Social sophistry : logos and mythos in the forms of cooperation

In Plato's cave, humans chained to a wall see gests that workers are aware of the importance the world only as flickering shadows of statof cave-shadows in defining societies. Indeed, ues, removed by several degrees from the 'real' recent authors are usually careful to explain world of ideas and forms. As the cave-dwellers their use of social terms (e.g., Burda et al. 2000), communicate thoughts about the statues, their probably more careful and explicit now than pre words add yet another layer of removal and 1995.1 see this as progress — at least we know distance, here between each others' perception that we are in a cave like Plato's, and thought-pictures. Over ten years ago, I asked Second, tabulation of how often various a number of the philosopher queens and kings social terms were used before vs. after 1995 of social insect biology how they conceived (Costa & Fitzgerald 2005) can demonstrate any and applied the term 'reproductive division of trends, though the connections between word use labor', the core of the traditional definition of and application of concepts is difficult to judge, eusociality. From each person I received a differThird, we can seek to assess conceptual ent answer. I reckoned then that social terminolimpact by determining if any of the specific ogy systems required an attempt at meeting of suggestions of the authors have been imple minds, to avoid implicit confusion and to foster mented. For example, Crespi and Yanega (1995) progress in recognizing social convergences. proposed that some 'traditionally eusocial' ants, Down the hall I went to Paul Sherman and bees, and termites should be considered as coop his erudite mind. We compared our flickering erative breeders. Search for the combined terms shadows, decided to write a paper together, and 'insects' and 'cooperative breeding' on BIOSIS started — but then realized that we viewed the for 1985 through 1994 yielded 12 citations, with wall quite differently, and two contrasting papers only one on social insects (ants). By contrast, were the ultimate result. 1996 to 2005 produced 27 hits, including two The conceptual impact of the papers by Sherpapers on ants, two on termites, five on wasps, man et al. (1995), Crespi and Yanega (1995), and and three on bees. A search for 'eusociality con later Costa and Fitzgerald (1996), Wcislo( 1997), tinuum' over this period gave only one empiri and Crespi and Choe (1997) may be assessed cal paper, on Zambian mole rats. I take this as in several ways. First, the papers have been suggestive evidence that some workers have cited 80, 45 and 22 times respectively (for the adopted at least one central idea of Crespi and first three papers, Web of Science), which sugYanega (1995), that insects can be cooperative

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