Honeybee queens are the only honeybees with stingers that don't die when they sting. That's because the queen bee's stinger has no barbs, and the reason for that is that the queen must not die easily, and she must use her stinger, so if she's going to survive at all her stinger has to not have barbs. The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens that are about to hatch or have hatched already. She also has to possibly use her stinger when she goes out to mate (though she does go with attendants who will defend her if attacked).
I was surprised not to find mention of this in TFA.
> A honey bee dies when it stings you because its stinger is covered in barbs, causing its abdomen to get ripped out when it tries to fly away. And surviving with your guts spilling out everywhere is pretty bloody hard.
There's another interesting detail here: when the worker tries to fly off after stinging, she has to try really hard because the barbs hold the stinger in place, and trying hard causes two things to happen:
- noise that attracts other workers
to attack the same creature
- spreading of the dying bee's
distress pheromones that also
attract other workers to sting
the same creature
So when you get stung by a bee near other bees you will be in trouble. That's how you go from one sting to hundreds. And hundreds is enough to kill a human. That's why you don't go near a hive without protection. Being in or near a swarm is safer than being near a hive: the bees in a swarm don't have much (larvae, honey) to protect, so they don't attack.
BTW, when I get stung, if the stinger doesn't get stuck I sometimes don't even notice till much later -- this happens when I get stung through my gloves. If the stinger does get stuck in my skin the first thing I notice is the buzzing of the bee that stung me. The frequency of the buzzing of the bee that stung me and that is trying to rip off the stinger is absolutely terrifying because I know what comes next: a dozen more bees will flock right to where the one bee stung me and will all try to sting me, and since the one bee was able to it might be the case that her sisters will succeed as well. That buzzing spreads her injury pheromones, and the frequency of its sound also acts as a very loud and clear signal to her sisters. The buzzing lasts about 1 second or less; the pain from the sting comes a second or two later. It takes her sisters about 1 to 2 seconds to find the bee that stings successfully. Getting stung by a dozen bees at once is panic inducing, and the swelling that will create will take two weeks to subside. I was stung 13 times at once one time, and 5 times another time. It's no fun.
What I noticed is that pitch of buzzing is higher when bee is attacking, not after sting. Higher pitch means probably higher frequency of wings, so bee has more velocity and it is more nimble. When I was kid visiting frequently a place with 100 hives in a summer. I started to recognize that pitch of attacking bee and learned to keep head lower, between arms. Sometimes I was chased by a bee several tens of meters. It is good to use cover of some trees or bushes. I believe bees are aroused by smell of venom itself. Sometimes, when hive is opened, bees turn their abdomen higher, towards opening showing stings. I think I saw that drops of venom forms around end of sting. Smoke particles, probably bonds to venom vapors, neutralizing its influence on other bees, because after couple smoke puffs venom smell is not noticeable any more. Also, smoke causes bees to change their process, from „intruder alert”, to „tree is burning”, and are turning on ventilation. Each summer, first sting swelled the worst, but consecutive ones were less so, so I think some tolerance develops, but it won’t last a year. The worst is being stung in fingertip, because it causes nail deformation, for some time.
Great point about the queen bee. The queen also uses her stinger inside her own hive. If the hive believes she is nearing the end of her reproductive abilities, they’ll rear other queens. She has to defend her position and quickly goes to kill the new queens when they emerge or she’ll be replaced. Beekeepers generally replace their queens every 2 years or so, and have to remove the old queen to prevent this behavior as well.
> That's why you don't go near a hive without protection.
This is true and recommended for just about everyone.. however, I have known some beekeepers that can do it. If you smoke the bees well, they’ll get calm enough that they won’t sting. It’s thought to be likely because the smoke covers pheromones, and also because the smoke causes the bees to begin hoarding honey in case they need to quickly leave a burning hive.
I was never brave enough to attempt it, however during my time beekeeping I was amazed at how magical smoke was. Picking up handfuls of bees in their hive and not being swarmed feels like a super power.
> I was never brave enough to attempt it, however during my time beekeeping I was amazed at how magical smoke was. Picking up handfuls of bees in their hive and not being swarmed feels like a super power.
I'm not brave enough to attempt it either, except -maybe, someday- with a) smoke, b) a veil instead of a suit, c) nukes rather than mature hives, d) in top-bar hive bodies rather than Langstroth boxes. Fuck Langstroth boxes -- you can't help but kill bees in those boxes, and the moment you kill one you're in trouble. Top-bar hives make it much much easier to not kill any bees.
For some reason I was never afraid of bees. I have a cousin who keeps bees, and she showed me a bee hive once. Neither of use used any masks or gloves. I remember when she showed me the queen, and I was pointing at it to make sure I got it right, she told me to not touch her, because then the other bees will sense the foreign smell on her and will kill her. In any case, I was surrounded by thousands of bees, but none stang me or my cousin. There's some urban legend that bees smell you, and depending on the smell they decide to attack you or not. I suppose I drew the lucky lottery ticket.
Don't wasps have a similar "swarm attack" mode that doesn't require individual wasps dying to spread pheromones? Something in the sting/venom itself?
I've been stung by wasp swarms twice, in the same area (they were protecting their nest, and please don't ask why it happened twice... we humans do indeed stumble with the same stone twice!). The wasps were very aggressive stinging near the same location in my arm, and it hurt a lot. I was stung in the same body part by the swarm, not in random locations.
Depends on the wasp/bee species. Not all of them swarm. Also, ants are related to wasps, and you will see similar behavior with them.
I had a friend, when I was a kid, that shot a white-faced hornet nest (not actually hornets -they are big yellowjackets -even worse) with a BB gun, from, like, 50 meters away.
The hornets figured out who shot their nest, and swarmed him. May have just been that they attacked any nearby critters, but he certainly paid for his folly.
White-faced hornets are better to have in your yard, than yellowjackets. They are a lot less aggressive, only attacking if their nest is at risk. They also eat yellowjackets, so you have hornets or yellowjackets, but not both.
I know Yellowjackets, we have them in Argentina. Their bite is said to be extremely painful but I haven't been bitten yet despite some pretty reckless behavior on my part.
One nice afternoon I was having a snack in a cafeteria, by the open window, and a bunch of yellowjackets started dipping in my drinks and my pie. Apparently they like raw meat (locals use it to drive them away from their own food) but I only had sweet stuff on my table. I got annoyed and killed a bunch of them with my bare hands, with no repercussions (killing dangerous insects with your fists or palms is surprisingly easy if you strike fast against a flat surface -- obviously I waited till they moved away from my stuff).
I was later told this was a terrible idea because their bite is very painful (see above: I'm not the smartest about bugs and have been bitten more than once due to recklessness!).
White-faced hornets[0] are a lot more painful than yellowjackets[1] (they are about twice as big, but pretty much the same configuration).
I don't think yellowjackets will swarm, if a forager gets killed. Don't step on one of their nests, though (they dig holes). Also have a friend who did that, once. Also, if you get close to one of their nests (hard to see), they might swarm you.
The biggest difference, is that yellowjackets are much more aggressive foragers, so it's easy to piss off individuals. I had [yet another] friend that imbibed one that went into his can of soda. He tells me the experience left his lip swollen like a cartoon, for several days.
We have yellow jackets in the SE US. They are as persistent as they are aggressive. The "yellow jacket in the Coke can" is almost a cliche it happens so often. I once ran over a nest with a lawn mower at my family's lake house. I don't specifically remember being suddenly covered in stinging yellow jackets (I was), but I do remember vividly that was the fastest I'd swum across the lake.
where beekeepers use sticky sheets to get one hornet and then all the other hornets will join the one because they are all attracted to its aid by its pheromones.
Wasps absolutely have attack pheromones, and they absolutely spread those when they get injured (in the same way that bees do when they're injured) and when they attack (but here they might be able to do it "consciously"?).
What's nice about wasp stings is that because the stinger with the venom pouch and pump doesn't get stuck in your skin you get a much smaller dose than with a bee sting.
When I've been stung by bees where the stinger didn't get stuck in my skin the sting was no big deal. When the stinger gets stuck in my skin it's much worse.
interesting. I had a friend who was like that. once he invited me to a jazz concert near a river in the city where we both lived. river = mosquitoes. it was around 7 to 8 p.m. there was a shitload of mosquitoes around, and they were biting me and other people like mad, but he seemed completely unaffected. I asked him, aren't you being troubled by them? he said no.
I had had enough, and ran away from both the concert and those mosquitoes.
I have been stung by wasps a few times, and it is a lot more painful than a mosquito bite.
yellowjacket seems to be an American term.
I had to look it up.
Don't get me wrong, I hate mosquitoes and don't like being stung (both because of dengue fever risks in the case of aedes, and because it itches a lot afterwards), but I never find their bite painful. I suppose it depends on the kind of mosquito? I do know -- cause I've been bitten -- that horseflies hurt like hell, because their mouth parts have evolved to pierce cattle skin!
"Yellowjacket" is the translation I found for a kind of wasp we have in Argentina's Patagonia, where we call them "chaquetas" (Spanish for jackets). I think they might be imports and not native though, but now they are very frequent in our region.
>The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens
I think this is one of the more interesting differences. Plenty of species operate in groups. But its usually a dominant male with a harem. Bees and the like are unusual in that it's a dominant female.
I think it's related to the ease of reproduction. The females put relatively little into their off spring compared to a lion or even birds. It lets them to be essentially autonomous in reproduction which allows them to create offspring that are more like limbs.
There are bees that are monogamous, where the female and the male act a lot more like birds as far as mating and young rearing goes, and there are eusocial bees that where the female absolutely dominates.
Honeybees keep very few males (drones) around, and in the Fall they push them out of the hive and let them die of exposure to the elements. Honeybee workers work themselves to death. The queen is their slave. It's a pretty crappy life, but they make wonderful honey, and they collect wonderful propolis.
From what I can tell, the entire hive is “the” organism, and individual bees are like cells in the body. There was an episode of Cosmos, where Neil deGrasse Tyson described bees as the other of two major intelligences on Earth, and suggested their structure as a model for alien visitors[0].
If we judged ourselves by the cells in our body, we’d probably conclude that humans aren’t “happy.”
White blood cells basically run suicide missions against intruders, so they are sort of like swarming worker bees.
Weird take I know, but since only one female bee in the hive passes along her genes (which are shared with the other bees), it's a very different incentive structure.
I have had a hive where I had queens that lived quite fine together. Weirdest hive as one of them was a caucasia and the other a cordovan. Never did get stung with those ladies.
Mine was by accident, but I hear that some beeks do it since cannot get the genetic combination, they just do it as a mechanical combo, to get preferred traits. Like buckfast and russian to help with swarming and defensiveness.
I've heard of queens co-existing, yeah, but that must be very rare. I wonder if somehow they either smell close enough to the same that they and the workers don't notice, or if they are sufficiently different that they don't recognize their smells as those of other queens.
This maybe points to another theory (which may be entirely wrong, I'm just guessing!): honeybees die because they aren't supposed to attack each other. Like they can't be aggressively selfish because they'll just die in the process.
Honeybees do attack other colonies' honeybees. Africanized honeybees definitely do it. As someone else points out the barbs don't get stuck in insects, but do get stuck in mammals (and presumably birds too?).
> Africanized honey bees are typically much more defensive, react to disturbances faster, and chase people further (400 metres (1,300 ft)) than other varieties of honey bees.
My bees will chase me about 200 yards, and probably more if I had to go further to go inside a building (they don't like dark places). They lay ambushes, too. They'll wait outside the building I go into and will attack again if I go out.
Well, they used to anyways. Since switching to top-bar hive bodies they're much nicer.
She's also her daughters' slave. They make her work (lay eggs). They decide when to make new queens. They decide when to swarm with the old queen, and when they do they put her on a diet first so she can lose weight so she can fly (they won't let her eat much for two weeks), and they'll push her out of the hive when the time comes.
Humans only really get stung by queen honeybees when manipulating them. Normally the queen will be inside the hive and stay inside the hive except once or twice early in her life when she goes out to mate.
The drones in the hive are her brothers. She needs more gentic diversity, so she goes out to mate with other colonies' drones. Her attendants know where to go find them because they've scouted them before.
The drones are also clones (?) of the prior queen. They are unfertilized eggs, so they contain a genetic copy of half the queen's DNA. Mating with a drone from you hive would be like mating directly with your genetic mother. It's going to result in real bad inbreeding real quickly. Especially since queens mate a single time, and live for only a few years.
They're like half-clones, yeah. Queens can mate more than once though, but usually just once, and if more than once just twice. A well-mated queen will have sperm from a dozen different drones.
I think two answers, though as per TFA there's probably a lot more behind this:
First, she wants to get the best genetic material, and flying high is one of those tests for drones to pass, and
Second, needs to acquire genetic material from different bloodlines, hence does the business with several drones (obviously not an option within the hive).
> so if she's going to survive at all her stinger has to not have barbs. The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens that are about to hatch or have hatched already
But in this particular case the queen is no different from worker bees, right? They wouldn't die either from stinging other bees...
My understanding is that the barbs in the stingers don't get stuck in insects, but I don't know if that's a fact. At any rate the queen is sometimes irreplaceable, so she needs every survival advantage possible.
Not really. The bee that stings you will flap her wings very vigorously, and it will rip its stinger off in less than a second trying to get away from you. Unless you're deliberately trying to get stung and save her, you won't have a chance.
Depends on the colony. The bees that have stung me have always taken 5 or 10 seconds to start trying to dismantle themselves in earnest, which (depending on location) is usually enough time to rescue them. (I'm not sure whether they survive my rescue, but at the very least they can fly away, and their stingers don't remain in my skin.)
Read this in my early 20s and loved it. Many ideas that have stuck with me. Hoping to reread it with my wife soon, nearly 20 years later, and see how it aged.
I don't understand why any "why" question in evolutionary biology is ever satisfied with a "survival of the fittest" truism. Any evolutionary explanation you give me is also falsified by the existence of another species with a different/opposite trait. Whatever explanation you give for a bee's barbed stinger is falsified by the wasp's non-barbed one. Also doesn't answer other questions, such as why didn't bees evolve a type of barbed stinger that doesn't rip their guts out and kill them? Or why do they even need a stinger at all, as many insects don't have one?
Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion. Why do species survive? Because they were the fittest, because they survived. But why?
Wasps and bees have different ecological constraints with different risks involved. There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive.
Evolution doesn’t have any goals or agenda. That’s why whales still have vestigial hip bones despite having no hips whatsoever. Because it’s not a significant parameter in their survival. Same with barbed stingers of bees.
I think this is a perfect example of what your parent comment is talking about, being:
> unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion.
You said:
> There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive.
Sure, there's no contradiction, but this is totally circular reasoning that could be used to prove anything.
The connection graph between "They survive because they're the fittest" and "They must be the fittest because they survive" is just a circle disconnected from all other knowledge.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.[0]
But with this circular understanding of natural selection, you could be given a description of absolutely any conceivable configuration of organism and your response would be the same: "they must be the fittest, because they survive, because only the fittest survive" and you haven't gained any understanding at all.
There will never be a contradiction, because the argument is disconnected from any larger system of reasoning that could plausibly contradict it.
"Hey, there is a random monkey in the Amazon that has 3 hoops on its head and a big hole through its abdomen, isn't that weird? Why are they like that?"
"Ah, the hoops and the holes are required for Fitness. Only the Fittest survive, you know. So if they have 3 hoops on their heads and big holes in their abdomens, that is what makes them Fittest. Amen."
"Why aren't other monkeys like that then?"
"Other monkeys don't need hoops and holes for Fitness. Otherwise they too would have hoops and holes. :)"
A better understanding of natural selection would be confused about the hoops and the holes, and that confusion would correlate with either the random monkey species actually not existing, or the model being wrong.
As regards the bees: there probably is a reason that dying when stinging confers Fitness. But we should find out what that reason is, rather than state "Fitness because Survival" and feel like we've answered the question.
My understanding from the article and the general theory of Superorganisms is that it’s not exactly true that “dying when stinging confers fitness”. Rather, dying when stinging is just not a huge penalty when you’re talking about non-reproducing members of a colony. So, while it may be a good thing for bees to evolve the ability to survive stinging, the selective pressure is not as large as one might intuitively expect.
Maybe a better title for the post would be something like, “Isn’t it weird that bees die when they sting? Shouldn’t they have evolved away from that?”
This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting.
I'm not at all sure this is true - I don't know the evolutionary history of bees, but it seems unlikely that some kind of solitary proto-bees would have died after a sting. And even if this were true, we should still wonder why that proto-bee evolved to have this suicide stinger in the first place.
"It's not a big disadvantage to survival" can't be the explanation for a trait, unless that trait is a remnant from an ancestor where it brought an advantage (like the hip bones in whales - hip bones are obviously useful in land-based mammals, and whales are descendants of those).
