What On Earth Books

THANKS TO ALL of you who had a crack at my ‘democratic’ challenge last week. First prize goes to Rowena Moore, from West Sussex, who emailed back the correct answer within FIVE minutes. A booby prize goes to my Dutch correspondent Peter van Lindonk who wryly proposed that the creatures with at least 100 million years of experience on how to make the most effective democratic decisions must surely be ‘women’.

If you live the UK, tomorrow is a big day. It is your first (and probably your last) ever chance to vote on whether or not to change the system we use for electing MPs to our parliament in Westminster. Consider yourself forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. Whenever I am confused I look to mother nature – she almost always knows what does and doesn’t work in the long run.

Democracy first evolved in the world of social insects perhaps as long as 100 million years ago. I would be amazed if honey-bees (the correct answer to the quiz, by the way) are the only insects to practice democratic decision-making. Many of you guessed ants or termites, and I dare say they probably do have some kind of democratic voting system also, but the rather well-studied system used by bees is what’s most relevant to the vote tomorrow.

Bees (Sky stream, panel 2) make a collective colony-wide decision each year on where is the best location for their next nest. This is a critical decision – the very survival of the colony depends on it – so inevitably natural selection has determined that the best possible decision making process is the one that has stood the test of time.

I shan’t go into the intricacies of exactly how the bees do their voting – you can read all out it here or refer to the Honey Bees chapter on pages 152-3 of What on Earth Evolved? 100 Species that Changed the World.

But in summary, a team of scouts will identify various potential nesting sites and then report back the location of each one to the rest of the community by means of their various dances. Other bees check out the sites before returning to the nest and scoring each one based on the length of the dance they perform in the direction of the site they think is best. After about two weeks the site with the best score is the winner and the colony swarms. It has been estimated that using this form of range voting, bees will choose the best location approximately 90% if the time.

If such excellent decision-making already exists in nature, why don’t we humans follow the same pattern in our own fledgling democracies?

One view is that bees have had millions of years to learn – through trial and error – what works best, while human forms of democracy are still very much in their infancy. Another is that modern humans are an arrogant species usually incapable of learning and listening to nature – at least in our modern, urban form.

If such excellent decision-making already exists in nature, why don’t we humans follow the same pattern in our own fledgling democracies?

But what’s all this got to do with the vote tomorrow? Well, the idea of scoring votes is clearly much closer to AV than is our traditional system of first-past-the-post. And the reason bees use scoring rather than first-past-the-post isn’t just because it tends to make better decisions. It’s also because a colony of bees has evolved to behave like a super organism not an aggregation of individuals.

What that means is that no single bee is precious of its own right to an individual vote, or is in the least bit concerned about how effectively the colonies government suits its own individual self-interest. Instead, bees do what is best for the survival of their genes throughout the generations to come. The absence of fertility in many individual bees is another aspect of this super efficient decision making body. In the same way, individual cells in our bodies sacrifice themselves for the good of our corporate whole through a process called apoptosis. When they do not, we get cancer.

Range voting therefore tends to be about making decisions that are best for the community as a whole – regardless of any individual’s self-interest. Conversely, first-past-the-post systems tend to have more to do with the inalienable right of an individual voter to cast their vote exclusively for a single candidate (or party), regardless of whether that candidate counts for more or less than 50% of the votes cast.

These rival systems expose a major fault line that runs through all western democracies. On one side are liberals for whom freedom means emphasising the common good of the society, liberating the masses from poverty and injustice. On the other side are conservatives who seek to protect an individual’s freedom from interference by the sate or external threats to their property. To put it another way, it’s Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité Vs The Boston Tea Party.

Tomorrow’s vote – however apathetic you may feel towards it – marks a milestone of sorts in the evolution of our democracy. If observing nature is any guide to the future then perhaps it’s inevitable that someday our descendants will end up with a system like bees (assuming we last long enough…). How quickly that happens depends – at least a bit – on tomorrow.

But if that all seems far too convoluted (which I am sure it is) then at least now you know why the stripes on the backs of bees are yellow not blue….