Twice a year – on Australia Day and the King’s Birthday – Australia honours those among us who have gone the extra mile. And twice a year there is dismay and confusion in the press and social media that some of the awards have gone to people who are patently unworthy – party hacks of the right or left, shady businessmen or union officials who have channelled money or influence or votes to their side of politics, and so on.
These complaints have gone on for years, and nothing seems to change. To me, as a complex systems scientist, this suggests that the honours system has evolved into a stable state that accepts or tolerates a certain proportion of imposters. And to me, that suggests that we are dealing with an example of Batesian mimicry – a phenomenon well known in evolutionary biology. It also suggests that evolutionary biology might provide some insights about the persistence of imposters in the honours system.
The phenomenon was discovered by Henry Bates in the Amazonian rainforests in the mid-19th century. Bates was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Darwin, and he observed that some Amazonian butterflies of very different species shared the same spectacular and highly visible wing markings. The problem for Bates was that some of the species were quite unpalatable to the birds who might prey on them, but others were delicious. Bates realised that the unpalatable species were sending an honest signal to their potential predators, but the palatable species were imposters or mimics, sending a dishonest signal, and free-riding on the hard evolutionary work that the unpalatable species – the models – had done through their co-evolution with their predators.
But the imposters can’t be too abundant, otherwise their predators will learn that they have been tricked and gobble them up. But neither should they be too rare, because that would be wasting the opportunity presented by the hard work of the unpalatable species in teaching their would-be predators to avoid them.
Thus evolution drives the system to a stable state. The predators lose some opportunities to eat the mimics – but muddle on, the models lose some of the power of their honest signals – but muddle on, and the mimics survive under the protection of their mimicry.
As a rough rule of thumb, mimics survive if their abundance is no more than about 10% of the abundance of the models.
Which brings us back to the honours system. We would expect that, as a stable Batesian mimicry system, about 10% of the honours would be shonky, and that the system would tolerate that. But we can dive a little deeper than that.
The Australian honours system has four grades. Each year, there are two rounds of awards with the total number of awards in each round typically getting up to about 1000. The highest award, the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) is given in the low single digits; the next highest, the Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) is given in the low teens; the next highest, the Member of the Order of Australia (AM), is given in the low hundreds; and the lowest award, the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM), is given by the hundreds.
This provides a terrific opportunity of imposters to game the system while still more or less preserving its stability. With somewhere between 500 and 1000 awards in each list, this means that imposters could be as abundant as 50 – 100. Now given the types of imposters who would game the system – crooks and scoundrels all – we might expect them to try and climb the tree, as it were, and seek the highest award possible without disturbing the stability of the system too much.
This allows me to erect an hypothesis which readers might like to test by perusing an honours list.
I would suggest that we would indeed see that about 10% of the awards at the lowest level – the OAM – were shonky, but that in the more rarefied levels above that, the percentage of imposters would be higher. The smaller absolute numbers of awards at these levels could sustain a higher proportion of imposters without upsetting the global stability of the honours system. The shonks at the higher levels ride on the honesty signals of the models at the lower levels.
My guess – and it’s just that – is that the middle levels of the honours system (AO and AM) could sustain about twice the proportion of shonkery – say 20% of the awards at those levels, while the highest level (AC) might sustain a higher proportion again – perhaps 40%.
And the sad thing is that this is a very hard system to disturb. Time has shown, and theory explains, it to be a very stable phenomenon. We are likely stuck with a system that rewards crooks and scoundrels.
Roger Bradbury
Roger Bradbury is Emeritus Professor of Complex Systems Science in the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. He is a complex systems scientist. His research interests lie in the modelling and simulation of the dynamics of social and natural systems. He worked for many years in the Australian Intelligence Community on the strategic analysis of international science and technology issues. For the general reader, he writes on the scientific bases of policy issues.
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