Sp the question is: why did some organism ever evolve a stinger that kills it, how was that ever something that made some organism survive better than its brethren that didn't have this trait?
> This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting.
I don't see how you arrived at this conclusion, this logic seems to be flawed.
Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it.
Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are.
Not everything is optimal in the extreme. For all we know there have been many, many bees without barbs, but the bar to pass that on as an advantage is very high. The odds of a bee reproducing aren't even that high to begin with.
> Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it.
If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in some individual bees, but many other bees didn't have them, like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then I'd agree.
But a trait can't be universal in a species, and even in many related species, unless there is explicit selective pressure for that trait, or if it's a remnant from a common ancestor that had it. Your high cholesterol predisposition example is actually perfect, it shows what happens with traits that don't have significant pressure for or against them: they remain confined to a subset of the population.
> Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are.
They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the organism still viable is extremely low.
> If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in some individual bees, but many other bees didn't have them, like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then I'd agree.
What makes you believe they are not a "variation" in individual bees? Colony genetics are fascinating and can facilitate some pretty extreme variation.
Could a single queen's mutation be responsible for all barbs? You have some hidden constraints here that I don't think we agree on.
> They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the organism still viable is extremely low.
This is simply wrong. There are always plenty of potential mutations that cripple viability, sure. But pleiotropy in general is relatively common. In some species more than others.
Your reasoning here is heavily flawed. You firmly believe evolution and genetics work in a particular way that simply does not reflect reality. You are putting your belief in "survival of the fittest" first. I encourage you to broaden your horizons.
This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms
I don’t know where you got that. It seems perfectly plausible that the stingers evolved in the superorganism, and that the selective pressure was something like “drones protect the hive via stingers which kill them” versus “drones can’t sting at all”.
This is a different argument, one which I can agree with. I was specifically saying that the argument for how a species acquired a universal trait can't be "because it didn't hurt their fitness that much", you have to have positive pressure for a trait to spread to the entire species (or it must be a trait left over from an ancestor where it had these pressures).
> "It's not a big disadvantage to survival" can't be the explanation for a trait
Why not? Honest question.
Intuitively, I'd say that there are plenty of traits that propagate as long as they aren't expensive in terms of genetic survival. It's the nature of random genetic mutation, random traits will develop and some of them won't really affect survival and may propagate.
Yes, traits can propagate even if there is no selective pressure for them. But they won't reach 100% of the species, even less so 100% of several geographically separated species (such as African and European bees) just because they aren't that bad. Could we contrive a story where it could be possible something like this does happen? Sure, but it would be very unlikely (basically, it would require only a small population that happened to have this minor handicap to have randomly survived some mass extinction event that killed off the entirety of the rest of the species).
Well, there's a larger problem in the post. The primary reason that a bee dies when it stings you is that you kill the bee. A bee stinging an inanimate hunk of meat is unlikely to die.
But they can die, and yeah, a big part of the reason why is that dying isn't as large of a cost for bees as you might expect from a human perspective.
And looping back, another part is that given the very high risk of being intentionally killed when stinging an enemy who you want to sting, improving the much smaller rate of accidental death isn't really worth much. But even though it isn't worth much, it's worth something, and work has been done on the project.
Per everything I've ever read on this, a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive. It will either try to pull itself out and disembowel itself, or it will remain stack and die of hunger. What makes you think a bee that stings, say, a dog that can't swat it will then go on to survive?
Watching a youtube video by a beekeeper demonstrating that a bee stuck in his arm will gently wiggle itself around until it can pull free and fly away. Between that one guy with his live demonstration and his plentiful experience being stung by bees, and you with everything you've ever read, I'm obviously going to stick with him.
So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written?
For example, this article interviews two bee scientists that confirm that the majority of honeybees die via self-disembowelment after stinging a human:
However, they mention an interesting other thing, that may actually help explain what happens much better: bees don't die when they sting other insects or spiders, they only die when their needles get stuck in our thick skin. So perhaps the most likely explanation for the evolution and survival of the barbed stinger trait is that it's beneficial when bees fight their common enemies, and that bees simply don't interact that much with mammals and their thick skins.
I'm not sure why this answer is buried down so deep. It should be pretty obvious.
The average bee has no reason to ever fight a mammal. Optimizing for a rare event like that makes no sense. It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has become a frequent occurrence.
Surviving attacks against humans that help you survive is a really strange priority.
To be fair, many forest mammals will try to eat honey (bears and honey badgers being just two well known examples) and those have skins much thicker than even ours, so I suspect that bees have the same issues when stinging them. And those mammals are much more of a threat to a hive than insects and spiders, as they will virtually destroy the entire hive structure if they are not deterred, and likely kill thousands of larvae and bees.
> It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has become a frequent occurrence.
This can't possibly be true; the honeyguides are a family of birds whose evolved behavior is to find humans and lead them to wild beehives so that the humans can forage the honey (and the honeyguide can forage the leftovers).
> So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written?
No? You claimed that bees stinging meat cannot survive. Your anecdotes do nothing to support that. Decide what you want to say, then look for support. Where do you get the idea that two examples of something happening provide just as much support for the idea that it always happens as four examples of it not happening do for the idea that it doesn't always happen?
But for what it's worth, Aristotle wrote in the 4th century BC that bees stinging humans often recover, but that they will inevitably die if they lose their stinger.
Not at all my experience. My Italian bees are pretty hot though, so that may be why. My Russian bees are much nicer, and I've never been even stung by one of them, so maybe that's it. My hot bees will rip their stinger out within a second, and they emit a very particular frequency that I feel and that lets me know very quickly that I'm in trouble -- to be fair I've only experienced that vibration a handful of times because I've gotten much better at not leaving any exposed skin or any way for them to get in my suit.
All those bee rescue videos you see where the beekeeper doesn't wear a veil are not telling you the whole story. Before they go work on extracting the hive they'll first check that those bees are not hot and angry. If those bees are africanized then they'll use a suit and smoke and they will not bother making or posting a video about it. I.e., those videos are all cherry-picked experiences, all the good ones.
The ones that manage to leave the stinger in never survive in my case. Idk what to tell you. That's just my experience. Can they survive? Yes, they can. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? No, I don't think so.
Dying after a sting does not have to confer extra fitness to exist, right now. rather it had to have conferred some fitness relative to the alternative traits circulating at the time it was selected. obviously if you go by gradient descent you are not guaranteed to reach a global minimum or even a local one, given a constantly changing fitness landscape.
In most of these discussions, optimizing nature of evolution is taken as granted - we do not need to prove how evolution works yet again - there are plenty of evidence and discussion elsewhere - take it or leave it.
This node is well connected to other knowledge, and if you disagree, you need to convince a whole discipline of science, not me.
From the optimizing premise of evolution, various inferred hypotheses can be made, explaining a range of phenomena, just like, in physics, from the premise that probabilities of events are given by the amplitudes of solutions of certain pdes with specific initial conditions, we were able to devise tractable mathematical models of various nuclear reactions, here a model of development of certain abstract traits was explained (“altruism”).
The author fully acknowledged that this is a simplified model and does not match reality in some cases, and in other cases does not explain well enough. improvements to the model were proposed.
> totally circular reasoning that could be used to prove anything.
No, you can attack the reasoning by looking into actual costs. It seems like it can explain anything because we don’t constantly see examples where it’s false.
Looking at the costs to bees you see what percentage of them die from attacking mammal flesh and yep it’s a tiny rounding error.
Hypothetically, in a world without constraints mice could have a 100 foot long teeth, but we don’t live in a world without constraints.
It's only circular reasoning if you ignore the mathematical model of evolution. Evolution is simply that your chances of picking a red ball from a jar increases proportionally to the number of red balls in the jar.
What you're saying is that "but why did you pick that specific ball, what were the factors at play?". I say "probability", and you call it circular reasoning. You expect me to explain the physical forces at play that pushed forward a specific ball on the top when you filled the jar, and made it collide with your fingers, and your brain's reasoning chain to pick the first ball that you touched, so you pick that one.
But, basically, you can't. It's impossible because 1) we can't time travel. 2) we can't stop the universe and examine all of its properties. We work with the mathematical model we have and expect everything to work aligned with it. "Why do certain monkey species have holes in their bellies?". You can reason about that question, you can even come up with some answers, but it would be impossible to prove due to our universe's observability constraints.
But the mathematical model works, it even works beyond our physical realm (e.g. it works to solve mathematical problems). And no, it will never explain why certain monkeys have holes in their bellies. That's an entirely different domain of causal analysis.
"Fittest" is what we call those who happen to survive in their context. Systems that successfully replicate themselves in their context tend to stick around. Those who can't, go extinct. We obviously still study why they survived. That's what the article speculates about. So yes, in a sense, any organisms you see is the "fittest" in the sense that it was able to survive (replicate) in its context while countless others were not.
How is it circular to argue why one species would do better in an environment than another based on phenotype and the physical interactions it enables? It’s all relative to other species. As long as you understand that, there is no logical fallacy. I do very much appreciate the focus on informal logic though.
Because you could encounter absolutely any organism and make the same argument. There is no configuration of organism that would cause you to say "huh, I guess Survival doesn't depend on Fitness after all!"
Because it takes the observation of Survival and uses it to infer Fitness, at the same time as saying that Fitness confers Survival.
>Because you could encounter absolutely any organism and make the same argument.
That's a function of the explanation being an extremely good explanation. It rises to the top precisely because it has explanatory power all across nature without evident counter-example.
>There is no configuration of organism that would cause you to say "huh, I guess Survival doesn't depend on Fitness after all!"
This is where the argument falls apart. For starters, species go extinct all the time for reasons tied to their evolutionary trajectory. And there are species still living that unfortunately seem very imperfectly adapted to their constraints and likely to go extinct without a run of good luck or human intervention (e.g. pandas). We seem perfectly capable of recognizing when such species are "on the ropes". Additionally there are relative advantages we can clearly observe from animals in overlapping niches, and we can marvel at the effectiveness of adaptations in ways that don't involve circular assumptions (e.g. algae's capability for efficient growth is astonishing and without equal on the planet).
And, we could surely conceive of preposterous examples that defy expectations (e.g. the other commenter's example of mice with 100ft teeth).
It probably feels like it proves too much, because it's confirmed over and over again in nature everywhere, at all times. But in an alternate world where that wasn't the case, counter-examples would abound (such as the mouse with 100ft teeth). So re-iterating the core lesson about the role of natural selection is not just a circular assumption, it's the culmination of hard earned, accumulated evidence, ready at any moment to be falsified.
The honeybee is a perfect example, because the stinger does pose a real question about how we understand it's relation to fitness, and it requires delving into all kinds of complicated dynamics about genetically related drones are to the queen, the role of the sacrifice in supporting the hive and so-on. If we didn't have explanations like those, it would indeed pose a problem with explanations that presume fitness.
That's a real payoff from being alert to the need to have robust explanations; I don't think anyone is just saying "well it's fitness" and calling it a day so much as they're honoring the explanatory power of a well confirmed theory.
> It probably feels like it proves too much, because it's confirmed over and over again in nature everywhere, at all times.
No, logically it is proved true because it is assumed to be true and then used to prove itself.
> For starters, species go extinct all the time for reasons tied to their evolutionary trajectory.
Again, this is circular logic. You assumed that the only reason that species go extinct is because it wasn’t fit enough. If you assume survival of the fittest then of course it is true.
Here’s another circular explanation: things are the way they are because God created it that way. This explanation rises to the top precisely because it has explanatory power all across nature without evident counter-example, right?
>Again, this is circular logic. You assumed that the only reason that species go extinct is because it wasn’t fit enough.
Again, I gave numerous examples, and you ignored mostly all of them.
Just to develop the point about extinctions a bit further. We know for instance of birds that had no natural fear of predators on the Galapagos Islands that upon human contact were driven to extinction or near extinction, and we don't need any circular assumptions to tie their fitness to their extinction.
And that's not to mention the rest of the examples I listed that you ignored, such as cases where we can observe that currently living species are doing well or poorly, like algae and pandas respectively, all of which hinge on knowledge of specific biological mechanisms.
So I don't know why you keep asserting that it's an assumption.
Actually your example of creationist species isn’t circular at all, it just has no predictive power. Unless you want to say that God really likes beetles, I suppose.
In the end evolution is random, but exerts some pressure towards fitness in some environments. Some traits are legacy or are just plain random; just because an organism has a trait does not mean it is useful now, or indeed has ever been useful for fitness. The whole package must be reasonably fit for some environment, but that doesn’t mean all the traits improve fitness.
This whole line of argument from the parent comment and its ancestor seems to ignore we can see where certain evolutionary features reach local minima, like the retina of the human eye. It’s obviously not the fittest thing wrt the octopus retina, but does well enough you can read this.
no, "god created it this way" does not answer for extinctions. if god created it that way, the species would not be extinct.
the part i think youre missing is that "survival of the fitness" is shown elsewhere, and used as a tool here to identify what the fitness is, and how and when certain traits were beneficial.
the case you are descibing is that all applicatioms of science(well, of anything) are circular reasoning. if you use newton's mechanics to predict motion of a mass undergoing acceleration, its circular because your result is proof of newtons mechanics, and newtons mechanics is proof of your result.
its just an "if and only if" relationship. that's not circular reasoning.
Translating the word Fitness from a term of art makes this very clear: if you said "good enough to survive", no one would question the statement "I wonder why they survive. Guess they must be 'good enough to survive'".
> The connection graph between "They survive because they're the fittest" and "They must be the fittest because they survive" is just a circle disconnected from all other knowledge.
The GP said that bees survived because they're "fit enough" not that they survive because they're "the fittest" and there are definitely species that don't seem to be surviving because they're not fit enough.
This assumes that Fitness is a meaningless aphorism. I would posit that Fitness is a meaningful concept that can be learned. It is defined by what happens to be reproductively helpful to a species, which is tautological, but to understand the definition, it just means you need to understand that particular species ecosystem and lifecycle.
If you really analyze any word, it loses all meaning except what we've assigned it.
Love this comment. It highlights a major misunderstanding of biology that many people who didn't study it in depth have: that every, or most features of living beings do not have an "evolutionary explanation." T-rex arms aren't short so they can open flowers - they just happen to be small because that's the type of creature that happened to survive after a lot of changes.
Well, the explanation I heard is that snoring provided protection during sleeping to scare away predators. I don't know the source for this theory, so take it with a grain of salt :)
Most likely, yes, like the loudness of baby crying. Humans are pack animals so any predator attracted by snoring or baby cry, and deciding to check it out would be in a very very big trouble.
> Why do species survive? Because they did, and because the objective of life is to survive. But why?
In evolutionary biology, that definitionally is the ultimate answer. One species survived, another didn’t. Sometimes that’s because the adaptation helped them outcompete, sometimes it’s because they were already competitive and this preexisting disadvantage from an earlier round didn’t hurt enough to matter. We can try to find intuitive explanations past that which feel satisfying but it’s always going to be a rough approximation.
Let’s use chess as an analogy. Allow an engine to analyze a position and tell us the best path forward. But why did it choose that line? We can (and do) come up with explanations that help us fit a move into our understanding of the game: moving this pawn allows that knight to occupy a better spot where it can exert its influence on the rest of the board, or whatever. But that’s merely a convenient simplification for our gut understanding. It’s not really the actual answer. The ultimate “why” is “because it produces the best possible eventual outcome no matter the response”.
The "why" questions people ask about evolutionary biology are the carry over of theology into the understanding of evolution. People still need to believe there is a fundamental reason the world is the way it is. A similar theological carry over is the belief that we are better suited to the environment we evolved in. This is akin to "golden age" thinking, that the world today is somehow not right and if we return to the origin things will be better.
At a fundamental level causality doesn't even really make sense in evolutionary biology. You can ask the question "what benefits do this feature provide", but you can never really say that's why they evolved. In the end you have the traits you do because, at point in the species development, they didn't make you die faster and some helped you survive better, but it's not really possible to disentangle these.
Likewise people don't really understand that in evolutionary processes both the species and the environment are constantly changing. The notion that a species is "adapted for a particular environment" is somewhat nonsensical because "the environment" is never really fixed.
All creatures are very complicated. Thus reproduction doesn't produce perfect clones, "mutations" take place. This is largely because there are so many different ways to derive one individual out of two individuals' complex genitic material. This is all a feature. This is why individuals have unique characteristics. Think about how different humans are from each other, even though we're all humans. This same thing applies to all creatures. Every individual is different. Those who have "disabilities" (disadvantages in their context) are less likely to survive. So those with advantageous traits survive and pass their traits on through reproduction, making those specific traits more prevalent.
The answer to "why didn't x evolve to do y?" is usually just that that specific mutation might have never occurred or caught on randomly. This is also why different species do different things differently. It's all random mutations. Some were beneficial in their context and environment so those who had them were more likely to survive and pass those traits along.
