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.
Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
131–140 of 251 posts
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#132I 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…
> 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.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 argum…
> 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…
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.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#134I 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…
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.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#135Hobby 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.
your comment was excellent.
I couldn't read past the article's pretentious opening.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#136Honeybee 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…
>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.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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…
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.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 expe…
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. An…
> 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.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#139Honeybee 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…
>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…
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
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> 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…
> 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.