I’m writing this article to express my personal opinions of how ecological sociality may have contributed to the development of non-heterosexualiity and new gender roles.

Feel free to discuss the ideas together.

Rebranding sociality

Different disciplines may interpret the term “sociality” very differently. Here, sociality refers to a terminology in Ecology, which means “the degree to which individuals in an animal population tend to associate in social groups and form cooperative societies.” I pulled up the Wikipedia page and they categorized sociality into the following:

1. Subsociality
2. Solitary but social
3. communal
4. quasisocial
5. semisocial
6. eusocial

Important: bear in mind that these classifications were first coined on insect ecology. And even so, ecologists didn’t create these animals. We’re only trying to categorize our observations in the best way that we can.

Types of sociality

Subsociality can be understood as the most basic form of sociality. It simply means the parents care for their offspring for any given amount of time. Therefore, even spiders who let their spiderlings piggyback or centipedes that “hug” their new hatchlings can also be seen as basic parent care, and therefore subsocial.

If the animal does not exhibit any parental care, most of the time it is considered as solitary. However, even solitary animals can be social. For instance, orangutans forage separately but share the same place to sleep. These animals are called solitary-but-social.

Communal, quasisocial and semisocial species all share a common nest site, but the level of sociality differs. Communal species share the same nest but they only care for their own young. Quasisocial animals share the same nest and some responsibilities of brood care, and all the individuals remain reproductive. In a semisocial population, however, there is also a biological caste system that delegates certain individuals as labor and non-reproductive (a.k.a. sterile).

A eusocial society, like the honeybees, carries all the characteristics of a semisocial population, meaning that they share the same hive, brood care responsibilities, and the labor losing their ability to reproduce. The only difference is that multiple generations of the eusocial honeybees would be living together and sharing the same space and labor.

If you are beginning to ponder how humans would be classified under this scheme, hold your horses. I’ll go into the details in the following sections.

But how is sociality related to sexuality, you may ask. To link the two together, I first have to introduce another concept called “fitness”.

Fitness

Someone called Dawkins published a book called The Selfish Gene in 1976. He tried to look at evolution not from the human point of view but from the genes themselves. Dawkins argued that from the point of view of a gene, it wants to pass on as many copies of itself as possible. If you have trouble visualizing this, imagine the scenario where a bacterial cell keeps multiplying in numbers. Apply this back to the individual animal. It can roughly be translated into the number of viable offsprings that this animal can reproduce. This concept is coined as the “personal fitness” of an animal or gene.

However, unlike the animal that carries the gene, a gene is not faced with the dilemma of alive or dead. In another sense, although your sibling is their own individual, both of you obtained your genetic material from the same sources (i.e., your parents). Your sibling shares roughly half of your genes. So, even if you die from an accident, your gene “remains alive” in your sibling, your parents, and in a smaller proportion in your relatives. This is called the “inclusive fitness” of an animal or gene.

To give a comical example, imagine a single gene that gives people a big nose. For this big-nose gene, its evolutionary success depends on how many copies of this big-nose gene exist in the population. In other words, the bigger the noses of the population, the more successful it is.

Trading-off of fitness

The concepts of fitness and sociality complement each other very well.

For a subsocial centipede to care for its young, it needs to sacrifice its own time and energy to guard the offspring in order to increase their chances of survival. Because if the offsprings were killed off, then no genes will be passed on to the next generations.

However, parental care isn’t always the best strategy in the wild. Caring for offspring means the adult loses time to forage, and sometimes it also makes them more vulnerable to predators. Plus, provision of parental care doesn’t automatically guarantee the survival of the young. In some animals, they may perform better if they prioritize themselves instead of providing parental care. Solitary animals like mantises can be just as successful in the environment.

In ecology, we call this decision-making process a “trade-off“. Trade-off simply means that when resources are limited (e.g., time and energy), an organism is often denied the luxury to enjoy the best of both worlds. It has to pick its own battle. The trade-off can happen at different levels. Some trade-offs are biological, such as the sterile workers in honeybees being denied the chance to reproduce. Trade-offs can also be behavioral, such as a mother deciding whether and for how long it will brood its young.

Therefore, the proposed categories of sociality can also be understood as a ladder, or spectrum, of trade-offs that the animal has made in order to achieve its maximum fitness.

For a communal species, choosing to share a common nest site hints that tolerating each other is more worthwhile than competing against each other. A quasisocial animal is co-dependent with each other because sharing of food and resources is deemed worthwhile for everyone’s offspring. Semi-social and eusocial animals like the honeybees take the trade-off to the extreme by creating strict reproductive dictatorships. It may sound like a dire trade-off, but from the gene’s point of view, the environment must’ve made it worthwhile to form big colonies of honeybees instead of letting them roam solitarily.

Pinning the concepts of sociality and fitness against each other, two deductions can be obtained. First, if genes are indeed selfish, then the attempt to maximize fitness will become a motive, while sociality can be understood as a tool or method that the gene uses to attain maximum fitness.

Second, if sociality is a tool for the gene to maximize fitness, then sociality must be a constantly evolving trait under the varying limitations of the dynamic environment.

And, if these two deductions are correct, then a third deduction must hold: if sociality is a constantly evolving trait, then any attempt to categorize sociality based on current knowledge must crumble in the future.

Moral of the story is that a human society is often — very controversially — counted as a eusocial species despite the absence of a biological caste system, and the debate only occurs because our current classifications and definitions fail to encapsulate sociality in a nutshell.

Hence, I will be introducing sociality as a fluid construct for the rest of the article.