It's not that "the objective of life is to survive" in a spiritual sense, it's that life randomly happens and some of it survives and it makes more life like itself. In some ways, I suppose the purpose of life is to create more life. Systems that replicate themselves successfully survive. We call these "life". It's really a linguistics thing.
Hope some of this makes sense. I enjoyed thinking about this.
If your answer is "it's a random mutation" then that settles the "why" question permanently. Why all this idle speculation about bee's stingers, then? It was a random mutation, and it survived, done.
Every single part of an organism goes through a recombination/mutation process countless times, the stinger evolved to be what it is today over a very long time and it's cool to study why it ended up the way it did. Tells us about their environment and history and evolutionary pressures, survival is a result of the random traits being successful in their context in specific ways.
Why shouldn't different or even "opposite" traits also be successful? When faced with random inheritable differences across different species over long periods of time why wouldn't the result be a variety of them, every one of which just didn't prevent reproduction from passing those traits on to the next generation? Some traits might be seen as "better" or "worse" by comparison but as long as they get passed on, we'll see both. It isn't about being "best". It's about being "good enough"
Because the trait is not the end all be all. It's a random walk to an outcome that leads to enough offspring to survive for the species to be there at all. It's probably not even the most optimal solution whatever is there, just happens to be competitive among the rest of the ecology to not be snuffed out.
> Any evolutionary explanation you give me is also falsified by the existence of another species with a different/opposite trait. Whatever explanation you give for a bee's barbed stinger is falsified by the wasp's non-barbed one.
The explanation in the article does not reduce to a "survival of the fittest" truism and is not falsified by this example. The article explains at great length why that is, specifically referring to that example.
I had a very similar feeling until I took a course with one of the leading researchers in the field of protein folding. Two things that he repeatedly mentioned stuck with me a lot:
Evolution is not the survival of the fittest but the not-dying of the unfit. That explains why we have so many different species in the same ecological niche. The example he used was different types of grass on the same field. All of those were fit enough to not die.
The second thing he always repeated was that biology only observes what does or at some point did work. That leads to a huge confirmation bias that research needs to be aware of. Two species might be very similar but just across different sides of the boundary of survival.
I think you misunderstood what people mean by "why" in the context of evolution.
For example, you ask a random person what his job is.
He: I fix TVs
You: Why?
He: Uh, that's what keeps a roof over me and keeps my family fed?
You: But clearly other humans do other jobs and still have roofs. So it's not a real "why". Your statement is falsified.
> Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion
How DNA works at molecular level is science. How creators became what they are now is history. History usually doesn't have the same level of falsifiability as science does.
I think your example is perfect. What he gave you is not a complete answer to why, because, as you say, he might have been doing a number of other jobs. So why roofs specifically? Add the description of how he inherited his father’s carpenter business but whenever he visited clients, they all had leaky roof, yadayada, and that he now feels happy enough to not look for any further changes, and you get the kind of answer OP is looking for.
Imagine taking your favorite fractal <formula here> and picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Would you be better satisfied by <formula> or by specific step by step calculations that lead to that neighborhood?
Either way, now imagine taking not your favorite, irregular, non-describable, non-computable, enormously complex processes-driven fractal that is the real nature, then picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Now ask yourself the same question and what comes to mind.
More short analogy would be that biology is physics with all elementary particles being different.
But, doesn't this match the parent comment's point? If someone asks why a particular point and not, a nearby point is on the fractal, the reply is just that complicated program generated this number and not another number. It leads to the theme of incompressibility (is there a program of smaller length which can correctly check whether a point in a given region is on the fractal). Sometimes, programs are incompressible, and at other times there is a local explanation.
So, people writing on this topic should be careful to make this distinction and check if their local explanation (which is a 'compression' of the evolution process) actually classifies points into fit/unfit regions with the assumption that the points are in some common region(shared features in the environment).
Compare also with explanations of historical events(list of causes for a victory but with the same causes present, there is failure in another context) and atheist - religious debates on God's grace for a particular prayer and allowing the suffering of others. If a local explanation can't distinguish events, then the global explanation has to be validated by something else.
This analogy doesn’t really answer it, it only shows that there’s no generic answer. So “fittest” basically means “the result”. It’s a definition, not explanation. But it is used instead of “the result” because we have some insights into how it was calculated, and we know that the nature simply creates {mi,bi,tri}llions of variants and then some minuscle amount has better chances to pass and mix these genes, outplaying others in this game. That’s where fittest comes from. Any attempt to explain it fully meets with a local complexity, in which only high-level questions can be answered in the same limited high-level manner. So there is some compressibility, but it’s clearly jpeg. Cause if a whole planet of distinct particles would strictly follow some rule to compress the observations into, it would be a rule of physics, not biology. E.g. why do animals fall to the ground? Due to gravity, here’s <formula>, works for all particles.
Sure, you won't get exact predictions on which genetic codes are realized. Similar to how statistical physics doesn't predict microstates, but the macro picture is understood. Even that might be too ambitious for complicated systems, but you can still have sensible predictions from evolution theory which looks at a landscape and says that there will be animals with tall necks and predators with very fast speeds even if you didn't know beforehand about giraffes and cheetahs.
In the fractal analogy, the compressed theory does not predict that exactly this point does/does-not lie on the fractal, but predicting whether a small disc around the point intersects the fractal.
I have a personal theory that genetics and survival just need to be good enough. They may find other local maxima and improve things. But they don't need to be perfect in every dimension. There is room for stuff that doesn't make sense to human logic. In addition because species don't generally breed with other species you need to find those optimisations through chance within a species. And genes are not a feature list. Turn one gene on and something else may turn off. There are trade off too.
What kind of explanations are you looking for? Your idea is that there should be some sort of common explanations of why.
I guess because these are theories and best guess based on the evidence. There are many unknowns but that doesn't mean we should disregard what we know.
If someone simply asked what are the advantages of bees barbed stingers over wasps non barbed ones, that would be an interesting question. But if someone asks “why” and then proceeds to give a circular logic explanation (it survived because it is fit because it survived) that is unprovable, I find that to be silly idle speculation.
I believe you’d have to look at the evolutionary advantage of bees with barbed stingers vs bees without barbed stingers and how one made that particular group of bees more successful than the other.
Why did the spaghetti monster give bee srings barbs?
Because the bees prayed for protection and got saucy about it.
Is that better? Are you really looking for equivalence? Is that fit enough?
Instead of spreading evolution FUD, there are many0laces you could educate yourself. S9meone with a HN acvount is more than able to seek these out. Therefore your motives for this comment seen more disingenuous.
The main problem I see with how some popular science journalists approach evolutionary biology is that they always think from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to the group.
Survival of the fittest is the flawed quote, usually used by those with supremacist conceptual frameworks (that there can be an objective “better”, etc). This shows up a lot in fiction, where the quote is used as justification for cruelty, atrocities, and the like.
IMHO, the much better quote is:
> It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
It is not only the best adapted class that survives, aka the "fittest." They only need to be good enough to survive and reproduce. In other words, the principle should be stated as "survival of the good enough." I know it doesn't roll off the tongue as well, but is more accurate.
As I've been listening to Mythos recently, I must point out that it is also because Zeus cursed the Bee
> In his final response on the matter he declared that she will be a Queen of a colony of workers that will aid her in gathering honey. However, Greek Gods were never truly honourable in their wishes unless it benefitted them directly. In addition to her swarm of workers she was also granted a fatal sting, but this sting would be fatal to her or her colony if they ever used it on another. It was from then on that the honeybees’ was barbed; meaning that if their weapon was ever to be “deployed” that the individual that used their sting would not survive the attack.
Sometimes I observed how it worked after being stung by a bee. It is better to remove sting using force from one side. When two fingertips are used to remove a sting all venom is being pushed into the wound.
A random bee sting in class was the straw that broke my back in a mid 90s multivariable calculus lecture at a Swedish university where I was studying CS/EE. It lead to me dropping out. Went to a local internet/web software startup instead and a whole new world opened up.
The gate keeping of all that calculus for a CS degree is silly. Wasn’t the strongest at math, so grinned and bared but don’t really have a grasp of it anymore, and it would have been a shame to not have graduated with a CS degree because of it.
In Sweden it was a heritage from Ericsson. They needed/need engineers who knew that stuff. Supposedly. I should have picked something with less EE even though I also loved electronics.
As an easily distracted high schooler just trying to enjoy one of his favorite classes, I discovered I could swat a flying bee dead with my folder. They were getting in through some gap in a window facing an alcove an I think we had four or five one year before Facilities fixed the problem.
It worked out, but you don’t really want to go squishing bees in an open area since they release chemicals that put their siblings on alert. If they stay put a glass and a piece of stiff paper are a better solution. But these were buzzing around my fellow students making everyone freak out.
Same reason why honest signals exist. A peacock with very rich feathers is a fitness disadvantage. But they find mates more successfully. These traits persist in the gene pool.
It’s so much easier to just evolve a cheating trait that does the job of finding a mate even without the required fitness.
But the signals stay honest for the most part.
Why?
It’s because ultimately the species survives, not the individuals.
In a lot of cases, something that makes the individual more fit also makes the species more fit. But in some cases, they are inversely proportional.
Hence you end up with suicidal genes that favor the death of the individuals for the greater good of the species.
Now extrapolating to human society, most nations have landed on a system where taxes are paid to the government. Every individual might complain and try to get out of paying. But we do. Why? Maybe because societies where that wasn’t a thing were less fit and didn’t last long enough to still be around.
I think you are missing a few points. First, is the adversarial nature of mate selection.
A female peacock who falls for a trick will have fewer offspring that survive. The discerning hen will do better. Honest communication works because it is backed up actual fitness. It doesn't require group selection.
Second, I think there is a lot more going on with respect to taxes. Taxes have existed for maybe 10,000 years. An armed man demanding half your stuff or they kill your family is a tax too. Same for a mature lion that eats what another animal killed. I would argue taxes are an inherent result of power imbalances among humans. Differences give rise to power differentials, which give rise to security concessions, which consolidate into kingdoms and nations.
> Taxes have existed for maybe 10,000 years. An armed man demanding half your stuff or they kill your family is a tax too. Same for a mature lion that eats what another animal killed. I would argue taxes are an inherent result of power imbalances among humans. Differences give rise to power differentials, which give rise to security concessions, which consolidate into kingdoms and nations
Tax fits the model pretty well. Defending against bandits who steal everything and move on is expensive, so kings that claim much smaller portions of wealth and scare off bandits tend to lead to better nations. (Then you've got modern democracies, that typically tax much more, but in a way which is actually compatible with higher growth because the money tends to be spent back into the sluggish parts of the economy rather than spent on zero sum competition with neighbouring kings/lords over territorial tax bases and precious import collection)
> It’s because ultimately the species survives, not the individuals.
No, this is wrong. "Survival of the species" isn't a basis for selection. It will not lead to a gene becoming more prevalent in a population of interbreeding individuals.
Bees sacrifice themselves because they share genes with the queen; genes that are involved in this sacrifice increase their relative abundance in the bee gene pool by increasing the fitness of the superorganism that is the colony.
That's not entirely true. For example, being gay is hypothesized to give an evolutionary advantage because you can provide care for your sibling's children, who share their dna with you. Same goes for early menopause. That can extend to small villages where individuals may give up their own resources for a greater survival chance of their kin within the collective.
Everything that makes us human is constrained by the possibilities offered by our genes. Epigenetics, development, and environment are downstream of that. It is our genes that allow for sexual reproduction in the first place and why we’re attracted to other humans and not, say, trees.
Pre 1800, the average life expectancy was aged between 20-40 [1].
I think the menopause is something that was experienced by extremely few people until after then.
>"Survival of the species" isn't a basis for selection. It will not lead to a gene becoming more prevalent in a population of interbreeding individuals.
Well, "species" is but a loosely defined set of genes.
I can offer another "why?"
How many animals attack a wasp's nest? Almost zero, except other wasps in a territory war?
How many animals attack a beehive? Humans, bears, apes,.. pretty any big enough mammal that can climb.
So bees not only suffer from much more predators due to their precious honey, in my view they also need to differentiate between "honey maker" and warrior (sting) functions as their poison could contaminate the honey. Why do the males have to die? Because almost none of their enemies can extract a bee sting from their skin. Once stung, the poison glands and some muscles remain with the sting, acting as a "poison pump". This could deter the attacker longer from a second attack. Which makes sense, as the beehive cannot run away from the attacker.
The group selection part is really interesting evolution-wise. It seems a very slow and difficult method of selection. I had never considered how something dying, and not passing along their genetics, could enforce a genetic trait.
Humans use XY system, so we share 50% of your genes with your children, parents and siblings (in average).
Bees and ants use X0 system. A female bee share 50% of your genes with their own daughters, 75% with their mother and 75% with their female parents and 75% with their female siblings (in average).
So, from the bee's genes point of view instead of having their own children it's better to kidnap their mother and force her to have more female children. And a consequence is that instead of running away to form their new family in a safe place it's better to die protecting their mother.
Your conclusion is right, but in bees, sex is determined by Haplodiploidy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy ), not X0.
Also, the daughters have the same number of chromosomes as the mother so they share 50%, not 75% of their genes with their mother (they do share an average of 75% of their genes with their sisters).
group selection works a lot better when the sacrificing individuals are sterile, with no other hope of passing on their genetics.
See also Eunuchs and Castration as a way to recreate a similar dynamic with humans. Castration had the fascinating ability to bind the interests of the Eunuchs more closely with the power structures and rules, by removing the option of family and progeny of their own.
“Group selection” is not a thing. The article hand waves this always with
> some biologists still get really triggered about group selection and deny its evolutionary importance
Which is dishonest at best. The vast majority of biologist have realized group selection doesn’t work as proposed. [0]
What people thought was group selection was just kin selection working over time.
All evolution works at the level of the gene. Genes “want” to reproduce more of themselves. And if the same gene is in a kin, then it can favor enhancing the survival of kin that carry copies of itself. At a macro level this can be misreported as group selection, but to be sure, the selection is happening at the level of the gene, and reaches at most to kin sharing genes.
The article then goes on to say
> The nice story I told above about the evolution of altruism could just have easily been applied to humans. Yet we do not exist in eusocial colonies, so there must be something else going on
And he then talks about gene selection and the fact that bees are
haplodiploidy, which is indeed the cause of the “altruism” we see.
His dismissal of haplodiploidy at the end of the article is a weak argument. Just because haplodiploidy in other species doesn’t lead to eusocial groups, or that eusocial groups can occur without haplodiploidy are not sufficient arguments that dismiss the effects of haplodiploidy and kin selection favoring altruism in eusocial bees.
I highly recommend people interested in these topics to read the seminal Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. [1]
Agreed, it's a disappointing and discrediting detour in an article that's about a fascinating topic. As you note, this has been worked out via haplodiploidy, which doesn't require venturing into theorizing about group selection or altruism.
And just to take a beat, and explain why group selection "triggers" people (in the author's wording), it's because it violates our fundamental, bedrock idea of causality which is no small thing, and anyone having a cavalier attitude about that probably doesn't belong in a room where these ideas are being deliberated. We understand physics to be causally closed, and expect "higher level" explanations to be compatible with the constraints of physics.
A model example in taking causality seriously, and proceeding with extreme care and extreme caution about challenging that intuition, I think is best exhibited in Quantum Mechanics, where, after excruciatingly careful examination of data and lots of hard thinking about implications, and lots of accounting for it's almost vulgar challenge to our intuitions, do we dare offer a model that challenges our basic idea of causation. That deviation is appropriately treated as profound, by contrast with the fast and loose invocation of group selection you find in some evolutionary explanations.
Yes! To put a finer point on it, group selection theories don’t have a specific physical explanation for how they operate, instead veering into philosophical explanations.
Ultimately natural selection must operate on the gene. Genes are the only source of information that gets passed to offspring through germ line cells in sexual reproduction or mitosis in asexual reproduction (don’t get me started on the fad of epigenetics, which is just a fancy term for standard DNA controlled embryological differentiation.)
The replication of genes and the information they encode, are the physical cause of the effect of phenotypes.
Group selection theorists (of which there are few) have no physical cause that allows selection to occur on the level of the group, and there’s no sound hypothesis of such that I have heard of. You’d need some physical mechanism for information flow between individuals in a group for that to be the case, and outside of kin inheritance, there’s nothing like that that exists.
It requires such a depth of evolution as to make it absurd to imagine that the genus homo is the point at which altruism emerged. Animals care about each other.
Think about how most people are naturally scared of heights, or snakes. A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you play with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a snake.
The ones that aren't afraid of those things are more likely to die from falling off a cliff or being injected with venom.
