Robinson brings up this magisterial tome because of the book’s importance in popularizing its namesake field.
‘It asserted a very simple and powerful point: that social behavior has a biology,’ he explains. ‘And in that simple statement, there are two singularly important points.
- ‘First, that there’s a whole rich mechanistic underpinning for social behaviour: hormones, brain, other regulatory processes. That’s uncontroversial.
- And second, if something has a biology, it has both mechanistic underpinnings in the biological realm, and an evolutionary history. The evolutionary history is the part that is controversial.’
Wilson’s comparisons of social behaviors across different species and conjectures about the evolutionary origins of these similarities were generally well-received — until he brought humans into the discussion.
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The Robinson lab’s 2017 study used these genomic techniques to identify common genes in unresponsive and humans with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Before discussing the study’s findings, Robinson makes several points clear.
- ‘Are there autistic bees? Are bees little humans? Are humans big bees? No. That’s not the message at all. ASD is a complex syndrome, and I don’t mean to belittle it in the slightest.
- Instead, the genomic analysis allows us to say that there are common building blocks of the social brain in honey bees and humans.’
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A deeper understanding of epigenetics has subverted the “nature or nurture” adage. These studies show that changes in our individual behaviors or surroundings can influence our epigenome — and that of our descendants.
‘It used to be thought that everything is either controlled by genetics or the environment,’ says Robinson. ‘Instead we found that, yes, it’s all about genes, but it’s also about environmental regulation of genes, and this influences heredity too. Given the comparative studies between humans and animals, there’s no reason to believe that the human brain operates any differently.’
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