Some insects create highly organized social systems; ant and termite colonies, with their elaborate systems for foraging and gathering, are among the most well known.
A late-August workshop at SFI, “Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Insects and Humans,” asked what sort of evolutionary food-gathering crossovers, if any, might exist between human farmers and, say, leaf-cutting ants or ambrosia beetles.
SFI External Professor Peter Peregrine, the workshop’s host, says the group’s first order of business was to ask “whether humans and insects both practice agriculture" or whether they are really such different forms of food production that comparing and contrasting them is not productive.”
If, in fact, something along the lines of convergent evolution (the development of similar features in species of different lineages,) is happening, Peregrine says that opens questions about how various functional and developmental constraints led to food gathering and production.
“What if some of the effects of agriculture on insect societies help us understand what happened in human societies once agriculture was adopted,” says Peregrine, an archaeologist. “If we can identify some of the causes and consequences of human agriculture as being shared with insects, then I think that helps us to build broader theories of cultural evolution based on well-established principles and processes of organic evolution.”
He also hopes to build lasting relationships between groups of researchers, such as biologists who have been bridging the gap between organic and cultural evolution and Peregrine’s fellow archaeologists.
“Food-getting strategies are a basic function of any organism and play a profound role in directing the course of evolution,” says Peregrine. “Understanding the evolution of a rare and unique food-getting strategy – in this case agriculture – might help us in redefining or even in developing new approaches to understanding evolution.”