Inequality of wealth is a topic that is usually left for human studies. According to new research from the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, researching income inequality in animals can help researchers better understand social evolution.
Adjusting comes closer from the investigation of abundance disparity in people, the analysts show how abundance as material merchandise, individual credits, or social associations happens extensively across creature species and can be appropriated similarly or inconsistent.
This approach allows researchers from several fields of evolutionary biology to come together under the umbrella of wealth inequality to investigate the hypothesis that unequal distribution of value, in whatever shape it may take, has significant consequences for animal communities.
Inequality is one of modern society’s greatest issues, and it is a hot topic in social and political discourse. Scholars in economics and sociology study inequality to learn where it arises from, what its effects are, and how we may implement policies that result in more productive, healthy, and equitable society.
This research has revealed that inequality can have serious effects for those of us who live in these communities.
This discovery piqued the interest of behavioral ecologists Eli Strauss of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany (MPI-AB) and Daizaburo Shizuka of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who study social development in non-human cultures.
“Reading these fascinating sociology and economics papers, it struck me that this work shares a common goal with my work in animal behavior, which is that we both want to understand how inequality arises and affects outcomes for individuals and groups,” says Strauss, first author on the paper and a post-doctoral researcher at MPI-AB.
A new framework in the study of social evolution
It’s not that inequality in animals hasn’t been investigated previously. Animal scientists have long studied distinctions in physical characteristics, territory and resources acquired, structures built, and social power wielded by animals. However, the underlying concept that these various aspects of animals’ lives are related under the canopy of inequality was missing.
The structure of a society has a lot of different influences on all individuals that live within it. In many cases, the differences between individuals arise from the various ways in which unequal societies affect them. In turn, individuals try to exert control over or navigate these unequal systems in different ways. The biology of animal societies includes these types of dynamics, and we can’t understand the evolution of social animals without recognizing this feedback between the individual and the society.
Daizaburo Shizuka
“As we read, we wondered how the scholarship on the causes and consequences of inequality in humans could help biologists like us better understand animal societies,” says Daizaburo Shizuka, an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Strauss and Shizuka assemble work from several academic domains in a review paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B to bridge the gap between inequality research in human and animal cultures.
Their main focus was on what they could learn about animals by looking at human inequality studies. Their study is one of the first to bring together these disparate fields of study in order to better understand how unequal distribution of value, in whatever form it takes, impacts animal societies.
Can animals have “wealth”?
First, however, the researchers had to find common ground across humans and animals. In humans, “inequality” exists when something of value is distributed unequally among individuals. Usually, that value is defined as their wealth.
“Animals don’t have bank accounts, so how can they be wealthy?,” says Strauss. To answer this question, the scientists turned to research in evolutionary anthropology that explores inequality in hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and other small-scale human societies. “These societies show varying degrees of wealth inequality, but wealth isn’t limited to bills and coins,” he adds.
Rather, anthropologists consider wealth to be a combination of material items, personal attributes such as knowledge or hunting ability, and social ties. A woman could be affluent by owning a large number of cows, being skilled at raising crops, or wielding power in her society.
The review focuses on how these same human features of wealth manifest themselves in animals. Animals have a wide range of tangible wealth, including territory control and food access.
For example, squirrels and oak seed woodpeckers assemble food reserves and stock them with crowds of nuts and seeds. In dolphins and New Caledonian crows, apparatus use strategies are significant lumps of data that open up new scavenging open doors.
Social connections are likewise a basic wellspring of abundance in numerous species, for example, in spotted hyenas and ravens, which structure coalitions with their gathering mates that assist them with ascending through the positions in their social orders.
Interestingly, wealth is occasionally passed from parents to offspring in animals, just as it does in humans. Similar to how money is allocated unequally among people, various sorts of wealth can be divided pretty evenly across individual animals or concentrated in the hands of a few affluent individuals.
Shedding light on social evolution
With this comprehensive understanding of income disparity, the authors go on to look at how inequality research in humans can help us better understand how animal societies function. They address hypotheses on why certain societies are more unequal than others, the effects of inequality on individual health and group success, and how people and families’ income changes over time as a result of social mobility.
Says Shizuka: “The structure of a society has a lot of different influences on all individuals that live within it. In many cases, the differences between individuals arise from the various ways in which unequal societies affect them.”
“In turn, individuals try to exert control over or navigate these unequal systems in different ways. The biology of animal societies includes these types of dynamics, and we can’t understand the evolution of social animals without recognizing this feedback between the individual and the society.”
“Our hope is that this paper will guide future research into wealth inequality across species, which will ultimately lead to a better understanding of the evolution of traits that help animals get the most out of living socially,” adds Strauss.
The authors recognize that researching inequality in animals may give light on how inequality occurs in human society, but caution that studying animals to understand ourselves should be done with caution.
Humans are a distinct species with distinct social and cognitive characteristics. While it’s improbable that humans and other animals experience inequality in the same way, there are no other societies that operate on the same scale as the modern human global economy.
“We can look to other species to understand the general evolutionary processes that produce all animals, ourselves included,” says Strauss, “but the question of what makes an ethical human society is fundamentally a moral question where the social lives of animals can’t guide us. This is something we need to figure out on our own.”
