Sometimes many drown, but you don't hear people accusing THEM of being suicidal! The "suicide" sequence was created by herding the poor little lemmings over a small cliff into a river!Ĭaribou also migrate and often have to swim across water. Filmmakers imported lemmings and filmed the "migration" by placing them on a turntable covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The scenes weren't even filmed in the lemmings' natural surroundings. The "suicide" myth was fuelled by a 1958 nature film which featured a fake sequence of lemmings leaping into the ocean. They can swim about 200 meters / 650 feet in calm water, but in choppy water (and not being adapted like some other furry Arctic animals), many will drown. Their path may be blocked by water, and if they can't find a way around it, they'll swim. The lemming population can decrease or increase dramatically, and when things get crowded, food becomes scarce, and the little critters migrate - looking for more space. The stories about lemmings, committing mass suicide by jumping off cliffs are not factual, even though this myth has become a metaphor for the behaviour of crowds of people who foolishly follow one another. A biologist said that he would not sacrifice his life for one brother, but he would for two, or eight cousins.Lemming Suicide - Fact or Myth? Athropolis HOME | Maps | Arctic Links | Arctic Libraryįrom our library of things you should know about the Arctic From a genetic point of view, your sister’s survival and reproduction are half as important as yours, and your cousin’s are one-eighth as important.īecause of this, natural selection favors helping your relatives if the cost to you is less than the benefit to the relative, times the degree of relationship. Siblings share half of their genes with each other cousins share one-eighth of their genes. The closer the relative is, the more apt you are to help them. By helping your relatives, you increase their reproductive success, which in turn promotes the propagation of your genes. (So why did the lemmings jump off the cliff? It turns out it was staged-documentary producers used brooms to force the lemmings to jump into the water.) Kin Selectionįrom a natural selection point of view, we’re not completely devoid of reasons to help others to further our own genes. As Richard Dawkins noted in The Selfish Gene, the individual is merely a vessel created by genes for the replication of genes. Natural selection acts on the level of the individual without a concern for the species. The key point is that natural selection benefits genes, not groups. The gene that promotes self-sacrifice is removed from the population. Over time, all the heroic, self-sacrificing lemmings die, and the selfish lemmings stay back and reproduced. Some individual lemmings have a mutation that let them stay back and survive. Imagine that a gene codes for a lemming’s willingness to jump off a cliff to save the group. This was an example of the theory of “group selection”-some may sacrifice themselves for the sake of the species.įrom a natural selection point of view, this is nonsense. Natural Selection and GroupsĪ famous documentary about lemmings jumping off cliffs explained that when food becomes scarce, a fraction of lemming jump off the cliff to save enough food for others to survive. This theory is greatly flawed because if there was a self-sacrificing gene, then the members of the group with that gene would die out very quickly.Ĭontinue reading about the myth of group selection. The theory of “group selection” states that some members of a group may sacrifice themselves for the good of the species. Is there such thing as group selection? Why did the lemmings jump off the cliff in the famous documentary? Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading. This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Why We Get Sick" by Randolph Nesse and George Williams.
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