I'm personally someone who is freaked out heavily by insects. I know logically a house centipede or a harmless spider can't hurt me, but seemingly my brain has something in it that overrides my entire body when I see one and disgusts me. Usually it's irrational, but it probably helps humanity on a larger scale to avoid the ones that are dangerous!
There's a lot about the humans body that naturally gives us non-logical instincts that help us to survive and breed. People like having sex, regardless of whether they want a baby. There's no logic to it, but we know what we like!
The more advanced we get, the more it becomes apparent that we're just monkeys in shoes.
> Some cats are afraid of cucumbers, presumably because the shape and color resembles a snake. Here’s a funny compilation: https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU
It's funny in a way, but if you think about it it's actually abusive.
Would you think it's funny if you were terrified of snakes and someone randomly put a fake snake next to you when you were just relaxing?
This entire article is flawed in my opinion.
Bees are not "suicidal". They are not meant to die after they sting.
It's just that they have not adapted to stinging mammals with elastic skin (and probably will not).
Bees can absolutely live after stinging if they manage to dislodge the stinger from the skin.
The concept of indirect fitness must be more complicated than explained here. The article explains it as a worker bee sharing 75% of her genes with her sisters, but only 50% with a child, so there is selection pressure for workers to be sterile and self-sacrificing. But few genes actually differ between individuals, so the percentages are much higher. E.g., I share ~ 99% of my genes with each one of you reading this. Assuming honey bees' genetic variation is not much more extreme than human variation, we're talking about 99.5% vs. 99.75% sharing, which sounds more like an explanation of why altruism would be preferred in general rather than uniquely affecting bees.
The article does eventually circle around to acknowledge this, but it's easy to miss and very underdeveloped compared to the discussion of kin selection: "So why do bees die when they sting you? Perhaps because they're disposable parts of a larger super-organism which has evolved by multi-level selection."
It doesn't matter how much bees have in common. The idea is that in bees, altruistic traits, that is those that produce more sisters by helping the queen have a 75% chance of being passed, because sisters share 75% of a worker bee genes. Most of the genes are the same, of course, bees won't become dogs or anything like that, but a few of them differ, and these are the one that matter.
Could worker bees be fertile and have a selfish traits that let them have more children, they would only have a 50% chance of passing these, because children share 50% of genes.
So: 75% of altruistic genes pass vs 50% of selfish genes. Altruistic genes win. Humans can't pass 75% of their genome this way, so that altruistic genes have no intrinsic advantage over selfish genes.
Right, "sharing" here must mean DNA that was cloned from the same ancestral DNA strand, not merely that it shares the same informational content. I got lost in the analogies that frame things in terms of what's "better" for the organism and lost sight of this.
The most important thing from the perspective of replication of a DNA strand is the number of copies of DNA passed to the next generation, and future generations, right? Which would be 0.75 * (mean marginal increase in next-generation sisters) + 0.5 * (mean # offspring). The probability that these next-generation individuals actually get to reproduce in turn would also factor in somewhere.
What's also interesting is that if we take the point of view of the queen (through whom the altruistic genes must pass), the queen's reproductive strategy is relatively few children + hordes of sterile helpers + killing her own sisters. So are we talking about a fitness advantage of altruistic traits (maximizing # sisters), or a fitness advantage from selfish traits [maximizing P(fertile child survival) I guess, since # children is small] that produce hordes of sterile helpers?
Edit: Circling back to the organism perspective, in the sense of "I would gladly give up my life for two brothers or eight cousins.", how many bees is it worth giving up one's own life for in that specific sense? We do have a common ancestor after all and thus a non-zero R-factor.
Hmm, I understand this difference in genes differently.
You and I probably share 99% of effective genes, but still the difference in genes is much greater because there we are comparing the entire DNA. There is a lot of non-affecting DNA. And that is what they analyze when comparing DNA of two individuals in forensics.
Based on the information I found, the % difference between two randoms humans in terms of base pairs (including non-coding DNA) is even less than the difference in terms of genes, so the distinction does not materially alter the discussion. Also the article framed its explanation in terms of genes, not base pair sequence.
Forensic comparisons are mostly about comparing the number of short tandem repeats at handful of loci, a very small part of the the whole genome.
If you have any information that indicates the DNA similarity between people is less than 98–99% I would love to hear it. I have not personally analyzed the sequences from the 1000 genome project to check, and am relying on summaries written by other people.
They’ve found that African Elephant populations are largely constrained by water availability. Creating artificial watering holes is helping restore elephant populations better than most other attempts.
But the matriarch is typically one of the oldest female members of the group, and elephants remember watering holes that they haven’t visited since they were young. During a drought they will check all of these secondary and tertiary water sources. If that elephant is killed by poachers, the herd may lose the last remaining record of water resources and suffer for it.
I also recall watching a documentary about a troupe of primates. They adopted a young male kicked out of another troupe. Nothing remarkable about him until, again, a drought year. Turns out not all knowledge of edible foods is instinctual. They discovered him eating a fruit none of the tribe had eaten before. When he didn’t die they all started eating it too.
So I think we underestimate the value of record keeping with respect to longevity and inter-group mixing. It’s not all genes and safety in numbers.
In Māori culture in NZ, tribal elders (kaumātua) function much the same, they are the keepers of knowledge, history and cultural practices for their group(s).
I suspect you'd find the same in many cultures that didn't have writing to transmit knowledge.
(There's also the aspect of "mana", a very hard word to translate, "face", "influence", "power" or "really respected" are good approximations.
A kaumātua with mana accords your group (iwi/tribe or hapu/sub-tribe) with their mana.
So, say your Granddad was a renowned warrior or diplomat, even though he's in his 80s, the respect his opponents developed for him still persists, and flows onto you.)
I don't think its that simple. If we look back far enough, it was more like the man/men hunted or gathered and women took care of kids, fire and cooking.
If I look at less distant ancestors, they all worked in the fields, and so did grandparents (who were not as old as these days when 15 was a good age to start bearing kids, so 35 years old granny was normal). So it again falls mostly on women. Grandparents, those still living, much less.
I find the grandparents hypothesis compelling at first glance but it sort of begs the question, why don't we live indefinitely in the first place? There are obvious answers, we make tradeoffs to improve performance early in life at the expense of long term function, but it doesn't seem like the reproductive benefits of caring for a grandchild that only shares a 1/4 of your DNA necessarily tips the scales of selection towards longevity. Especially when, in theory, men remain fertile their entire lives and thus there should have always been some selection for longer life spans. You would expect the reproductive benefits of a 70 year old caring for their own child might be at least comparable to 70 year old caring for a grandchild.
> why don't we live indefinitely in the first place?
It doesn’t seem to be necessary for the survival of our genes.
> You would expect the reproductive benefits of a 70 year old caring for their own child might be at least comparable to 70 year old caring for a grandchild.
They’re competing with 20-30 year-olds with better physical fitness for a mate. This would be relevant for ~99% of human existence even if it’s not totally relevant today.
Members of some species take care of the children of others, as well as theirs (Orcas come to mind, humans too if course). There is an advantage in helping others with similar DNA than you, because they will reciprocate.
>Thirdly, the haplodiploidy hypothesis only works if all sisters share the same father and if a queen is biased to produce more daughters than sons.
The sex ratio doesn't actually seem like a problem for the theory, because it sounds like for a worker bee, the relatedness of the marginal sibling is 5/8 in expectation, vs. 1/2 relatedness of the marginal offspring.
I think you also have to discount the relatedness into the future. If the colony you are born into is already established, your 5/8 related marginal sibling has a much higher likelihood of survival than your 1/2 related marginal offspring when you take into account the risk of breaking from the colony and starting your own.
That probably goes some way to explaining the first problem of multiple fathers. Marginal half-siblings are only 1/4 related to the worker, but they may have a greater chance of survival.
> we humans and nearly all other mammals certainly don't have a singular queen and a sterile caste of workers.
No we have many queens and many sterile workers. Almost all women have children and increasingly more men don't father children. We've outlawed polygamy, but society is trending that way anyway, especially considering online dating statistics. 80% of women are choosing from the top 20% of men.
Men die in war. Look at ukraine. A million men dead, while women dance in clubs. Vietnam, on the American side: 55,000 men dead, 8 women dead. Most women stayed home, like the queen bee. Most of those men were sterile for all intents and purposes.
If we don't introduce artificial measures, the natural tendency is toward fewer women mating with more men and the end result is one to many. There's a British lady trying to mate 1,000 men.
For the record, almost no bees die when they sting you. This is just a weird myth that people repeat nonstop.
This only happens to honeybees, and only when they're stinging humans. Most skin is much thicker than ours, more similar to our feet callouses. The stinger isn't supposed to go in. That's closer to a sword's foil.
The reason they panic when it happens is it's not supposed to happen.
The stingers are mostly meant for combat with other insects. You can watch these fights on youtube. They never, ever end with the bee self eviscerating.
This is a simple example of people trying to look smart by explaining things which, when you check, just aren't true.
Bee's are a product of many millions of years of evolution, so the why, is that it works!
Ever watch bees?, bugs?, other things, up close and in the danger zone? I do. A bee's stinger will embed in you, or me, and then the venom sack rips right out of the bee and it is possible to watch the venom sack pump venom without the bee
itself attached anymore.
I was attending my mother in her herb garden and commented on there bieng honey bees around, which she disputed, so I caught one, and held its legs
while it tried to sting me, and showed her this,
but my hands are so callused, that its stinger would not go in, then I let it go. She says I am an improbable creature, and describes me bieng a half Vulcan and half Klingon.
> The haplodiploidy hypothesis, though nice, is not without its problems. Firstly, there are plenty of species with haplodiploid genetics which do not form eusocial colonies.
That is not a problem. Reproductive fitness must always be measured relative to an environment. Just because colony life is a successful strategy for haplodiploid species in some environments does not mean it will be a successful strategy in all environments. You can see this in other species. Female lions live mostly in cooperative groups while male lions and all other large cats (leopards, cheetahs, and tigers) are solitary.
Am I the only one who grew up with bees dying after stinging carrying a sort of unspoken significance or meaning?
I don't think I ever heard someone actually state it, but growing up I had the feeling that bees dying when they sting you was in some sense "significant" because it meant that bees had to be selective in when they chose to resort to violence.
It was almost like an unspoken fable or illustration about the importance of controlling aggression.
I had this experience with a wasp nest near my house. I figured "live and let live" until one day I walked out my door and a wasp flew directly over and stung me without provocation. So I got some insecticide and got rid of the nest.
Isn’t that just so unbearably sad? These little creatures work tirelessly their whole lives, buzzing from flower to flower, pollinating the plants that sustain ecosystems and our food supply. They barely get to live a few weeks as worker bees, and then if they ever need to sting to protect their hive... that’s it. Their life ends in an act of ultimate devotion.
The title is a bit misleading as it really doesn’t explain why bees die when they sting in the sense of a causality. The article itself mentions that the stinging mechanism bees use, is itself not a prerequisite for how they are organized as wasp use a different one. Very interesting read though.
Kind of got me thinking is there any tool or is someone working on something that can parse a DNA and give you the end result for any species? If not what's the main challenge
Would be a cool challenge for all the quantum supremacy folk
Stepping back a little and try to projecting that logic onto humans, are we more like super organisms? Interestingly, Our social constructs does have similarities of both superorganism and non- superorganism
It's even more extreme than that. If you took a random sampling of humans to a version of Earth that had never experienced humans, it would not go well. We're heavily dependant on society and modern technology. We've evolved together.
this is wild because the article starts off with explaining how "why" is a bad question, and then doubles down on this entire thesis explaining why a bee dies when it stings you, a human, and the evolutionary nature supporting it
except, its entirely wrong and the foreshadowing about "why" was super important: bees don't 'expect' to die when they sting you. they can sting many creatures and not get their abdomen ripped out because the barb doesn't get stuck in the thing they stung. just like wasps.
so this 20 page dissertation is completely baseless.
It is in the article "A honey bee dies when it stings you because its stinger is covered in barbs, causing its abdomen to get ripped out when it tries to fly away. And surviving with your guts spilling out everywhere is pretty bloody hard."
That's the baseline answer. It is a simple observation, and at this level of question you don't need to worry about evolution at all.
Dying worker bees ensure survival of the group without a measurable impact on death of the colony, which when seen as a super organism, means only a part of the organism, leaving the reproducing parts intact, since workers don't mate anyway.
Honeybee queens are the only honeybees with stingers that don't die when they sting. That's because the queen bee's stinger has no barbs, and the reason for that is that the queen must not die easily, and she must use her stinger, so if she's going to survive at all her stinger has to not have barbs. The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens that are about to hatch or have hatched already. She also has to possibly use her stinger when she goes out to mate (though she does go with attendants who will defend her if attacked).
I was surprised not to find mention of this in TFA.
> A honey bee dies when it stings you because its stinger is covered in barbs, causing its abdomen to get ripped out when it tries to fly away. And surviving with your guts spilling out everywhere is pretty bloody hard.
There's another interesting detail here: when the worker tries to fly off after stinging, she has to try really hard because the barbs hold the stinger in place, and trying hard causes two things to happen:
So when you get stung by a bee near other bees you will be in trouble. That's how you go from one sting to hundreds. And hundreds is enough to kill a human. That's why you don't go near a hive without protection. Being in or near a swarm is safer than being near a hive: the bees in a swarm don't have much (larvae, honey) to protect, so they don't attack.BTW, when I get stung, if the stinger doesn't get stuck I sometimes don't even notice till much later -- this happens when I get stung through my gloves. If the stinger does get stuck in my skin the first thing I notice is the buzzing of the bee that stung me. The frequency of the buzzing of the bee that stung me and that is trying to rip off the stinger is absolutely terrifying because I know what comes next: a dozen more bees will flock right to where the one bee stung me and will all try to sting me, and since the one bee was able to it might be the case that her sisters will succeed as well. That buzzing spreads her injury pheromones, and the frequency of its sound also acts as a very loud and clear signal to her sisters. The buzzing lasts about 1 second or less; the pain from the sting comes a second or two later. It takes her sisters about 1 to 2 seconds to find the bee that stings successfully. Getting stung by a dozen bees at once is panic inducing, and the swelling that will create will take two weeks to subside. I was stung 13 times at once one time, and 5 times another time. It's no fun.
What I noticed is that pitch of buzzing is higher when bee is attacking, not after sting. Higher pitch means probably higher frequency of wings, so bee has more velocity and it is more nimble. When I was kid visiting frequently a place with 100 hives in a summer. I started to recognize that pitch of attacking bee and learned to keep head lower, between arms. Sometimes I was chased by a bee several tens of meters. It is good to use cover of some trees or bushes. I believe bees are aroused by smell of venom itself. Sometimes, when hive is opened, bees turn their abdomen higher, towards opening showing stings. I think I saw that drops of venom forms around end of sting. Smoke particles, probably bonds to venom vapors, neutralizing its influence on other bees, because after couple smoke puffs venom smell is not noticeable any more. Also, smoke causes bees to change their process, from „intruder alert”, to „tree is burning”, and are turning on ventilation. Each summer, first sting swelled the worst, but consecutive ones were less so, so I think some tolerance develops, but it won’t last a year. The worst is being stung in fingertip, because it causes nail deformation, for some time.
It's not just ventilation. When they smell smoke they also go eat a bunch of honey so they can swarm away with the queen and start over elsewhere.
Oh for sure, they do buzz differently when they are in protec/attac mode.
Why are bee stings such a common occurance to you? Are you a beekeeper?
I am.
The bees in a swarm have filled themselves with food before swarming, so they’re stuffed, so it’s hard to flex the abdomen to make a sting
Yes, there is this too.
Great point about the queen bee. The queen also uses her stinger inside her own hive. If the hive believes she is nearing the end of her reproductive abilities, they’ll rear other queens. She has to defend her position and quickly goes to kill the new queens when they emerge or she’ll be replaced. Beekeepers generally replace their queens every 2 years or so, and have to remove the old queen to prevent this behavior as well.
> That's why you don't go near a hive without protection.
This is true and recommended for just about everyone.. however, I have known some beekeepers that can do it. If you smoke the bees well, they’ll get calm enough that they won’t sting. It’s thought to be likely because the smoke covers pheromones, and also because the smoke causes the bees to begin hoarding honey in case they need to quickly leave a burning hive.
I was never brave enough to attempt it, however during my time beekeeping I was amazed at how magical smoke was. Picking up handfuls of bees in their hive and not being swarmed feels like a super power.
> I was never brave enough to attempt it, however during my time beekeeping I was amazed at how magical smoke was. Picking up handfuls of bees in their hive and not being swarmed feels like a super power.
I'm not brave enough to attempt it either, except -maybe, someday- with a) smoke, b) a veil instead of a suit, c) nukes rather than mature hives, d) in top-bar hive bodies rather than Langstroth boxes. Fuck Langstroth boxes -- you can't help but kill bees in those boxes, and the moment you kill one you're in trouble. Top-bar hives make it much much easier to not kill any bees.
