Democracy was hardly the first societal order that man conceived. It is more accurately depicted as the product of revolution on the basis of a social epiphany regarding the inalienable rights explained in John Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government, a treatise on which parts of the Declaration of Independence were based.
After caste systems, feudalism, monarchies, and innumerable other trials in the great human experiment of societal coexistence, democracy as we know it was born of the convictions of American colonists that a government has no right to tax citizens, who are not represented in said government. A new study shows, though, that despite all that had to happen for man to not only conceive of democracy but also institutionalize it, democracy may very well be a biologically natural default for mankind.
Gradually over time, Western powers have shifted their imperial weight to and fro for the sake of proliferating democracy under the auspices of the logic that the democracy of a few is impinged upon by the communism or otherwise non-democratic system of others. Many criticisms can be made on this basis of the virtue of democracy or Western power. But over time, democracy has gone from an obscure, colonial system to one of the most popular systems of government on earth. The argument can be made, based on new research, therefore, that there is a sort of natural selection to social orders—some biologically deterministic value that made the modern status quo inexorable.
The study was published by senior author, Neil Jordan, Ph.D., and colleagues in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This international research team comprised of scientists from the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust found that wild, African dogs deliberately sneeze as a means of voting on courses of action for the pack. This proves incredibly fascinating in light of the human understanding of sneezes. Based on human biology, sneezing is typically understood as being entirely reflexive; it is the reaction of the epithelium of the nasal passage to infiltration of irritants that need to be expelled. Wild dogs in Africa proved capable of not only sneezing very deliberately and with control but also of using these sneezes to communicate votes.
The research team focused on wild dogs of the Lycaon pictus species, cousins of the stereotypical jackal. They happened to realize that the dogs' sneezes were more than mere sneezes and ended up analyzing recordings they produced from 68 different social rallies as the study terms them. "I remember saying to the other researchers, 'There's something going on with these sneezes,'" Jordan explained. These social rallies are essentially high-octane pep rallies that the dogs use to greet each other before they hunt as a pack.
The team came to realize from these analyses that the dogs were using the sneezes to vote on whether or not to leave and whether or not to take action. "The more sneezes that occurred, the more likely it was that the pack moved off and started hunting," Jordan explained in a statement. "The sneeze acts like a type of voting system." This is in line with the bio-sociological understanding that practically all social, living organisms have some means of making group decisions, as evidenced by how many different types of packs, flocks, herds, and gaggles there are out in the wild, operating as collective units.
Meerkats have been studied extensively for their social mechanism for relocating to different areas as a group during foraging; they establish what is termed a quorum, much like a legislative body of government. Even some bacteria have been observed establishing a quorum prior to activating bioluminescence or releasing toxins. Reena H. Walker was at Brown University as an undergraduate research technician, when she confirmed Jordan's theory about the African wild dogs using sneezes to make decisions.
Walker concluded that the number of sneezes was, by far, the most accurate predictor of whether dogs would hunt certain prey. She referred to each sneeze as an "audible, rapid forced exhalation through the nose" but a bit like the "choo" minus "ahh" to precede it. The sneeze is very abrupt, and when there are several, the vote is in favor, which often means that the pack is about to mobilize for one reason or another.
Democracy has proven to be cut-throat in its politics, though. Human beings, indeed, created an elaborate electoral system, via which they create representative democracy for millions of people across large regions, or even entire continents. But the process by which the votes are deliberated and cast is where the politics lie. Politicians are commonly viewed as power mongers clamoring over war chests and influence, and though the impetus for the sneeze may be different in dogs from the impetus in humans, the politics that come with democracy remain similar.
Walker observed what she described as a correlative reciprocity "between dominance and democracy." Individual dogs in the pack were found not to be beholden to a single vote. The social rallies could be started by any dog in the pack, yet there was a measurable power shift whenever a dominant dog initiated the rally. Dominant dogs clearly needed fewer sneezes from other dogs to spearhead a hunt, whereas many other dogs would only get the hunt they wanted when they got the requisite number of sneezes from a majority.
The research Jordan and Walker have conducted begs the question: are the fundamental elements of democracy a biological predisposition for human beings? For that matter, does societal coexistence, therefore, naturally breed political power play in animals due to the democratic default?