Are humans a 'eusocial' species?
Are we biologically programmed to raise each other's children?
Lately I’ve been reading Cat Bohannon’s book Eve, which examines the female body’s role in driving 200 million years of human evolution. I haven’t gotten very far yet but one section has already caught my attention. She writes about a biological term called eusociality.
Eusocial species rear their young collectively. They live in multigenerational groups in which only some individuals reproduce and everybody else helps raise those offspring.
Eusociality is most common among social insects, notably ants and bees. But there are also eusocial mammals, such as the naked mole rat. Many other mammals, including humans, exhibit characteristics like cooperative breeding and child rearing that, to quote Bohannon, ‘seem a heck of a lot like eusociality’.
The question of whether humans are actually eusocial is debated among evolutionary biologists but many believe that humans, while not being strictly eusocial, exhibit some forms of social behaviour very similar to eusociality. This would mean that it’s not our nature but our social systems that have created the situation in which the majority of people raise their own biological children, often within single isolated reproductive units — and that this way of living actually goes against our nature.
This gave me pause because I am a mum who very nearly wasn’t a mum. I decided at the age of 39 that I wanted to have a child. Before then, I was adamant that I would never have kids. I had never had a quiver of a maternal instinct nor a nano-inch of broodiness. When I did eventually change my mind (after spending my mid-thirties angsting back and forth), my husband and I struggled with fertility and very nearly didn’t have our baby Esmeralda, who is now two.
So I’m in the pretty interesting position of having been through the radical restructuring involved with becoming a mama (what Lucy Jones calls ‘matrescence’) while also having lived through almost all of my thirties as a child-free woman who intended to remain child-free, and experiencing what that feels like in our society.
Like Gwyneth Paltrow from Sliding Doors, I have lived two parallel (ok, consecutive) lives: the me who is a mum and the me who didn’t become a mum when everyone else around me was becoming one.
How do both me-s respond to the idea that some humans, including myself, perhaps aren’t supposed to have children and that those people are supposed to help raise other people’s biological children instead?
The mama-me is definitely 100% on board with the idea that we should be raising children collectively within multigenerational groups. The kinds of isolation that our capitalist socioeconomic system imposes on so many of us — the closed walls of the nuclear family, the gaping void where childcare is supposed to be, the relentless grind of having to do pointless, life-sapping work to get money — are clearly non-ideal for human wellbeing.
My friend Rachel has a catch-phrase: ‘what if the village has kids?’ What she means is that she wants to help her friends who are struggling with young children, but she has children of her own so how can she do that? But what if the village didn’t have kids, or not all members of the village anyway?
That’s what eusociality means: not everyone has their own biological children but can still be deeply involved with and essential to the upbringing of children.
What would the child-free-me think about the idea that my evolutionary destiny might be to help raise other people’s children and not my own? To be frank, that me had zero experience with kids and was so painfully awkward around any child that she preferred to keep out of their way.
That me might resent the idea that my lot in life was to take care of other people’s children when I was quite happy binge watching Never Have I Ever and sleeping until I damn well wanted, thanks very much, or that I could only justify my existence as a woman if I was involved in taking care of babies.
Having said that, the mummy-me suspects that had the child-free-me been mentored in caring for children and made to feel important in that respect, she might have found it rewarding to be part of a child’s life without having to spawn it herself, and since she would be doing it with a bunch of other people she would still have plenty of time to watch TV and catch her zzzs.
To be completely honest, I have mixed feelings about evoking evolutionary biology to talk about social relationships. The UK supreme court decision in April that the term ‘woman’ only applies to ‘biological’ women — meaning that trans people will not be able to access services essential to their gender — shows how harmful invoking biology can be.
We should all be free to choose how we love and live and form bonds with others, and the role of our social structures and institutions should be to facilitate that rather than dictate how and who we should be. Invoking biology can be a weapon to keep us in our place.
Women who can’t or don’t want to have children shouldn’t have to justify their existence by resorting to the biological argument that they serve some grand evolutionary purpose, nor should they be expected to do an iota childcare if they don’t want to.
And actually, there are some aspects of eusociality that don’t sound too pleasant, such as an extreme division of labour into reproductive and non-reproductive groups, sometimes called ‘castes’, so I’m not sure that I would want us homo sapiens to behave in a strictly eusocial way.
But still, on the other hand, something appeals to me about the idea that humans are such profoundly social animals that we don’t need to claim biological ownership over children to care for them as our own.
To me, this idea chimes with James Baldwin’s classic quote: ‘The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.’
Maybe thinking of ourselves as partly eusocial can help us get one step closer to treating all children as always ours.
And most importantly, mummy-me could definitely do with a bit more shuteye.
Leave a comment! How do you feel about the idea of humans being eusocial? Are you child-free but a strong part of a child’s life? Or child-free and not remotely interested in being part of a child’s life? Have you managed to create a genuine ‘village’ for raising a children collectively? How???
This is interesred. Always have an opinion about children.
Really liked this one! I very recognizable struggle between the two selves! If dialectics were real, would James Baldwins idea be the synthesis?