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Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

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Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#91

Post by afavour »

_1tem wrote: post #85
notRobot wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure? Doesn’t mean the species-specific examination isn’t interesting.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#92

Post by barbazoo »

_1tem wrote: post #87
pks016 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#93

Post by ripitout »

_1tem wrote: post #43

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…

Love how the top comment is "I don't see how evolution explains everything in biology". Classic HN.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#94

Post by crystal_revenge »

_1tem wrote: post #43

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…

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.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#95

Post by shwouchk »

jstanley wrote: post #57
sedatk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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,…

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?

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#96

Post by prerok »

jpeloquin wrote: post #74

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.…

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.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#97

Post by atorodius »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #94
_1tem wrote: post #43

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…

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 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

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#98

Post by thaumasiotes »

kevinventullo wrote: post #69
jstanley wrote: post #57

Earlier 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,…

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…

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.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#99

Post by tsimionescu »

kevinventullo wrote: post #69
jstanley wrote: post #57

Earlier 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,…

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. 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?

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#100

Post by glenstein »

crazydoggers wrote: post #5
tibbon wrote: post #2

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.

“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 g…

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.

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