ‘natural’ does not mean it is good or right or the proper way to do things. To put it bluntly: arsenic is natural. Cyanide is natural. Dysentery, pneumonia, cancer, and necrosis are all natural. There are plenty of things in nature that are bad and toxic and poisonous; we plan around them, find technology of one form or another to keep these things in check, and move on. 

If your argument revolves around “this is the way things naturally are!”, it’s probably a bad argument. If your worldview requires nature to be superior to the unnatural, it’s a bad worldview. If your master plan requires humans to naturally be good, you’re not putting the infrastructure in place to deal with humans who- for whatever reason!- aren’t.  

More to the point, this is a false dichotomy. It’s taking a really simplistic either-or view of a really complicated, nuanced problem.   

Human beings are primates. Humans are pack hunter/gatherers optimized to live in tribes of maybe 15-150 people. Any human organization bigger, more complicated, or more diverse than this is ‘unnatural’, in the same way that air conditioning and the internet are unnatural. They’re forms of technology humans created in order to make life better. 

If you want to see ‘natural’ human behaviour, there’s one of two tacks you can take- you can study humans from traditional societies that don’t interact with the outside world, or you can study humans’ closest relatives (chimps, bonobos, and so on). 

There are lots of ethical issues with the first option and lots of procedural issues with the second. (An example of #1- Is it worth exposing people from these societies to the outside world if they don’t want to be exposed? Are you going to fundamentally change their culture by observing it, and is that worth the knowledge you’ll gain? An example of #2- bonobos settle most disputes by having sex with each other, but humans do not respond well to being nonconsensually groped while they’re angry. You can’t always translate non-human-primate social structures to humans.) 

But, we have enough data from both of these sources to be able to get an idea of what human behaviour in its ‘natural’ state looks like. And - well, as far as I know, the answer isn’t as simple as ‘humans are naturally cooperative!’ or ‘humans are naturally competitive!’ Humans are naturally tribal. 

What this means is that humans naturally form small or medium-sized communities, which share common interests and usually see themselves as being ‘like a family’ or ‘all friends here’. And naturally- without any social norms that incentivize doing otherwise-  humans are kind and cooperative among members of their own community, and are wary around members of other communities, but not necessarily hostile.  

The social norms that incentivize hostility (or a lack thereof) are tied to resources. If resources in an area are scarce, different tribes generally don’t fight, and in fact often cooperate. It’s hard enough to survive; fighting is a waste of resources you could use for other things. Similarly, if resources are plentiful and everyone has enough of what they need, tribes don’t often fight, because everyone has what they need; why would you fight? 

Generally, tribes become hostile towards each other when there’s a shortage of something, be it food, water, territory, or women (I did say things that are natural are worse).  Nature being nature, there’s nearly always a shortage of something. Tribal hostilities tend to be small-scale skirmishes- the point isn’t to KILL THE OTHER GUYS DEAD FOREVER (even if that’s what you tell each other when you go out to fight), the point is to get what you need and come back with it in one piece. 

I reiterate: human society as we know it is an outgrowth of all of this. It’s not completely disconnected from humanity’s ‘natural’ state- humans haven’t evolved much physically since the end of the Ice Age, and it’s safe to say that physically and mentally we have a lot in common with our ancestors. But it’s not that natural state. 

 So what changed that natural state? What took humans from “small-scale skirmishes for resources” to “large-scale bloody wars that raze cities or destroy civilizations”? The Answer May Shock You.

Spoilers: it’s not capitalism, it’s agriculture and city-building. There’s lots of different reasons why this happens, and going into them all would mean this post will stretch your dash even farther, but the short version goes something like this:

Agriculture means you’re stuck in one place and can’t leave. If resources get scarce in your part of the river valley, you can’t just set up a new camp a hundred miles away; you have to stick with your crops. And if things go wrong for you, but they went right for the guys twenty miles downstream, it starts to look damn tempting to raid them and steal all their stuff. 

Agriculture and city-building also go hand in hand with the emergence of strong, top-down leadership; if you get a group of more than a couple hundred people, you need someone (or a group of someones) to coordinate what y’all are doing, or everything falls apart.  

You get one leader- one chief or king or patriarch- who’s a little greedier than his neighbours, he realizes, “hey, instead of just taking what we need, what if we took........ all their stuff.....”, and Hijinks Ensue. And by hijinks, I mean the start of an endless bloody cycle of conflict that we’re still trying to end today. 

Capitalism didn’t have anything to do with it; that came a lot later. You can definitely make a case for capitalism exacerbating the stuff that makes people fight each other- as an example, forced scarcity trips the ‘we’re all out of resources, time to Fight’ switch in our brains, whether or not we’ve actually got enough resources to work with. 

But TLDR: humanity is six billion monkeys on six billion typewriters, living in a society designed by countless typewriter-monkeys that came before us; this society is profoundly “unnatural” but that’s a good thing; you can’t say humanity is naturally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because humans are complicated’; war sucks; capitalism has some major problems but you can’t foist all humanity’s flaws off on it.

[I can’t properly source all of this right now because it’s wayyyy past my bedtime, but off the top of my head, this post owes a lot to E.O. Wilson, a biologist whose work focused on integrating biology and sociology.] 

[cock-a-roach]

When people think of cockroaches, some may think of the much-smarter-than-a-bug Gregor Samsa, but it takes a special kind of person—a social biologist, really—to think of them as “gregarious.” Yes, these unloved (by humans), trash-eating creatures have social lives too. A recent review in the journal Insectes Sociaux highlights the social behavior of two so-called gregarious cockroach …

Cockroaches need friends! 

[dr-afsaeed]

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate - New Study

Science, Volume 389, Issue 6760, Page 580-581, August 2025. Summary Without knowing the specific content of the Science issue, I can only provide a general summary. Science, Volume 389, Issue 6760, pages 580-581, published in August 2025, likely contains scientific research, reviews, or perspectives. Given the journal’s broad scope, the articles could cover any discipline, including biology,…

[mushrooms-and-millipedes]

Most of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) is just an excuse for EO Wilson to talk about ants, but I’m not complaining