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In the course of his fascinating 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning book On Human Nature, the US entomologist and public intellectual Edward O Wilson wrote about the size of the social groupings we humans like to live in.
He compared us with our evolutionary near-neighbours, the great apes and monkeys, and with some of our more distant evolutionary fellow-travellers, such as birds, fish, and insects, who, like us, like to live alongside others of their species.
The book has formed part of my lockdown reading project, and Wilson’s consideration of the ways in which human nature is influenced by our species’ evolutionary past has at times made the experience of living through a pandemic feel like something of a unique laboratory experiment.
Our intimate social groupings, according to Wilson, contain in the order of 10 to 100 adults, and never just two, as with most bird species, and never thousands, as is the case with many species of fish and insect.
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It is, Wilson says, inconceivable that we could be socialised into living in the way non-primate species do, and to try to do so would quickly dissolve personality, cause relationships to disintegrate, and reproduction to cease.
Nphet and the Coalition have yet to try to make us live in ant-colony-type groupings of thousands, or to suggest that the owners of Dryrobes do their sea swimming in massive shoals, but we have at times been asked or told to live unnaturally restricted social lives, contrary to the nature we have inherited from our deep past.
It is possibly for this reason that during recent months, when I and my family were being responsible in relation to restricting our contacts, I have nevertheless been curiously relieved to wake on the occasional morning to find that my teenage sons have been out late the night before drinking cans of beer along the canal, in the company of tribe-sized groupings of their peers.
I had a similar reaction in relation to my daughter, who spent much of June and July staying in a friend's mobile home on the Dingle peninsula. Soon after she received her vaccine jab from a pharmacy in Tralee, she decided to return to Dublin. The strength with which I responded positively to her declaration that there was no competition between the splendour of the mountains and beaches of Co Kerry, and the prospect of flinging herself back into her social life in the capital, may have its roots in an innate understanding of what it is that best suits our species.
Something similar may be driving the odd level of interest we as a society have shown in relation to when and to what extent we can return to indoor dining, and knocking back pints inside pubs.
Family feasting, hospitality, and mealtimes are on the list of 67 characteristics that were identified by a US anthropologist in the 1940s as having been recorded in every culture known to history and ethnography, and which Wilson suggests must be diagnostic of our nature.
The list also includes religious ritual, courtship, dancing, marriage, visiting, funeral rites, and hairstyles, all of which have featured in our public discussions as to what policies we should adopt in our fight against the coronavirus.
Our response to the requirements of public health policy in the fight against the virus can be seen as an illustration of the benefits to our species of our extraordinary capacity for altruism.
We don’t want to lock our lives down, but we know that each of us should, for the greater good, but also for our own good and that of our nearest relatives.
Wilson sees altruism as a type of enlightened selfishness that allows for a social contract that has been of spectacular benefit to our species over the course of its few million years of evolutionary history.
Normally, as social beings in bubbles of 20 to 100, we negotiate relationships and keep a watchful eye on our status. In restricted pandemic households we may have turned off the social part of our nature, or at least sat on it, while waiting for Dr Holohan to blow his whistle and allow us spring back into action. This odd experience may have caused some of us to cultivate our inner hermit, and such people may now be dreading the sound of Holohan's whistle.
For my part, when my daughter, newly returned to Dublin, arranged for myself and her mother to meet up in the city centre for an outdoor pizza with her and her partner, I felt a niggling desire to instead stay at home on the sofa with Wilson’s other Pulitzer-prize-winning book, The Ants (1990).
But then I put on my best shirt, polished my shoes, and went into town, where I really enjoyed myself despite our restaurant table being up an alley in Temple Bar.
Next stop the barber.