Innate Response and Social Roles: Consider the Bees
http://ts-si.org/biological-sciences/3929-innate-response-and-social-roles-consider-the-bees.html (http://ts-si.org/biological-sciences/3929-innate-response-and-social-roles-consider-the-bees.html)
2/5/09
Toulouse, France. It is common for lay proponents of social politics to reinforce their positions with recourse to the oversimplified debates over nature vs. nurture. However, serious investigations acknowledge our animal nature and use quantitative methods to improve our understanding of behavior.
So, what is the origin of social behavior?
Finding an answer to this question inevitably involves study of the social insects, such as bees, which have an innate tendency to form social connections.
In the previous research, the response threshold model posited that individual responses to stimuli can differ enough that individuals with varying thresholds specialize in different tasks. However, previous work could only explain broad differences in behavior. It has been very difficult to explain more specific task-associated specialization, let alone the origins of division of labor, through a reliance on response thresholds.