181–190 of 251 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?).
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…
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 locati…
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 :)
basically you are Spiderman
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 locati…
Wasp bites are a lot more painful than mosquito bites.
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.
Earlier 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…
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.
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…
Imagine taking your favorite fractal and picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Would you be better satisfied by 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…
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.
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…
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.
Earlier 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…
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.