Bugs
Like the 'random article' button on Wikipedia, the 'Top Stories' and 'See Also' links on the BBC news website can be dangerously interesting. Tonight I learned about recent scientific studies of insects. Locusts, ants, and bees, oh my. The bee ball phenomenon was particularly fascinating (be sure to watch the video).
6 comments:
the article doesn't make it clear, but presumably the bee-balling is a suicide mission for the bees, yes? i am sorta interested in evolutionary biology lately; i wonder how that kinda thing happens, evolutionarily speaking. i mean, obviously it is really good for hive survival, but do bees with that instinct survive to reproduce? how is that behavior rewarded evolutionarily? how much genetic variance do bees in a single hive have? or maybe my original assumption is wrong, and/or honeybees are more resistant to heat and co2 than hornets.
See the 'and' article. It's all about how ants and bees really will sacrifice themselves for their hive since they are protecting their genetic material by doing so.
I expect a number of the bees die, though perhaps they are able to rotate in and out of the center so that none of them has as much exposure as the hornet. That seems doubtful, however.
Yeah, evolutionary biology is fascinating, a fact that took me a surprisingly long time to discover.
Yea, evolutionary biology doesn't really care about the individual, at least from my understanding. So long as the action promotes the overall health and prosperity of the hive (or herd or whatever group of common genetic material you're talking about), it doesn't matter what happens to the individual members.
I think we tend to have such an individualistic view of genetics because the individual is the primary mover in American conceptions of how the world works. This of course, has its advantages as well, even if its, in many ways, wrong.
The same phenomenon can be seen among groups of humans, who pass on and promote their social groups (and genetics, though never to the point of a species sub-division) by means of war. Its no mistake that so many successful civilizations were built upon the backs of those who died in war.
I think the Richard Dawkins book "The Selfish Gene" is on that general theme, that evolution serves the genetic material rather than the individual.
Yeah, Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable" talks about it too, though "The Selfish Gene" is more focused on the idea. Daniel Dennet talks about it in various places too.
The Old Testament is filled with instances valuing group preservation with no regard for the individual. All of Job's kids die, but eventually he is rewarded by getting twice the number he originally had. It's not about his emotional relationship with each child, it's about his economic/genetic preservation.
I'm always amazed how little recognition there is among individualistic American Protestants about how different their scripture's reality is.
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