A woman named Juliet Turner recently celebrated earning her Ph.D. from Oxford by posting a photo on Twitter of herself in her academic gown, with the words, “You can call me doctor.” What happened next shouldn’t surprise anyone who has spent time online. A stranger (in every sense of that word) named Richard Cooper responded with a sarcastic jab:
“ ‘Just look at the degree on that chick.’ — No man ever.”
Cooper, a self-proclaimed “alpha male” with 225,000 Twitter followers, sparked a predictable chorus of misogynistic heckling. Many people objected to his remark, but Cooper’s troopers found new angles for dragging women who pursue advanced degrees. In typical internet fashion, a meme war erupted. Cooper’s allies bashed Turner for pursuing an education instead of having babies, while women from around the world came to her defense by posting their own graduation photos and repeating the line, “Just look at the degree on that chick.”
Before discussing this exchange further, it’s worth looking at the research for which Turner earned her degree. Her thesis was titled The Evolution of Cooperation and Division of Labour in Insects. One of the men who joined the dogpile attempted to mock her work:
“People aren’t seething because you earned a PhD. They’re seething because… the grand achievement you’re flaunting is … about ants.”
This, of course, spectacularly misses the point of Turner’s research.
Why Ants Matter
As Turner explained, studying the evolution of cooperation and division labor in insects actually provides insights into multiple topics:
- Pure science. All complex life depends on cooperation & division of labour e.g. genes in a genome, cells in an organism. This field helps explain how life transitioned from single cells to complex multicellularity.
- Cancer biology. Cancer is a breakdown of cellular cooperation. The same rules that maintain stable cooperation in superorganismal insects underlie the stability (or collapse) of multicellular systems like our own bodies.
- Tech. Swarm robotics: decentralised control, signalling, efficiency optimisation. All informed by the principles governing insect societies.
- Economics and Sociology. Role specialisation and allocation, why different societal structures evolve, how national/international conflicts get resolved, how cooperation can persist despite incentives to cheat.
Not to mention that insects form the backbone of all terrestrial ecosystems and amount to more than half of all known species, performing countless essential ecological roles.
Given my own personal interests in machine learning, artificial intelligence and the nature of cognition, I thought her research sounded interesting. Turner’s PhD thesis is not available online yet, but she has shared a paper that she co-authored in Nature, titled “Larger colony sizes favoured the evolution of more worker castes in ants.” I read it and found this nugget:
Division of labour has played a pivotal role in the evolution of life on earth, by facilitating evolutionary transitions to more complex organisms. In these transitions, individuals cooperate to form a new higher-level individual (organism). For example, cells formed multicellular organisms, with germline and soma, and insects formed complex colonies termed ‘superorganisms’, with queen and worker castes. Division of labour is fundamental to these transitions because specialization allows the individuals that form a higher-level organism to perform more diverse functions and to become more reliant upon each other for reproduction (mutual dependence). Consequently, a major aim in evolutionary biology is to understand the factors that favour an increased level of division of labour.
In the Nature paper, Turner and her colleagues argue that colony size is the main driver of increased complexity and specialization in ant societies.
What About Humans?
I found myself wondering whether the same logic applies to human beings. On the one hand, it is fairly self-evident that larger human societies are more specialized and complex. Cities develop specialty roles that villages do not. However, ant colonies and human societies differ in one crucial way: Humans have language. I think a case can be made that the human development of language, especially written language, is the underlying cause of the unmatched size and scale at which human societies operate, because language is necessary to enable the full detail, specialization and complexity of human behavior.
In support of this theory, Alicia P. Melis and Dirk Semmann have written a 2010 scientific paper titled “How is human cooperation different?” They compared human cooperation with that of other animals and made these observations:
Although cooperation is a widespread phenomenon in nature, human cooperation exceeds that of all other species with regard to the scale and range of cooperative activities … Fundamental differences between human and animal cooperation lie in the complexity of the social network and the information transfer about social behaviour. The possibility of using language to exchange social information is probably the most important difference.
Language fundamentally changes the scale of cooperation. It lets us:
- pass down knowledge across generations
- coordinate across continents
- create institutions larger than any one person can comprehend
- build economies of staggering complexity
- form nations of millions of people—even billions
Pre-industrial humans were hunter-gatherers, foraging together in small bands that averaged 20 to 100 people. Modern societies coordinate millions of individuals across the globe. The company where I work, for example, has staff working together from the U.S., India, Latin America and Europe — cooperation that would be impossible without rapidly shared, high-fidelity communication.
Of course, non-human species ranging from ants to elephants are able to communicate and coordinate. My cats, for example, use meowing, purring or snarls to communicate when they are hungry, want to go outside, or feel threatened. However, they cannot communicate more detailed messages.
Without language, humanity would likely still live in small bands not so different from those of the Paleolithic.
This brings me back to the Twitter pile-on.
Ain’t That a Shame?
The ant-men who swarmed Juliet Turner came from different countries and backgrounds. Their pile-on literally became an international affair. Some may even be bots. But they engaged in deeply human behavior: Linguistic shaming to enforce social norms.
Shaming is a language-based cooperative strategy—a strategy that is not available to ants or cats. It is used to punish perceived violations of social expectations. However, Turner’s attackers had a hard time agreeing upon the nature of her “crime.” Consider the contradictions in their criticisms:
- Some of the attackers complained that Turner should have been giving birth and raising children rather than devoting her time to a “frivolous” pursuit such as seeking higher education. In the words of one tweeter, “She’s got a Ph.D. in Biology, but failed miserably in Biology—30 years old and zero kids. Her ancestors are ashamed of her.” Another tweet warned that “our society is performing a civilization ending level of suicide when it has successfully convinced women, and more importantly its best women, into believing that they are producing a greater amount of societal good by forgoing childbirth for a lifetime of education and careerism.”
- Richard Cooper’s original jibe, however, criticized her on other grounds. The problem was not her failure to make babies but her failure to be sufficiently slutty. “Just look at the degree on that chick” is a sarcastic riff on the phrase, “Just look at the tits on that chick.” This is the sort of comment you might hear from some horny dude in a bar but is unlikely to come from a man who seriously intends to father and help raise children.
- The ragebros alternated between saying that Turner and women like her were either too sexy or not sexy enough. After other women started posting their own “look at the degree on that chick” photos, the guys tried picked apart the appearance of women who they thought were unattractive. A guy in New Zealand complained that men never boast about their degrees the way these women were doing. After people pointed out that posting graduation photos is actually fairly common, he replied that the difference is that women were “posting sexy pictures” of themselves. Some were even wearing high heels!
To sum up: women are either not sexy enough, or too sexy, or too educated, or not maternal enough, or too proud, or not proud enough. No behavior escapes condemnation. Turner said she was “Really fascinated by how my decision to spend some time reading and thinking about ants snowballed into several million people weighing in on whether I am or am not personally causing the collapse of civilisation.”
In another era, the “alpha male” rhetoric might have had more bite. Similar shaming messages have worked in the past to police women’s behavior. Linguistic shaming is very common in human societies and is not limited to shaming women. It can be complex and nuanced — far more complex than the signalling used by ants to organize their divisions of labour.
In the case of Juliet Turner, however, the shaming attempts were so numerous and complex that they made no sense. They became just a mass of contradictory rage, and the women they were trying to shame obviously didn’t buy it.
If these guys want to win back the control that they think they’ve lost, they’re gonna need a bigger anthill.
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