ABSTRACT
The history of ideas has witnessed wide cycles in the perceived relevance of the social insects to the study of man. Each of the more than 20,000 species of social insects represents an independent evolutionary experiment by which the general theories of sociobiology can be tested and extended. The social insects also offer superb opportunities to develop the concept of optimization in the evolutionary studies of behavior. As a consequence, the social insects provide a view of how a higher degree of social organization can be reached in a radically different sensory world. Plausible estimates of the approach to optimization have recently been made for several social phenomena, including division of labor and foraging in Atta leaf-cutting ants and number of queens in incipient colonies in Myrmecocystus honeypot ants. The social sciences and humanities suffer dramatically from a blinkered concentration on the single species Homo sapiens.