For some reason I was never afraid of bees. I have a cousin who keeps bees, and she showed me a bee hive once. Neither of use used any masks or gloves. I remember when she showed me the queen, and I was pointing at it to make sure I got it right, she told me to not touch her, because then the other bees will sense the foreign smell on her and will kill her. In any case, I was surrounded by thousands of bees, but none stang me or my cousin. There's some urban legend that bees smell you, and depending on the smell they decide to attack you or not. I suppose I drew the lucky lottery ticket.
Very interesting!
Don't wasps have a similar "swarm attack" mode that doesn't require individual wasps dying to spread pheromones? Something in the sting/venom itself?
I've been stung by wasp swarms twice, in the same area (they were protecting their nest, and please don't ask why it happened twice... we humans do indeed stumble with the same stone twice!). The wasps were very aggressive stinging near the same location in my arm, and it hurt a lot. I was stung in the same body part by the swarm, not in random locations.
No wasps were harmed during this accident.
Depends on the wasp/bee species. Not all of them swarm. Also, ants are related to wasps, and you will see similar behavior with them.
I had a friend, when I was a kid, that shot a white-faced hornet nest (not actually hornets -they are big yellowjackets -even worse) with a BB gun, from, like, 50 meters away.
The hornets figured out who shot their nest, and swarmed him. May have just been that they attacked any nearby critters, but he certainly paid for his folly.
White-faced hornets are better to have in your yard, than yellowjackets. They are a lot less aggressive, only attacking if their nest is at risk. They also eat yellowjackets, so you have hornets or yellowjackets, but not both.
Wow. Those hornets seem surprisingly clever.
I know Yellowjackets, we have them in Argentina. Their bite is said to be extremely painful but I haven't been bitten yet despite some pretty reckless behavior on my part.
One nice afternoon I was having a snack in a cafeteria, by the open window, and a bunch of yellowjackets started dipping in my drinks and my pie. Apparently they like raw meat (locals use it to drive them away from their own food) but I only had sweet stuff on my table. I got annoyed and killed a bunch of them with my bare hands, with no repercussions (killing dangerous insects with your fists or palms is surprisingly easy if you strike fast against a flat surface -- obviously I waited till they moved away from my stuff).
I was later told this was a terrible idea because their bite is very painful (see above: I'm not the smartest about bugs and have been bitten more than once due to recklessness!).
White-faced hornets[0] are a lot more painful than yellowjackets[1] (they are about twice as big, but pretty much the same configuration).
I don't think yellowjackets will swarm, if a forager gets killed. Don't step on one of their nests, though (they dig holes). Also have a friend who did that, once. Also, if you get close to one of their nests (hard to see), they might swarm you.
The biggest difference, is that yellowjackets are much more aggressive foragers, so it's easy to piss off individuals. I had [yet another] friend that imbibed one that went into his can of soda. He tells me the experience left his lip swollen like a cartoon, for several days.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolichovespula_maculata
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowjacket
We have yellow jackets in the SE US. They are as persistent as they are aggressive. The "yellow jacket in the Coke can" is almost a cliche it happens so often. I once ran over a nest with a lawn mower at my family's lake house. I don't specifically remember being suddenly covered in stinging yellow jackets (I was), but I do remember vividly that was the fastest I'd swum across the lake.
Neither bees nor wasps will swarm if far from their nests mainly because there won't be many as they forage in a solitary manner.
But when hornets attack as a group, then they swarm, and they use their pheromones to aid in swarming. See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onq9ixC7OEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D00mEROqKwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx2EA_ooCf0
where beekeepers use sticky sheets to get one hornet and then all the other hornets will join the one because they are all attracted to its aid by its pheromones.
Wasps absolutely have attack pheromones, and they absolutely spread those when they get injured (in the same way that bees do when they're injured) and when they attack (but here they might be able to do it "consciously"?).
What's nice about wasp stings is that because the stinger with the venom pouch and pump doesn't get stuck in your skin you get a much smaller dose than with a bee sting.
When I've been stung by bees where the stinger didn't get stuck in my skin the sting was no big deal. When the stinger gets stuck in my skin it's much worse.
Wasp bites are a lot more painful than mosquito bites.
Mosquito bites are not painful at all to me.
I've been stung by a bee only once, and it wasn't particularly painful (but not nothing, of course).
As I mentioned above, I've been stung by swarms of wasps twice and it was very painful.
I hear yellowjacket stings are extremely painful, but even though I've been near them I've never been stung... fortunately.
>Mosquito bites are not painful at all to me.
interesting. I had a friend who was like that. once he invited me to a jazz concert near a river in the city where we both lived. river = mosquitoes. it was around 7 to 8 p.m. there was a shitload of mosquitoes around, and they were biting me and other people like mad, but he seemed completely unaffected. I asked him, aren't you being troubled by them? he said no.
I had had enough, and ran away from both the concert and those mosquitoes.
I have been stung by wasps a few times, and it is a lot more painful than a mosquito bite.
yellowjacket seems to be an American term. I had to look it up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowjacket
Don't get me wrong, I hate mosquitoes and don't like being stung (both because of dengue fever risks in the case of aedes, and because it itches a lot afterwards), but I never find their bite painful. I suppose it depends on the kind of mosquito? I do know -- cause I've been bitten -- that horseflies hurt like hell, because their mouth parts have evolved to pierce cattle skin!
"Yellowjacket" is the translation I found for a kind of wasp we have in Argentina's Patagonia, where we call them "chaquetas" (Spanish for jackets). I think they might be imports and not native though, but now they are very frequent in our region.
>The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens
I think this is one of the more interesting differences. Plenty of species operate in groups. But its usually a dominant male with a harem. Bees and the like are unusual in that it's a dominant female.
I think it's related to the ease of reproduction. The females put relatively little into their off spring compared to a lion or even birds. It lets them to be essentially autonomous in reproduction which allows them to create offspring that are more like limbs.
There's 13 000 species of ants and 6000 species of mammals, not to count all the other insects.
We are the unusual ones.
BTW there are mammals that live in insect-like groups - for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat#Roles
There are bees that are monogamous, where the female and the male act a lot more like birds as far as mating and young rearing goes, and there are eusocial bees that where the female absolutely dominates.
Honeybees keep very few males (drones) around, and in the Fall they push them out of the hive and let them die of exposure to the elements. Honeybee workers work themselves to death. The queen is their slave. It's a pretty crappy life, but they make wonderful honey, and they collect wonderful propolis.
From what I can tell, the entire hive is “the” organism, and individual bees are like cells in the body. There was an episode of Cosmos, where Neil deGrasse Tyson described bees as the other of two major intelligences on Earth, and suggested their structure as a model for alien visitors[0].
If we judged ourselves by the cells in our body, we’d probably conclude that humans aren’t “happy.”
White blood cells basically run suicide missions against intruders, so they are sort of like swarming worker bees.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ubE9hjrsHmI
> It's a pretty crappy life
By human standards, sure.
Weird take I know, but since only one female bee in the hive passes along her genes (which are shared with the other bees), it's a very different incentive structure.
Nice, another beek!
I have had a hive where I had queens that lived quite fine together. Weirdest hive as one of them was a caucasia and the other a cordovan. Never did get stung with those ladies.
Mine was by accident, but I hear that some beeks do it since cannot get the genetic combination, they just do it as a mechanical combo, to get preferred traits. Like buckfast and russian to help with swarming and defensiveness.
I've heard of queens co-existing, yeah, but that must be very rare. I wonder if somehow they either smell close enough to the same that they and the workers don't notice, or if they are sufficiently different that they don't recognize their smells as those of other queens.
This maybe points to another theory (which may be entirely wrong, I'm just guessing!): honeybees die because they aren't supposed to attack each other. Like they can't be aggressively selfish because they'll just die in the process.
Honeybees do attack other colonies' honeybees. Africanized honeybees definitely do it. As someone else points out the barbs don't get stuck in insects, but do get stuck in mammals (and presumably birds too?).
Checked them. Found:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee
> Africanized honey bees are typically much more defensive, react to disturbances faster, and chase people further (400 metres (1,300 ft)) than other varieties of honey bees.
My bees will chase me about 200 yards, and probably more if I had to go further to go inside a building (they don't like dark places). They lay ambushes, too. They'll wait outside the building I go into and will attack again if I go out.
Well, they used to anyways. Since switching to top-bar hive bodies they're much nicer.
The queen bee is a formidable final boss with a bad-ass origin story.
She's also her daughters' slave. They make her work (lay eggs). They decide when to make new queens. They decide when to swarm with the old queen, and when they do they put her on a diet first so she can lose weight so she can fly (they won't let her eat much for two weeks), and they'll push her out of the hive when the time comes.
Humans only really get stung by queen honeybees when manipulating them. Normally the queen will be inside the hive and stay inside the hive except once or twice early in her life when she goes out to mate.
Why does she go out to mate? Aren't the drones in the hive?
The drones in the hive are her brothers. She needs more gentic diversity, so she goes out to mate with other colonies' drones. Her attendants know where to go find them because they've scouted them before.
The drones are also clones (?) of the prior queen. They are unfertilized eggs, so they contain a genetic copy of half the queen's DNA. Mating with a drone from you hive would be like mating directly with your genetic mother. It's going to result in real bad inbreeding real quickly. Especially since queens mate a single time, and live for only a few years.
They're like half-clones, yeah. Queens can mate more than once though, but usually just once, and if more than once just twice. A well-mated queen will have sperm from a dozen different drones.
Ahh, thank you, I thought she mated with her own drones and was wondering how they got any genetic diversity like that.
I think two answers, though as per TFA there's probably a lot more behind this:
First, she wants to get the best genetic material, and flying high is one of those tests for drones to pass, and
Second, needs to acquire genetic material from different bloodlines, hence does the business with several drones (obviously not an option within the hive).
Maybe for the same reason we don't marry our cousins? :)
it's a Game of Drones
Do you Lisp?
> so if she's going to survive at all her stinger has to not have barbs. The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens that are about to hatch or have hatched already
But in this particular case the queen is no different from worker bees, right? They wouldn't die either from stinging other bees...
My understanding is that the barbs in the stingers don't get stuck in insects, but I don't know if that's a fact. At any rate the queen is sometimes irreplaceable, so she needs every survival advantage possible.
Does TFA stand for "the f...ine article"?
And/or the fine author.
the featured article
It becomes like pearl harbour
Useful reminder nature is terrifying even at its smallest. I'm a little surprised this wasn't taught to me in school.
Yeah: caterpillar parasites
While a bee stinger may get stuck in you, that's not so when stinging fellow insects.
The barbs don't catch on an exoskeleton like they do for thick and elastic mammalian skin.
An elegant way to deliver more venom to larger targets.
Wow that's super interesting! What a novel mechanism.
If you're careful with the index fingers of opposite hands, you can remove the stinger from your skin without killing the bee.
I don't think I've ever been stung in such a convenient position as to allow that.
as opposed to index fingers of the same hand..
Not the same hand, he's talking about two hands on the same side
There’s only one frood who could pull off that extraction.
but I need my second left hand to film for Insta! :-P
Not really. The bee that stings you will flap her wings very vigorously, and it will rip its stinger off in less than a second trying to get away from you. Unless you're deliberately trying to get stung and save her, you won't have a chance.
Depends on the colony. The bees that have stung me have always taken 5 or 10 seconds to start trying to dismantle themselves in earnest, which (depending on location) is usually enough time to rescue them. (I'm not sure whether they survive my rescue, but at the very least they can fly away, and their stingers don't remain in my skin.)
Nature’s design is often elegant. But also (sometimes) cruel.
Yeah, I was hoping the article would mention this, but no dice. :(
A fascinating read about such things is "The Red Queen" by Ridley.
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...
It's all about the propagation of the genes, not the survival of the organism.
Read this in my early 20s and loved it. Many ideas that have stuck with me. Hoping to reread it with my wife soon, nearly 20 years later, and see how it aged.
I don't understand why any "why" question in evolutionary biology is ever satisfied with a "survival of the fittest" truism. Any evolutionary explanation you give me is also falsified by the existence of another species with a different/opposite trait. Whatever explanation you give for a bee's barbed stinger is falsified by the wasp's non-barbed one. Also doesn't answer other questions, such as why didn't bees evolve a type of barbed stinger that doesn't rip their guts out and kill them? Or why do they even need a stinger at all, as many insects don't have one?
Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion. Why do species survive? Because they were the fittest, because they survived. But why?
Wasps and bees have different ecological constraints with different risks involved. There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive.
Evolution doesn’t have any goals or agenda. That’s why whales still have vestigial hip bones despite having no hips whatsoever. Because it’s not a significant parameter in their survival. Same with barbed stingers of bees.
I think this is a perfect example of what your parent comment is talking about, being:
> unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion.
You said:
> There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive.
Sure, there's no contradiction, but this is totally circular reasoning that could be used to prove anything.
The connection graph between "They survive because they're the fittest" and "They must be the fittest because they survive" is just a circle disconnected from all other knowledge.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.[0]
But with this circular understanding of natural selection, you could be given a description of absolutely any conceivable configuration of organism and your response would be the same: "they must be the fittest, because they survive, because only the fittest survive" and you haven't gained any understanding at all.
There will never be a contradiction, because the argument is disconnected from any larger system of reasoning that could plausibly contradict it.
"Hey, there is a random monkey in the Amazon that has 3 hoops on its head and a big hole through its abdomen, isn't that weird? Why are they like that?"
"Ah, the hoops and the holes are required for Fitness. Only the Fittest survive, you know. So if they have 3 hoops on their heads and big holes in their abdomens, that is what makes them Fittest. Amen."
"Why aren't other monkeys like that then?"
"Other monkeys don't need hoops and holes for Fitness. Otherwise they too would have hoops and holes. :)"
A better understanding of natural selection would be confused about the hoops and the holes, and that confusion would correlate with either the random monkey species actually not existing, or the model being wrong.
As regards the bees: there probably is a reason that dying when stinging confers Fitness. But we should find out what that reason is, rather than state "Fitness because Survival" and feel like we've answered the question.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-stren...
My understanding from the article and the general theory of Superorganisms is that it’s not exactly true that “dying when stinging confers fitness”. Rather, dying when stinging is just not a huge penalty when you’re talking about non-reproducing members of a colony. So, while it may be a good thing for bees to evolve the ability to survive stinging, the selective pressure is not as large as one might intuitively expect.
Maybe a better title for the post would be something like, “Isn’t it weird that bees die when they sting? Shouldn’t they have evolved away from that?”
This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting.
I'm not at all sure this is true - I don't know the evolutionary history of bees, but it seems unlikely that some kind of solitary proto-bees would have died after a sting. And even if this were true, we should still wonder why that proto-bee evolved to have this suicide stinger in the first place.
"It's not a big disadvantage to survival" can't be the explanation for a trait, unless that trait is a remnant from an ancestor where it brought an advantage (like the hip bones in whales - hip bones are obviously useful in land-based mammals, and whales are descendants of those).
Sp the question is: why did some organism ever evolve a stinger that kills it, how was that ever something that made some organism survive better than its brethren that didn't have this trait?
> This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting.
I don't see how you arrived at this conclusion, this logic seems to be flawed.
Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it.
Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are.
Not everything is optimal in the extreme. For all we know there have been many, many bees without barbs, but the bar to pass that on as an advantage is very high. The odds of a bee reproducing aren't even that high to begin with.
> Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it.
If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in some individual bees, but many other bees didn't have them, like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then I'd agree.
But a trait can't be universal in a species, and even in many related species, unless there is explicit selective pressure for that trait, or if it's a remnant from a common ancestor that had it. Your high cholesterol predisposition example is actually perfect, it shows what happens with traits that don't have significant pressure for or against them: they remain confined to a subset of the population.
> Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are.
They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the organism still viable is extremely low.
> If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in some individual bees, but many other bees didn't have them, like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then I'd agree.
What makes you believe they are not a "variation" in individual bees? Colony genetics are fascinating and can facilitate some pretty extreme variation.
Could a single queen's mutation be responsible for all barbs? You have some hidden constraints here that I don't think we agree on.
> They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the organism still viable is extremely low.
This is simply wrong. There are always plenty of potential mutations that cripple viability, sure. But pleiotropy in general is relatively common. In some species more than others.
Your reasoning here is heavily flawed. You firmly believe evolution and genetics work in a particular way that simply does not reflect reality. You are putting your belief in "survival of the fittest" first. I encourage you to broaden your horizons.
This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms
I don’t know where you got that. It seems perfectly plausible that the stingers evolved in the superorganism, and that the selective pressure was something like “drones protect the hive via stingers which kill them” versus “drones can’t sting at all”.
