Look to the Chickadees

Are we birds, or are we dinosaurs?

(This was reworked from the “For the Birds” radio program that first aired 12 October 2010. Listen to the new radio version here.)

Every now and then, I read something that twists the theory of evolution to conclude that we humans have evolved to dominate and exploit our fellow human beings, our neighbor species, and our environment. People who believe this seem to think that altruism exists only as a sneaky strategy for individual profit rather than an advanced approach for ensuring that an entire community remains strong and sustainable.

Darwin developed his theory not based on us humans but on his study of birds, including “Darwin’s finches,” and when you think about it, songbirds really are more evolved than humans in a great many ways. They’ve been on the planet longer both in terms of years and generations, yet their lines continue to radiate and thrive while our primate order is in rapid decline and our own species seems to be digging itself into more and more dead end tunnels.

Songbird bodies are far more evolved than ours, including their vision, hearing, cardiovascular and respiratory systems, endurance and speed, and their abilities to detect the earth’s magnetic poles and discern changes in air pressure. Chickadees, which have been here longer and may very well outlast us, have social hierarchies much like ours, though chickadees, in a more civilized and evolved manner, maintain their hierarchies not with bullying and fighting but with songs and other vocalizations.

Every chickadee society includes members of all social strata. If the lowest chickadees on the hierarchy have to wait the longest to get food resources, the flock still remains in an area until all the birds have eaten. When one chickadee’s caches of food tucked into an old birch are destroyed when the tree topples in an ice storm, it’s welcome to take what it needs from other chickadees’ caches. Over generations, chickadees could not support the wealth hoarding and disparities in income that our own society seems to think are sustainable.

In every case I can think of, when a single species increases and multiplies by dominating and altering its environment and unsustainably consuming necessary resources, it eventually hits a peak and declines rapidly, often to the point of extirpation or even extinction. Chickadee social flocks allow for much longer-term stability and success. Chickadees welcome a wide variety of other bird species into their cooperative feeding flocks to insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity in a manner that is very much in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution of the United States.

Our Constitution has lasted us for roughly 13 human generations, but now the civility within our own communities is crumbling as we fight over limited resources, ironically while squandering and destroying the very resources we are fighting over—a strategy that is neither evolved nor intelligent. The chickadee system has allowed them to not just survive but to thrive over tens of thousands of generations—something no human civilization has ever managed to do.

If we're going to look to Darwin, especially for those who think it was our species' intelligence that brought us as far as we've gotten and who believe in the concept of free will, we’d be wise to consider what evolution is really about and how communities, populations, and species collapse. Militaristic bullying worked just fine for Tyrannosaurus rex right up until it didn't. If we're going to call on Darwin for the answers to human destiny, let’s look to those songbirds that inspired his theory in the first place rather than to dinosaurs, especially because we all know how that turned out. The only ones who survived their mass extinction were birds.

(When I was invited to give a TEDx talk in Bemidji, Minnesota, in 2019, a comparison between chickadees and wolves, I built it on the idea behind this post.)