What Can We Learn from Muir's Super Chicken Experiment?
A Bleak Future for Overly Competitive Humans
Among scientists, there is a lot of debate on whether competition or collaboration (or symbiosis) has played a more important role in the evolution of humans. We know traits such as altruism and unselfish behavior in social animals like humans and bees do not easily fit the Darwinian, selfish-gene or even endosymbiotic theories of evolution. Spiritualists and followers of religions believe it’s not our physical evolution but our connecting to a unique consciousness that is our main adaptive advantage over other species.
But humans today are conditioned to compete relentlessly with each other. Loneliness is among the world’s top crises. As stated in my book, governments in several countries (UK, Japan, Germany and Canada) are establishing Ministries of Loneliness to address the crisis of individualism. Competition can make us lonely but also strong. What does science say about when we become overly competitive?
In my book, I discuss two interesting examples of how competition and collaboration can play a role in adaptation of different species: Chickens and ants. The following is a modified excerpts from the book:
Regardless of what theory evolutionary biologists use to justify adaptive nature of non-selfish traits, altruism has undoubtedly resulted in some powerful human colonies at least at tribal and national levels. Even among non-humans, a brilliant delightful study by biologist William Muir (pictured above) has shown that within- group only selection pressures lead to devastating results. Muir’s study involved a chicken breeding selection experiment. He segregated chickens based upon their egg production. His original goal was to improve egg-laying productivity by selectively breeding the best egg producers (known as Super Chickens) generation after generation. So he would select top egg-laying hens and place them together, and repeat the process again by selecting the best egg-laying hens from different cohorts (sample groups) and placing them with other best egg- laying aggressive super chickens to compete again for best egg-laying. Think of this as a track and field tournament for egg-laying. He hypothesized that within- group competitive selection pressures would progressively develop a better egg- laying hen population, generation after generation. As the control group, he also grouped average non-aggressive egg-laying hens together and monitored their productivity over time.
The results were shocking. In the control group, the average-performing non-aggressive chickens were plump, well-feathered, healthy, and producing more eggs than they were at the start of the experiment. The competitively-bred super chickens group was decimated and in disarray. Most chickens were pecked to death by the top three super chickens on the pecking order. Ironically, the within-group only competitive selection pressures led to death, disarray and low (re)productivity.
Muir’s experiment is cited repeatedly in recent years as strong evidence against competitive training and grooming of super performers in society, corporations and academia.
From a metabolic and energy conservation standpoint, group selection and altruism makes sense as collaborative foraging and trust building reduce the metabolic cost of survival for individual organisms. Biologist E.O. Wilson credits much of social grooming, collaborative foraging and group selection to the eusocial nature of Homo sapiens. Eusociality arises by the superiority of organized groups (colonies) over solitaires and cooperative pre-eusocial groups. Although rare, the few species that adhere to eusociality such as ants, wasps, bees and mole-rats, rank among the planet's most dominant. The biomass of ants alone composes more than half that of all insects, exceeding that of all terrestrial nonhuman vertebrates combined. Early hominins cooperated to rear their children while other members of the same group hunted and foraged. According to E.O. Wilson, those early cooperative and mutualistic traits, rooted partly in our eusocial nature, helped humans to dominate land vertebrates.
Contrary to Super chickens, ants have adopted a “group-survival” foraging strategy we call “swarm intelligence.” Learning from ants, humans now widely use swarm intelligence algorithms in metaheuristic artificial intelligence models (of mobile networks), multi-destination traveling salesman optimizations, Monte Carlo simulations, genetically modified organisms, military applications such as navigation of unmanned clusters of drones or vehicles, and even in crowd simulation CGI (Computer-generated imagery) software in movies like The Lord of the Rings.
Examples of swarm intelligence in natural systems include group behaviors such as flocking, hunting or herding in ant and bee colonies, birds, deer and other animals. Other examples include bacteria growth, fish schooling, microbial intelligence, and by extension our own adaptive immune system (innate as well as memory B cells and T cells). But what does swarm intelligence mean and how does it work? In my next blog I will share amazing details about how it works (quoting from my book again).
I did not have the support of Big House publishers so as an independent scientist/author, I feel proud when I receive great reviews by independent readers like you. The following is an introduction to the book on Amazon, ranked as Hot New Release:
Why do humans walk a tightrope between depression and addiction (habituation), anxiety and recklessness? Why is it so hard to kick bad habits? Who do several countries now have Ministries of Loneliness to keep the social fabrics from falling apart? Why are humans so prone to self-delusion, self-deception, and forming mobs and cults?
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The world’s largest battles are fought inside human minds and today most of us suffer from abuse not by others but by our own brain. In this book, we learn about the neurochemical soup that makes our "economic" brain prone to "metabolic" imbalance and leads us to pursue unfettered growth. "The sky is the limit" thinking has constructed a world of winners, losers and barely anyone in between.
In my book and my blogs (here and on Homo economicus), I connect our biology to our psychology and brain’s neurochemistry to show why our denatured evolutionary path has led to widespread imbalances both at the individual and social levels, which we respectively call disease and injustice.