This is a different argument, one which I can agree with. I was specifically saying that the argument for how a species acquired a universal trait can't be "because it didn't hurt their fitness that much", you have to have positive pressure for a trait to spread to the entire species (or it must be a trait left over from an ancestor where it had these pressures).
> "It's not a big disadvantage to survival" can't be the explanation for a trait
Why not? Honest question.
Intuitively, I'd say that there are plenty of traits that propagate as long as they aren't expensive in terms of genetic survival. It's the nature of random genetic mutation, random traits will develop and some of them won't really affect survival and may propagate.
Yes, traits can propagate even if there is no selective pressure for them. But they won't reach 100% of the species, even less so 100% of several geographically separated species (such as African and European bees) just because they aren't that bad. Could we contrive a story where it could be possible something like this does happen? Sure, but it would be very unlikely (basically, it would require only a small population that happened to have this minor handicap to have randomly survived some mass extinction event that killed off the entirety of the rest of the species).
IIRC genetic drift can reach 100%.
Well, there's a larger problem in the post. The primary reason that a bee dies when it stings you is that you kill the bee. A bee stinging an inanimate hunk of meat is unlikely to die.
But they can die, and yeah, a big part of the reason why is that dying isn't as large of a cost for bees as you might expect from a human perspective.
And looping back, another part is that given the very high risk of being intentionally killed when stinging an enemy who you want to sting, improving the much smaller rate of accidental death isn't really worth much. But even though it isn't worth much, it's worth something, and work has been done on the project.
Per everything I've ever read on this, a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive. It will either try to pull itself out and disembowel itself, or it will remain stack and die of hunger. What makes you think a bee that stings, say, a dog that can't swat it will then go on to survive?
Watching a youtube video by a beekeeper demonstrating that a bee stuck in his arm will gently wiggle itself around until it can pull free and fly away. Between that one guy with his live demonstration and his plentiful experience being stung by bees, and you with everything you've ever read, I'm obviously going to stick with him.
You should read better sources.
Here, an example of how bees behave after stinging meat: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7wH8dYiGbig
Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo
A bee that stings meat will pull itself out unharmed, if you let it.
Here is an example of a bee disemboweling itself:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/u9YDf9w6Ps8
Here is another one:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fMxZ4vKmOZo
So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written?
For example, this article interviews two bee scientists that confirm that the majority of honeybees die via self-disembowelment after stinging a human:
https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-die-after-stinging
However, they mention an interesting other thing, that may actually help explain what happens much better: bees don't die when they sting other insects or spiders, they only die when their needles get stuck in our thick skin. So perhaps the most likely explanation for the evolution and survival of the barbed stinger trait is that it's beneficial when bees fight their common enemies, and that bees simply don't interact that much with mammals and their thick skins.
I'm not sure why this answer is buried down so deep. It should be pretty obvious.
The average bee has no reason to ever fight a mammal. Optimizing for a rare event like that makes no sense. It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has become a frequent occurrence.
Surviving attacks against humans that help you survive is a really strange priority.
To be fair, many forest mammals will try to eat honey (bears and honey badgers being just two well known examples) and those have skins much thicker than even ours, so I suspect that bees have the same issues when stinging them. And those mammals are much more of a threat to a hive than insects and spiders, as they will virtually destroy the entire hive structure if they are not deterred, and likely kill thousands of larvae and bees.
> It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has become a frequent occurrence.
This can't possibly be true; the honeyguides are a family of birds whose evolved behavior is to find humans and lead them to wild beehives so that the humans can forage the honey (and the honeyguide can forage the leftovers).
> So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written?
No? You claimed that bees stinging meat cannot survive. Your anecdotes do nothing to support that. Decide what you want to say, then look for support. Where do you get the idea that two examples of something happening provide just as much support for the idea that it always happens as four examples of it not happening do for the idea that it doesn't always happen?
But for what it's worth, Aristotle wrote in the 4th century BC that bees stinging humans often recover, but that they will inevitably die if they lose their stinger.
Not at all my experience. My Italian bees are pretty hot though, so that may be why. My Russian bees are much nicer, and I've never been even stung by one of them, so maybe that's it. My hot bees will rip their stinger out within a second, and they emit a very particular frequency that I feel and that lets me know very quickly that I'm in trouble -- to be fair I've only experienced that vibration a handful of times because I've gotten much better at not leaving any exposed skin or any way for them to get in my suit.
All those bee rescue videos you see where the beekeeper doesn't wear a veil are not telling you the whole story. Before they go work on extracting the hive they'll first check that those bees are not hot and angry. If those bees are africanized then they'll use a suit and smoke and they will not bother making or posting a video about it. I.e., those videos are all cherry-picked experiences, all the good ones.
Does any of that support the idea that "a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive"?
This is clearly false. Why repeat it?
The ones that manage to leave the stinger in never survive in my case. Idk what to tell you. That's just my experience. Can they survive? Yes, they can. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? No, I don't think so.
All of evolution is path dependent.
Dying after a sting does not have to confer extra fitness to exist, right now. rather it had to have conferred some fitness relative to the alternative traits circulating at the time it was selected. obviously if you go by gradient descent you are not guaranteed to reach a global minimum or even a local one, given a constantly changing fitness landscape.
In most of these discussions, optimizing nature of evolution is taken as granted - we do not need to prove how evolution works yet again - there are plenty of evidence and discussion elsewhere - take it or leave it.
This node is well connected to other knowledge, and if you disagree, you need to convince a whole discipline of science, not me.
From the optimizing premise of evolution, various inferred hypotheses can be made, explaining a range of phenomena, just like, in physics, from the premise that probabilities of events are given by the amplitudes of solutions of certain pdes with specific initial conditions, we were able to devise tractable mathematical models of various nuclear reactions, here a model of development of certain abstract traits was explained (“altruism”).
The author fully acknowledged that this is a simplified model and does not match reality in some cases, and in other cases does not explain well enough. improvements to the model were proposed.
Isn’t that how science works, in the best cases?
> totally circular reasoning that could be used to prove anything.
No, you can attack the reasoning by looking into actual costs. It seems like it can explain anything because we don’t constantly see examples where it’s false.
Looking at the costs to bees you see what percentage of them die from attacking mammal flesh and yep it’s a tiny rounding error.
Hypothetically, in a world without constraints mice could have a 100 foot long teeth, but we don’t live in a world without constraints.
> Hypothetically, in a world without constraints mice could have a 100 foot long teeth
Oh boy, today's the day you learn something new about rodents.
What, the fact that their teeth can grow so long that they'll circle around and stab their brains?
It's only circular reasoning if you ignore the mathematical model of evolution. Evolution is simply that your chances of picking a red ball from a jar increases proportionally to the number of red balls in the jar.
What you're saying is that "but why did you pick that specific ball, what were the factors at play?". I say "probability", and you call it circular reasoning. You expect me to explain the physical forces at play that pushed forward a specific ball on the top when you filled the jar, and made it collide with your fingers, and your brain's reasoning chain to pick the first ball that you touched, so you pick that one.
But, basically, you can't. It's impossible because 1) we can't time travel. 2) we can't stop the universe and examine all of its properties. We work with the mathematical model we have and expect everything to work aligned with it. "Why do certain monkey species have holes in their bellies?". You can reason about that question, you can even come up with some answers, but it would be impossible to prove due to our universe's observability constraints.
But the mathematical model works, it even works beyond our physical realm (e.g. it works to solve mathematical problems). And no, it will never explain why certain monkeys have holes in their bellies. That's an entirely different domain of causal analysis.
"Fittest" is what we call those who happen to survive in their context. Systems that successfully replicate themselves in their context tend to stick around. Those who can't, go extinct. We obviously still study why they survived. That's what the article speculates about. So yes, in a sense, any organisms you see is the "fittest" in the sense that it was able to survive (replicate) in its context while countless others were not.
How is it circular to argue why one species would do better in an environment than another based on phenotype and the physical interactions it enables? It’s all relative to other species. As long as you understand that, there is no logical fallacy. I do very much appreciate the focus on informal logic though.
Because you could encounter absolutely any organism and make the same argument. There is no configuration of organism that would cause you to say "huh, I guess Survival doesn't depend on Fitness after all!"
Because it takes the observation of Survival and uses it to infer Fitness, at the same time as saying that Fitness confers Survival.
>Because you could encounter absolutely any organism and make the same argument.
That's a function of the explanation being an extremely good explanation. It rises to the top precisely because it has explanatory power all across nature without evident counter-example.
>There is no configuration of organism that would cause you to say "huh, I guess Survival doesn't depend on Fitness after all!"
This is where the argument falls apart. For starters, species go extinct all the time for reasons tied to their evolutionary trajectory. And there are species still living that unfortunately seem very imperfectly adapted to their constraints and likely to go extinct without a run of good luck or human intervention (e.g. pandas). We seem perfectly capable of recognizing when such species are "on the ropes". Additionally there are relative advantages we can clearly observe from animals in overlapping niches, and we can marvel at the effectiveness of adaptations in ways that don't involve circular assumptions (e.g. algae's capability for efficient growth is astonishing and without equal on the planet).
And, we could surely conceive of preposterous examples that defy expectations (e.g. the other commenter's example of mice with 100ft teeth).
It probably feels like it proves too much, because it's confirmed over and over again in nature everywhere, at all times. But in an alternate world where that wasn't the case, counter-examples would abound (such as the mouse with 100ft teeth). So re-iterating the core lesson about the role of natural selection is not just a circular assumption, it's the culmination of hard earned, accumulated evidence, ready at any moment to be falsified.
The honeybee is a perfect example, because the stinger does pose a real question about how we understand it's relation to fitness, and it requires delving into all kinds of complicated dynamics about genetically related drones are to the queen, the role of the sacrifice in supporting the hive and so-on. If we didn't have explanations like those, it would indeed pose a problem with explanations that presume fitness.
That's a real payoff from being alert to the need to have robust explanations; I don't think anyone is just saying "well it's fitness" and calling it a day so much as they're honoring the explanatory power of a well confirmed theory.
> It probably feels like it proves too much, because it's confirmed over and over again in nature everywhere, at all times.
No, logically it is proved true because it is assumed to be true and then used to prove itself.
> For starters, species go extinct all the time for reasons tied to their evolutionary trajectory.
Again, this is circular logic. You assumed that the only reason that species go extinct is because it wasn’t fit enough. If you assume survival of the fittest then of course it is true.
Here’s another circular explanation: things are the way they are because God created it that way. This explanation rises to the top precisely because it has explanatory power all across nature without evident counter-example, right?
>Again, this is circular logic. You assumed that the only reason that species go extinct is because it wasn’t fit enough.
Again, I gave numerous examples, and you ignored mostly all of them.
Just to develop the point about extinctions a bit further. We know for instance of birds that had no natural fear of predators on the Galapagos Islands that upon human contact were driven to extinction or near extinction, and we don't need any circular assumptions to tie their fitness to their extinction.
And that's not to mention the rest of the examples I listed that you ignored, such as cases where we can observe that currently living species are doing well or poorly, like algae and pandas respectively, all of which hinge on knowledge of specific biological mechanisms.
So I don't know why you keep asserting that it's an assumption.
Actually your example of creationist species isn’t circular at all, it just has no predictive power. Unless you want to say that God really likes beetles, I suppose.
In the end evolution is random, but exerts some pressure towards fitness in some environments. Some traits are legacy or are just plain random; just because an organism has a trait does not mean it is useful now, or indeed has ever been useful for fitness. The whole package must be reasonably fit for some environment, but that doesn’t mean all the traits improve fitness.
This whole line of argument from the parent comment and its ancestor seems to ignore we can see where certain evolutionary features reach local minima, like the retina of the human eye. It’s obviously not the fittest thing wrt the octopus retina, but does well enough you can read this.
no, "god created it this way" does not answer for extinctions. if god created it that way, the species would not be extinct.
the part i think youre missing is that "survival of the fitness" is shown elsewhere, and used as a tool here to identify what the fitness is, and how and when certain traits were beneficial.
the case you are descibing is that all applicatioms of science(well, of anything) are circular reasoning. if you use newton's mechanics to predict motion of a mass undergoing acceleration, its circular because your result is proof of newtons mechanics, and newtons mechanics is proof of your result.
its just an "if and only if" relationship. that's not circular reasoning.
You’re assuming God didn’t get tired of having the species around so He decided to do some exterior redecorating in His great wisdom.
Also you don’t understand physics, the proof is that you can make predictions and then verify the results.
Translating the word Fitness from a term of art makes this very clear: if you said "good enough to survive", no one would question the statement "I wonder why they survive. Guess they must be 'good enough to survive'".
> The connection graph between "They survive because they're the fittest" and "They must be the fittest because they survive" is just a circle disconnected from all other knowledge.
The GP said that bees survived because they're "fit enough" not that they survive because they're "the fittest" and there are definitely species that don't seem to be surviving because they're not fit enough.
This assumes that Fitness is a meaningless aphorism. I would posit that Fitness is a meaningful concept that can be learned. It is defined by what happens to be reproductively helpful to a species, which is tautological, but to understand the definition, it just means you need to understand that particular species ecosystem and lifecycle.
If you really analyze any word, it loses all meaning except what we've assigned it.
Love this comment. It highlights a major misunderstanding of biology that many people who didn't study it in depth have: that every, or most features of living beings do not have an "evolutionary explanation." T-rex arms aren't short so they can open flowers - they just happen to be small because that's the type of creature that happened to survive after a lot of changes.
Maybe this explains why humans are snoring? It just wasn't / isn't evolutionary important.
Well, the explanation I heard is that snoring provided protection during sleeping to scare away predators. I don't know the source for this theory, so take it with a grain of salt :)
I heard that too, but it doesn't sound likely. If I was sleeping and there was a predator passing by, I would prefer it didn't notice me... :)
The fact that heavier (and thus more attractive as prey) people are more likely to snore could give credibility to your explanation.
Most likely, yes, like the loudness of baby crying. Humans are pack animals so any predator attracted by snoring or baby cry, and deciding to check it out would be in a very very big trouble.
>many people who didn't study it in depth have
Or are incapable of studying/reflecting in depth.
> Why do species survive? Because they did, and because the objective of life is to survive. But why?
In evolutionary biology, that definitionally is the ultimate answer. One species survived, another didn’t. Sometimes that’s because the adaptation helped them outcompete, sometimes it’s because they were already competitive and this preexisting disadvantage from an earlier round didn’t hurt enough to matter. We can try to find intuitive explanations past that which feel satisfying but it’s always going to be a rough approximation.
Let’s use chess as an analogy. Allow an engine to analyze a position and tell us the best path forward. But why did it choose that line? We can (and do) come up with explanations that help us fit a move into our understanding of the game: moving this pawn allows that knight to occupy a better spot where it can exert its influence on the rest of the board, or whatever. But that’s merely a convenient simplification for our gut understanding. It’s not really the actual answer. The ultimate “why” is “because it produces the best possible eventual outcome no matter the response”.
The "why" questions people ask about evolutionary biology are the carry over of theology into the understanding of evolution. People still need to believe there is a fundamental reason the world is the way it is. A similar theological carry over is the belief that we are better suited to the environment we evolved in. This is akin to "golden age" thinking, that the world today is somehow not right and if we return to the origin things will be better.
At a fundamental level causality doesn't even really make sense in evolutionary biology. You can ask the question "what benefits do this feature provide", but you can never really say that's why they evolved. In the end you have the traits you do because, at point in the species development, they didn't make you die faster and some helped you survive better, but it's not really possible to disentangle these.
Likewise people don't really understand that in evolutionary processes both the species and the environment are constantly changing. The notion that a species is "adapted for a particular environment" is somewhat nonsensical because "the environment" is never really fixed.
> The notion that a species is "adapted for a particular environment" is somewhat nonsensical because "the environment" is never really fixed.
Mever considered this. Good stuff
Here's an explanation of how this works:
All creatures are very complicated. Thus reproduction doesn't produce perfect clones, "mutations" take place. This is largely because there are so many different ways to derive one individual out of two individuals' complex genitic material. This is all a feature. This is why individuals have unique characteristics. Think about how different humans are from each other, even though we're all humans. This same thing applies to all creatures. Every individual is different. Those who have "disabilities" (disadvantages in their context) are less likely to survive. So those with advantageous traits survive and pass their traits on through reproduction, making those specific traits more prevalent.
The answer to "why didn't x evolve to do y?" is usually just that that specific mutation might have never occurred or caught on randomly. This is also why different species do different things differently. It's all random mutations. Some were beneficial in their context and environment so those who had them were more likely to survive and pass those traits along.
It's not that "the objective of life is to survive" in a spiritual sense, it's that life randomly happens and some of it survives and it makes more life like itself. In some ways, I suppose the purpose of life is to create more life. Systems that replicate themselves successfully survive. We call these "life". It's really a linguistics thing.
Hope some of this makes sense. I enjoyed thinking about this.
If your answer is "it's a random mutation" then that settles the "why" question permanently. Why all this idle speculation about bee's stingers, then? It was a random mutation, and it survived, done.
It was random, and it survived.
Every single part of an organism goes through a recombination/mutation process countless times, the stinger evolved to be what it is today over a very long time and it's cool to study why it ended up the way it did. Tells us about their environment and history and evolutionary pressures, survival is a result of the random traits being successful in their context in specific ways.
Still doesn’t explain why other species in the same context survived without it or with an opposite trait.
Why shouldn't different or even "opposite" traits also be successful? When faced with random inheritable differences across different species over long periods of time why wouldn't the result be a variety of them, every one of which just didn't prevent reproduction from passing those traits on to the next generation? Some traits might be seen as "better" or "worse" by comparison but as long as they get passed on, we'll see both. It isn't about being "best". It's about being "good enough"
Because the trait is not the end all be all. It's a random walk to an outcome that leads to enough offspring to survive for the species to be there at all. It's probably not even the most optimal solution whatever is there, just happens to be competitive among the rest of the ecology to not be snuffed out.
You might be interested in this concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape
Sure? Doesn’t mean the species-specific examination isn’t interesting.
> Any evolutionary explanation you give me is also falsified by the existence of another species with a different/opposite trait. Whatever explanation you give for a bee's barbed stinger is falsified by the wasp's non-barbed one.
The explanation in the article does not reduce to a "survival of the fittest" truism and is not falsified by this example. The article explains at great length why that is, specifically referring to that example.
I had a very similar feeling until I took a course with one of the leading researchers in the field of protein folding. Two things that he repeatedly mentioned stuck with me a lot:
Evolution is not the survival of the fittest but the not-dying of the unfit. That explains why we have so many different species in the same ecological niche. The example he used was different types of grass on the same field. All of those were fit enough to not die.
The second thing he always repeated was that biology only observes what does or at some point did work. That leads to a huge confirmation bias that research needs to be aware of. Two species might be very similar but just across different sides of the boundary of survival.
I think you misunderstood what people mean by "why" in the context of evolution.
For example, you ask a random person what his job is.
He: I fix TVs
You: Why?
He: Uh, that's what keeps a roof over me and keeps my family fed?
You: But clearly other humans do other jobs and still have roofs. So it's not a real "why". Your statement is falsified.
> Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion
How DNA works at molecular level is science. How creators became what they are now is history. History usually doesn't have the same level of falsifiability as science does.
I think your example is perfect. What he gave you is not a complete answer to why, because, as you say, he might have been doing a number of other jobs. So why roofs specifically? Add the description of how he inherited his father’s carpenter business but whenever he visited clients, they all had leaky roof, yadayada, and that he now feels happy enough to not look for any further changes, and you get the kind of answer OP is looking for.
* creators -> creatures
This typo somehow fits the theme in a discussion over evolution ;P
I can't believe no one has mentioned, this is exactly the teleological fallacy.
I was once very curious about evolutionary science until I realised exactly what you said. It's everywhere. Once you see it you can't unsee it.
If you're going to go that route, at least have the sense to use the word "how", not, "why" and never "because". There's nothing causal in evolution.
Imagine taking your favorite fractal <formula here> and picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Would you be better satisfied by <formula> or by specific step by step calculations that lead to that neighborhood?
Either way, now imagine taking not your favorite, irregular, non-describable, non-computable, enormously complex processes-driven fractal that is the real nature, then picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Now ask yourself the same question and what comes to mind.
More short analogy would be that biology is physics with all elementary particles being different.
This is an interesting analogy, thanks.
But, doesn't this match the parent comment's point? If someone asks why a particular point and not, a nearby point is on the fractal, the reply is just that complicated program generated this number and not another number. It leads to the theme of incompressibility (is there a program of smaller length which can correctly check whether a point in a given region is on the fractal). Sometimes, programs are incompressible, and at other times there is a local explanation.
So, people writing on this topic should be careful to make this distinction and check if their local explanation (which is a 'compression' of the evolution process) actually classifies points into fit/unfit regions with the assumption that the points are in some common region(shared features in the environment).
Compare also with explanations of historical events(list of causes for a victory but with the same causes present, there is failure in another context) and atheist - religious debates on God's grace for a particular prayer and allowing the suffering of others. If a local explanation can't distinguish events, then the global explanation has to be validated by something else.
This analogy doesn’t really answer it, it only shows that there’s no generic answer. So “fittest” basically means “the result”. It’s a definition, not explanation. But it is used instead of “the result” because we have some insights into how it was calculated, and we know that the nature simply creates {mi,bi,tri}llions of variants and then some minuscle amount has better chances to pass and mix these genes, outplaying others in this game. That’s where fittest comes from. Any attempt to explain it fully meets with a local complexity, in which only high-level questions can be answered in the same limited high-level manner. So there is some compressibility, but it’s clearly jpeg. Cause if a whole planet of distinct particles would strictly follow some rule to compress the observations into, it would be a rule of physics, not biology. E.g. why do animals fall to the ground? Due to gravity, here’s <formula>, works for all particles.
Sure, you won't get exact predictions on which genetic codes are realized. Similar to how statistical physics doesn't predict microstates, but the macro picture is understood. Even that might be too ambitious for complicated systems, but you can still have sensible predictions from evolution theory which looks at a landscape and says that there will be animals with tall necks and predators with very fast speeds even if you didn't know beforehand about giraffes and cheetahs.
In the fractal analogy, the compressed theory does not predict that exactly this point does/does-not lie on the fractal, but predicting whether a small disc around the point intersects the fractal.
I have a personal theory that genetics and survival just need to be good enough. They may find other local maxima and improve things. But they don't need to be perfect in every dimension. There is room for stuff that doesn't make sense to human logic. In addition because species don't generally breed with other species you need to find those optimisations through chance within a species. And genes are not a feature list. Turn one gene on and something else may turn off. There are trade off too.
What kind of explanations are you looking for? Your idea is that there should be some sort of common explanations of why.
I guess because these are theories and best guess based on the evidence. There are many unknowns but that doesn't mean we should disregard what we know.
If someone simply asked what are the advantages of bees barbed stingers over wasps non barbed ones, that would be an interesting question. But if someone asks “why” and then proceeds to give a circular logic explanation (it survived because it is fit because it survived) that is unprovable, I find that to be silly idle speculation.
I believe you’d have to look at the evolutionary advantage of bees with barbed stingers vs bees without barbed stingers and how one made that particular group of bees more successful than the other.
Why did the spaghetti monster give bee srings barbs?
Because the bees prayed for protection and got saucy about it.
Is that better? Are you really looking for equivalence? Is that fit enough?
Instead of spreading evolution FUD, there are many0laces you could educate yourself. S9meone with a HN acvount is more than able to seek these out. Therefore your motives for this comment seen more disingenuous.
The main problem I see with how some popular science journalists approach evolutionary biology is that they always think from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to the group.
Evolution isn’t a perfect engineer
Love how the top comment is "I don't see how evolution explains everything in biology". Classic HN.
women go to the bathroom together because if you squat to pee in the tall grass of the savannah you need somebody to lookout for predators
Survival of the fittest is the flawed quote, usually used by those with supremacist conceptual frameworks (that there can be an objective “better”, etc). This shows up a lot in fiction, where the quote is used as justification for cruelty, atrocities, and the like.
IMHO, the much better quote is:
> It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
See https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about-darwin/six-thin...
It is not only the best adapted class that survives, aka the "fittest." They only need to be good enough to survive and reproduce. In other words, the principle should be stated as "survival of the good enough." I know it doesn't roll off the tongue as well, but is more accurate.
Perhaps, survival of the fit. (period)
I'm very tickled by the lack of attention to detail here. The article does present that quote, yes, but it's preceded by the sentence:
"None of the fake soundbites is more insidious than the first:"
i.e. it's a fake quote
> It is the one that is most adaptable to change
That is what fit means.
Because Melissa pissed off Zeus.[1]
[1] https://crawliomics.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/zeus-the-honeyb...
As I've been listening to Mythos recently, I must point out that it is also because Zeus cursed the Bee
> In his final response on the matter he declared that she will be a Queen of a colony of workers that will aid her in gathering honey. However, Greek Gods were never truly honourable in their wishes unless it benefitted them directly. In addition to her swarm of workers she was also granted a fatal sting, but this sting would be fatal to her or her colony if they ever used it on another. It was from then on that the honeybees’ was barbed; meaning that if their weapon was ever to be “deployed” that the individual that used their sting would not survive the attack.
https://crawliomics.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/zeus-the-honeyb...
> the result is the picture at the top of this article
But there is no picture at the top of the article, at least on mobile.
It's not loading for me in Firefox on desktop either; I found the image in the source code if anyone is interested:
https://www.subanima.org/content/images/size/w1200/2021/11/b...
edit: looks intentional?
Hobby beekeeper here.
Worker bees dies when they sting a person, because the stinger and venom pump remain when they fly off, ripping their abdomen open.
The purpose of this is that the venom pump continues to function after they have left, making the sting as painful as possible.
Honeybees are a superorganism, where the survival of the colony supersedes the survival of any individual bee.
Sometimes I observed how it worked after being stung by a bee. It is better to remove sting using force from one side. When two fingertips are used to remove a sting all venom is being pushed into the wound.
your comment was excellent.
I couldn't read past the article's pretentious opening.
A random bee sting in class was the straw that broke my back in a mid 90s multivariable calculus lecture at a Swedish university where I was studying CS/EE. It lead to me dropping out. Went to a local internet/web software startup instead and a whole new world opened up.
Yes, I had been behind. I'm doing OK now :)
The gate keeping of all that calculus for a CS degree is silly. Wasn’t the strongest at math, so grinned and bared but don’t really have a grasp of it anymore, and it would have been a shame to not have graduated with a CS degree because of it.
It's "grin and bear", as in grinning while bearing the load. The past tense would be "grinned and bore". FYI.
In Sweden it was a heritage from Ericsson. They needed/need engineers who knew that stuff. Supposedly. I should have picked something with less EE even though I also loved electronics.
It seems much better these days.
I dropped CS for calc 2
Same. And now I’m 15 years into my software engineering career and the only regret I have is that I didn’t spend more time with linear algebra.
I know right - that was the fun kind of math.
As an easily distracted high schooler just trying to enjoy one of his favorite classes, I discovered I could swat a flying bee dead with my folder. They were getting in through some gap in a window facing an alcove an I think we had four or five one year before Facilities fixed the problem.
It worked out, but you don’t really want to go squishing bees in an open area since they release chemicals that put their siblings on alert. If they stay put a glass and a piece of stiff paper are a better solution. But these were buzzing around my fellow students making everyone freak out.
basically you are Spiderman
Huh. How about that.
beeman
This concept blew my mind when I internalized it.
Same reason why honest signals exist. A peacock with very rich feathers is a fitness disadvantage. But they find mates more successfully. These traits persist in the gene pool.
It’s so much easier to just evolve a cheating trait that does the job of finding a mate even without the required fitness.
But the signals stay honest for the most part.
Why?
It’s because ultimately the species survives, not the individuals.
In a lot of cases, something that makes the individual more fit also makes the species more fit. But in some cases, they are inversely proportional.
Hence you end up with suicidal genes that favor the death of the individuals for the greater good of the species.
Now extrapolating to human society, most nations have landed on a system where taxes are paid to the government. Every individual might complain and try to get out of paying. But we do. Why? Maybe because societies where that wasn’t a thing were less fit and didn’t last long enough to still be around.
I think you are missing a few points. First, is the adversarial nature of mate selection.
A female peacock who falls for a trick will have fewer offspring that survive. The discerning hen will do better. Honest communication works because it is backed up actual fitness. It doesn't require group selection.
Second, I think there is a lot more going on with respect to taxes. Taxes have existed for maybe 10,000 years. An armed man demanding half your stuff or they kill your family is a tax too. Same for a mature lion that eats what another animal killed. I would argue taxes are an inherent result of power imbalances among humans. Differences give rise to power differentials, which give rise to security concessions, which consolidate into kingdoms and nations.
> Taxes have existed for maybe 10,000 years. An armed man demanding half your stuff or they kill your family is a tax too. Same for a mature lion that eats what another animal killed. I would argue taxes are an inherent result of power imbalances among humans. Differences give rise to power differentials, which give rise to security concessions, which consolidate into kingdoms and nations
Tax fits the model pretty well. Defending against bandits who steal everything and move on is expensive, so kings that claim much smaller portions of wealth and scare off bandits tend to lead to better nations. (Then you've got modern democracies, that typically tax much more, but in a way which is actually compatible with higher growth because the money tends to be spent back into the sluggish parts of the economy rather than spent on zero sum competition with neighbouring kings/lords over territorial tax bases and precious import collection)
> It’s because ultimately the species survives, not the individuals.
No, this is wrong. "Survival of the species" isn't a basis for selection. It will not lead to a gene becoming more prevalent in a population of interbreeding individuals.
Bees sacrifice themselves because they share genes with the queen; genes that are involved in this sacrifice increase their relative abundance in the bee gene pool by increasing the fitness of the superorganism that is the colony.
That's not entirely true. For example, being gay is hypothesized to give an evolutionary advantage because you can provide care for your sibling's children, who share their dna with you. Same goes for early menopause. That can extend to small villages where individuals may give up their own resources for a greater survival chance of their kin within the collective.
Are homosexuality and early menopause genetic conditions?
Everything that makes us human is constrained by the possibilities offered by our genes. Epigenetics, development, and environment are downstream of that. It is our genes that allow for sexual reproduction in the first place and why we’re attracted to other humans and not, say, trees.
Seems quite likely to me.
Pre 1800, the average life expectancy was aged between 20-40 [1]. I think the menopause is something that was experienced by extremely few people until after then.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Average life expectancy is misleading. You want perhaps median life expectancy after the age of 20.
>"Survival of the species" isn't a basis for selection. It will not lead to a gene becoming more prevalent in a population of interbreeding individuals.
Well, "species" is but a loosely defined set of genes.
And group selection cannot increase the frequency of a gene in that collection.
I can offer another "why?" How many animals attack a wasp's nest? Almost zero, except other wasps in a territory war? How many animals attack a beehive? Humans, bears, apes,.. pretty any big enough mammal that can climb. So bees not only suffer from much more predators due to their precious honey, in my view they also need to differentiate between "honey maker" and warrior (sting) functions as their poison could contaminate the honey. Why do the males have to die? Because almost none of their enemies can extract a bee sting from their skin. Once stung, the poison glands and some muscles remain with the sting, acting as a "poison pump". This could deter the attacker longer from a second attack. Which makes sense, as the beehive cannot run away from the attacker.
The group selection part is really interesting evolution-wise. It seems a very slow and difficult method of selection. I had never considered how something dying, and not passing along their genetics, could enforce a genetic trait.
It's somewhat explained near the end of the article. Sex in bees (and ants) is weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system
Humans use XY system, so we share 50% of your genes with your children, parents and siblings (in average).
Bees and ants use X0 system. A female bee share 50% of your genes with their own daughters, 75% with their mother and 75% with their female parents and 75% with their female siblings (in average).
So, from the bee's genes point of view instead of having their own children it's better to kidnap their mother and force her to have more female children. And a consequence is that instead of running away to form their new family in a safe place it's better to die protecting their mother.
Your conclusion is right, but in bees, sex is determined by Haplodiploidy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy ), not X0. Also, the daughters have the same number of chromosomes as the mother so they share 50%, not 75% of their genes with their mother (they do share an average of 75% of their genes with their sisters).
> 75% with their mother and 75% with their female parents
Are these different things for bees?
Sorry, cut&paste typo.
group selection works a lot better when the sacrificing individuals are sterile, with no other hope of passing on their genetics.
See also Eunuchs and Castration as a way to recreate a similar dynamic with humans. Castration had the fascinating ability to bind the interests of the Eunuchs more closely with the power structures and rules, by removing the option of family and progeny of their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#Asia_and_Africa
[Edit] As crazydoggers points out, it is probably better to view this through the lens of kin selection, with reproducers as the evolutionary agents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42749677
“Group selection” is not a thing. The article hand waves this always with
> some biologists still get really triggered about group selection and deny its evolutionary importance
Which is dishonest at best. The vast majority of biologist have realized group selection doesn’t work as proposed. [0]
What people thought was group selection was just kin selection working over time.
All evolution works at the level of the gene. Genes “want” to reproduce more of themselves. And if the same gene is in a kin, then it can favor enhancing the survival of kin that carry copies of itself. At a macro level this can be misreported as group selection, but to be sure, the selection is happening at the level of the gene, and reaches at most to kin sharing genes.
The article then goes on to say
> The nice story I told above about the evolution of altruism could just have easily been applied to humans. Yet we do not exist in eusocial colonies, so there must be something else going on
And he then talks about gene selection and the fact that bees are haplodiploidy, which is indeed the cause of the “altruism” we see.
His dismissal of haplodiploidy at the end of the article is a weak argument. Just because haplodiploidy in other species doesn’t lead to eusocial groups, or that eusocial groups can occur without haplodiploidy are not sufficient arguments that dismiss the effects of haplodiploidy and kin selection favoring altruism in eusocial bees.
I highly recommend people interested in these topics to read the seminal Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. [1]
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
Agreed, it's a disappointing and discrediting detour in an article that's about a fascinating topic. As you note, this has been worked out via haplodiploidy, which doesn't require venturing into theorizing about group selection or altruism.
And just to take a beat, and explain why group selection "triggers" people (in the author's wording), it's because it violates our fundamental, bedrock idea of causality which is no small thing, and anyone having a cavalier attitude about that probably doesn't belong in a room where these ideas are being deliberated. We understand physics to be causally closed, and expect "higher level" explanations to be compatible with the constraints of physics.
A model example in taking causality seriously, and proceeding with extreme care and extreme caution about challenging that intuition, I think is best exhibited in Quantum Mechanics, where, after excruciatingly careful examination of data and lots of hard thinking about implications, and lots of accounting for it's almost vulgar challenge to our intuitions, do we dare offer a model that challenges our basic idea of causation. That deviation is appropriately treated as profound, by contrast with the fast and loose invocation of group selection you find in some evolutionary explanations.
Yes! To put a finer point on it, group selection theories don’t have a specific physical explanation for how they operate, instead veering into philosophical explanations.
Ultimately natural selection must operate on the gene. Genes are the only source of information that gets passed to offspring through germ line cells in sexual reproduction or mitosis in asexual reproduction (don’t get me started on the fad of epigenetics, which is just a fancy term for standard DNA controlled embryological differentiation.)
The replication of genes and the information they encode, are the physical cause of the effect of phenotypes.
Group selection theorists (of which there are few) have no physical cause that allows selection to occur on the level of the group, and there’s no sound hypothesis of such that I have heard of. You’d need some physical mechanism for information flow between individuals in a group for that to be the case, and outside of kin inheritance, there’s nothing like that that exists.
It requires such a depth of evolution as to make it absurd to imagine that the genus homo is the point at which altruism emerged. Animals care about each other.
Think about how most people are naturally scared of heights, or snakes. A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you play with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a snake.
The ones that aren't afraid of those things are more likely to die from falling off a cliff or being injected with venom.
I'm personally someone who is freaked out heavily by insects. I know logically a house centipede or a harmless spider can't hurt me, but seemingly my brain has something in it that overrides my entire body when I see one and disgusts me. Usually it's irrational, but it probably helps humanity on a larger scale to avoid the ones that are dangerous!
There's a lot about the humans body that naturally gives us non-logical instincts that help us to survive and breed. People like having sex, regardless of whether they want a baby. There's no logic to it, but we know what we like!
The more advanced we get, the more it becomes apparent that we're just monkeys in shoes.
> A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you play with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a snake.
Some cats are afraid of cucumbers, presumably because the shape and color resembles a snake. Here’s a funny compilation: https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU
> Some cats are afraid of cucumbers, presumably because the shape and color resembles a snake. Here’s a funny compilation: https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU
It's funny in a way, but if you think about it it's actually abusive.
Would you think it's funny if you were terrified of snakes and someone randomly put a fake snake next to you when you were just relaxing?
Is that not essentially the only way that selection happens? You are just desvribing basic natural selection
This entire article is flawed in my opinion. Bees are not "suicidal". They are not meant to die after they sting. It's just that they have not adapted to stinging mammals with elastic skin (and probably will not). Bees can absolutely live after stinging if they manage to dislodge the stinger from the skin.
The concept of indirect fitness must be more complicated than explained here. The article explains it as a worker bee sharing 75% of her genes with her sisters, but only 50% with a child, so there is selection pressure for workers to be sterile and self-sacrificing. But few genes actually differ between individuals, so the percentages are much higher. E.g., I share ~ 99% of my genes with each one of you reading this. Assuming honey bees' genetic variation is not much more extreme than human variation, we're talking about 99.5% vs. 99.75% sharing, which sounds more like an explanation of why altruism would be preferred in general rather than uniquely affecting bees.
The article does eventually circle around to acknowledge this, but it's easy to miss and very underdeveloped compared to the discussion of kin selection: "So why do bees die when they sting you? Perhaps because they're disposable parts of a larger super-organism which has evolved by multi-level selection."
It doesn't matter how much bees have in common. The idea is that in bees, altruistic traits, that is those that produce more sisters by helping the queen have a 75% chance of being passed, because sisters share 75% of a worker bee genes. Most of the genes are the same, of course, bees won't become dogs or anything like that, but a few of them differ, and these are the one that matter.
Could worker bees be fertile and have a selfish traits that let them have more children, they would only have a 50% chance of passing these, because children share 50% of genes.
So: 75% of altruistic genes pass vs 50% of selfish genes. Altruistic genes win. Humans can't pass 75% of their genome this way, so that altruistic genes have no intrinsic advantage over selfish genes.
Right, "sharing" here must mean DNA that was cloned from the same ancestral DNA strand, not merely that it shares the same informational content. I got lost in the analogies that frame things in terms of what's "better" for the organism and lost sight of this.
The most important thing from the perspective of replication of a DNA strand is the number of copies of DNA passed to the next generation, and future generations, right? Which would be 0.75 * (mean marginal increase in next-generation sisters) + 0.5 * (mean # offspring). The probability that these next-generation individuals actually get to reproduce in turn would also factor in somewhere.
What's also interesting is that if we take the point of view of the queen (through whom the altruistic genes must pass), the queen's reproductive strategy is relatively few children + hordes of sterile helpers + killing her own sisters. So are we talking about a fitness advantage of altruistic traits (maximizing # sisters), or a fitness advantage from selfish traits [maximizing P(fertile child survival) I guess, since # children is small] that produce hordes of sterile helpers?
Edit: Circling back to the organism perspective, in the sense of "I would gladly give up my life for two brothers or eight cousins.", how many bees is it worth giving up one's own life for in that specific sense? We do have a common ancestor after all and thus a non-zero R-factor.
Hmm, I understand this difference in genes differently.
You and I probably share 99% of effective genes, but still the difference in genes is much greater because there we are comparing the entire DNA. There is a lot of non-affecting DNA. And that is what they analyze when comparing DNA of two individuals in forensics.
Based on the information I found, the % difference between two randoms humans in terms of base pairs (including non-coding DNA) is even less than the difference in terms of genes, so the distinction does not materially alter the discussion. Also the article framed its explanation in terms of genes, not base pair sequence.
"Between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation—biochemical individuality—is about .1 percent." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20363/
https://book.bionumbers.org/how-genetically-similar-are-two-...
Forensic comparisons are mostly about comparing the number of short tandem repeats at handful of loci, a very small part of the the whole genome.
If you have any information that indicates the DNA similarity between people is less than 98–99% I would love to hear it. I have not personally analyzed the sequences from the 1000 genome project to check, and am relying on summaries written by other people.
I see, thank you for the explanation!
Why do humans live long enough to be grandparents? It's because grandparents take care of the grandkids while the parents work.
There’s the historian factor as well.
They’ve found that African Elephant populations are largely constrained by water availability. Creating artificial watering holes is helping restore elephant populations better than most other attempts.
But the matriarch is typically one of the oldest female members of the group, and elephants remember watering holes that they haven’t visited since they were young. During a drought they will check all of these secondary and tertiary water sources. If that elephant is killed by poachers, the herd may lose the last remaining record of water resources and suffer for it.
I also recall watching a documentary about a troupe of primates. They adopted a young male kicked out of another troupe. Nothing remarkable about him until, again, a drought year. Turns out not all knowledge of edible foods is instinctual. They discovered him eating a fruit none of the tribe had eaten before. When he didn’t die they all started eating it too.
So I think we underestimate the value of record keeping with respect to longevity and inter-group mixing. It’s not all genes and safety in numbers.
In Māori culture in NZ, tribal elders (kaumātua) function much the same, they are the keepers of knowledge, history and cultural practices for their group(s).
I suspect you'd find the same in many cultures that didn't have writing to transmit knowledge.
(There's also the aspect of "mana", a very hard word to translate, "face", "influence", "power" or "really respected" are good approximations.
A kaumātua with mana accords your group (iwi/tribe or hapu/sub-tribe) with their mana.
So, say your Granddad was a renowned warrior or diplomat, even though he's in his 80s, the respect his opponents developed for him still persists, and flows onto you.)
I don't think its that simple. If we look back far enough, it was more like the man/men hunted or gathered and women took care of kids, fire and cooking.
If I look at less distant ancestors, they all worked in the fields, and so did grandparents (who were not as old as these days when 15 was a good age to start bearing kids, so 35 years old granny was normal). So it again falls mostly on women. Grandparents, those still living, much less.
I find the grandparents hypothesis compelling at first glance but it sort of begs the question, why don't we live indefinitely in the first place? There are obvious answers, we make tradeoffs to improve performance early in life at the expense of long term function, but it doesn't seem like the reproductive benefits of caring for a grandchild that only shares a 1/4 of your DNA necessarily tips the scales of selection towards longevity. Especially when, in theory, men remain fertile their entire lives and thus there should have always been some selection for longer life spans. You would expect the reproductive benefits of a 70 year old caring for their own child might be at least comparable to 70 year old caring for a grandchild.
> why don't we live indefinitely in the first place?
It doesn’t seem to be necessary for the survival of our genes.
> You would expect the reproductive benefits of a 70 year old caring for their own child might be at least comparable to 70 year old caring for a grandchild.
They’re competing with 20-30 year-olds with better physical fitness for a mate. This would be relevant for ~99% of human existence even if it’s not totally relevant today.
why don't we live indefinitely in the first place?
1. need to make room for the young, ecosystems are not unlimited
2. we accumulate parasites and diseases as we live. Dying kills them off, too
3. much slower evolution, implying losing ground compared with quickly evolving competitors
Obviously because Tree-of-Life didn't survive on Earth, so we could never achieve our final form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector
Members of some species take care of the children of others, as well as theirs (Orcas come to mind, humans too if course). There is an advantage in helping others with similar DNA than you, because they will reciprocate.
They can actually survive if you let them.
Here’s a video of a guy filming himself being stung by a bee, then watching as the bee spins around, works its stinger loose, and flies away:
https://youtu.be/G-C77ujnLZo
Bees don't die right away; they all fly off after stinging, but they will eventually die for sure.
>Thirdly, the haplodiploidy hypothesis only works if all sisters share the same father and if a queen is biased to produce more daughters than sons.
The sex ratio doesn't actually seem like a problem for the theory, because it sounds like for a worker bee, the relatedness of the marginal sibling is 5/8 in expectation, vs. 1/2 relatedness of the marginal offspring.
I think you also have to discount the relatedness into the future. If the colony you are born into is already established, your 5/8 related marginal sibling has a much higher likelihood of survival than your 1/2 related marginal offspring when you take into account the risk of breaking from the colony and starting your own.
That probably goes some way to explaining the first problem of multiple fathers. Marginal half-siblings are only 1/4 related to the worker, but they may have a greater chance of survival.
> we humans and nearly all other mammals certainly don't have a singular queen and a sterile caste of workers.
No we have many queens and many sterile workers. Almost all women have children and increasingly more men don't father children. We've outlawed polygamy, but society is trending that way anyway, especially considering online dating statistics. 80% of women are choosing from the top 20% of men.
Men die in war. Look at ukraine. A million men dead, while women dance in clubs. Vietnam, on the American side: 55,000 men dead, 8 women dead. Most women stayed home, like the queen bee. Most of those men were sterile for all intents and purposes.
If we don't introduce artificial measures, the natural tendency is toward fewer women mating with more men and the end result is one to many. There's a British lady trying to mate 1,000 men.
We are more like bees than we like to think.
For the record, almost no bees die when they sting you. This is just a weird myth that people repeat nonstop.
This only happens to honeybees, and only when they're stinging humans. Most skin is much thicker than ours, more similar to our feet callouses. The stinger isn't supposed to go in. That's closer to a sword's foil.
The reason they panic when it happens is it's not supposed to happen.
The stingers are mostly meant for combat with other insects. You can watch these fights on youtube. They never, ever end with the bee self eviscerating.
This is a simple example of people trying to look smart by explaining things which, when you check, just aren't true.
Bee's are a product of many millions of years of evolution, so the why, is that it works! Ever watch bees?, bugs?, other things, up close and in the danger zone? I do. A bee's stinger will embed in you, or me, and then the venom sack rips right out of the bee and it is possible to watch the venom sack pump venom without the bee itself attached anymore. I was attending my mother in her herb garden and commented on there bieng honey bees around, which she disputed, so I caught one, and held its legs while it tried to sting me, and showed her this, but my hands are so callused, that its stinger would not go in, then I let it go. She says I am an improbable creature, and describes me bieng a half Vulcan and half Klingon.
> The haplodiploidy hypothesis, though nice, is not without its problems. Firstly, there are plenty of species with haplodiploid genetics which do not form eusocial colonies.
That is not a problem. Reproductive fitness must always be measured relative to an environment. Just because colony life is a successful strategy for haplodiploid species in some environments does not mean it will be a successful strategy in all environments. You can see this in other species. Female lions live mostly in cooperative groups while male lions and all other large cats (leopards, cheetahs, and tigers) are solitary.
Am I the only one who grew up with bees dying after stinging carrying a sort of unspoken significance or meaning?
I don't think I ever heard someone actually state it, but growing up I had the feeling that bees dying when they sting you was in some sense "significant" because it meant that bees had to be selective in when they chose to resort to violence.
It was almost like an unspoken fable or illustration about the importance of controlling aggression.
It points to another evolutionary pressure that isn't mentioned as often: if an animal is too aggressive humans will exterminate it.
I had this experience with a wasp nest near my house. I figured "live and let live" until one day I walked out my door and a wasp flew directly over and stung me without provocation. So I got some insecticide and got rid of the nest.
Isn’t that just so unbearably sad? These little creatures work tirelessly their whole lives, buzzing from flower to flower, pollinating the plants that sustain ecosystems and our food supply. They barely get to live a few weeks as worker bees, and then if they ever need to sting to protect their hive... that’s it. Their life ends in an act of ultimate devotion.
The title is a bit misleading as it really doesn’t explain why bees die when they sting in the sense of a causality. The article itself mentions that the stinging mechanism bees use, is itself not a prerequisite for how they are organized as wasp use a different one. Very interesting read though.
The interesting question to me is, “does the bee know it’s going to die if it stings you?”
And therefore, acts judiciously in deciding when, if ever, to sting? So that it only does it when it’s life-threateningly mad at something?
Kind of got me thinking is there any tool or is someone working on something that can parse a DNA and give you the end result for any species? If not what's the main challenge
Would be a cool challenge for all the quantum supremacy folk
Stepping back a little and try to projecting that logic onto humans, are we more like super organisms? Interestingly, Our social constructs does have similarities of both superorganism and non- superorganism
It's even more extreme than that. If you took a random sampling of humans to a version of Earth that had never experienced humans, it would not go well. We're heavily dependant on society and modern technology. We've evolved together.
E.g. smaller birth canals and C-sections.
this is wild because the article starts off with explaining how "why" is a bad question, and then doubles down on this entire thesis explaining why a bee dies when it stings you, a human, and the evolutionary nature supporting it
except, its entirely wrong and the foreshadowing about "why" was super important: bees don't 'expect' to die when they sting you. they can sting many creatures and not get their abdomen ripped out because the barb doesn't get stuck in the thing they stung. just like wasps.
so this 20 page dissertation is completely baseless.
To prove Mr Feynman right: because I stomp on it.
The next time my wife asks me why we have something new, my response will be "Because in a capitalistic society, you can exchange money for ____."
There are many valid explanations. https://www.ft.com/lol-404-theories
This link is awesome. Thanks for sharing!
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TLDR;
Suicidal altruism and costly signaling for the survival of the super-organism. Also, zombie poison delivery pumps.
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Okay champ.
Can someone answer this without an evolutionary presupposition?
It is in the article "A honey bee dies when it stings you because its stinger is covered in barbs, causing its abdomen to get ripped out when it tries to fly away. And surviving with your guts spilling out everywhere is pretty bloody hard."
That's the baseline answer. It is a simple observation, and at this level of question you don't need to worry about evolution at all.
Dying worker bees ensure survival of the group without a measurable impact on death of the colony, which when seen as a super organism, means only a part of the organism, leaving the reproducing parts intact, since workers don't mate anyway.
What are you asking for, a parable? A metaphor?
they are so pissed off by your presence that they say fuck it, ill fuck this bastard no matter what
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