[lbo-talk] Re: Instinct

boddi satva lbo.boddi at gmail.com
Sun Dec 4 07:47:57 PST 2005


The key to bee and ant societies is the suppression of worker fertility. Workers and queens are equally female but the basically the presence of the queen's pheromones/hormones makes their fellow females sterile.

Many animals compete with scent and chemical warfare. The thought is that back when bees were homogenous they developed the tendency for some females to develop earlier and produce pheromones that tended not only to attract males but suppress other females' reproductive capacity.

Most intra-species competitive behaviors tend to suppress overall fecundity. Although the queen bee has evolved to be super-fecund, if the 15-20 thousand individuals in a hive laid as many eggs in a year as, say, a high-producing cockroach, the hive would produce twice as many eggs.

And the care-taking behaviors of female bees may well have come from aggressive behaviors as female bees learned to search their area for larva of other bees and destroy them and go back and pack material around their own larva (re-capitulating a typical burying behavior) that competing females had exposed. Bees that produced stronger pheromones could trick a closely-related bee into mistaking their larve for her own. That bee's larvae would survive better and the trait of strong pheromone production would come to dominate bee clans.

But all these are pretty typical insect behaviors: caretaking of larvae (at least in the form of careful burying), producing suppressive hormones, destroying larvae in intra-species competition. Yet millions of insect species have not developed social structures. Most insects basically eat as much as they can and lay as many eggs as they can. A female ladybug lays about half as many eggs a day as a queen bee and yet she provides for herself. Most insects have behaviors that improve the survival of their offspring but these are individual, not group behaviors (laying eggs, larvae en masse is really not a group behavior so much as a question of being attracted by the activity of members of your species). If the ladybug model works and more or less predominates among insects, it's probably because the suppressive/competitive behaviors that produced ant, bee and termite colony behavior have evolutionary costs as well as benefits and individual fecundity is probably sacrificed.

That doesn't work for most insects. Bees do it but dragonflies, flies, butterflies, grasshoppers, roaches, true bugs, beetles and fleas (to name a few) eschew it.

boddi

On 12/2/05, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> > Yes, I agree there is honest debate about this; however, I consider the
> > data that supports the idea of group selection compelling. To get a
> > little sociological, the dogmatic insistence that evolution must work
> > solely at the individual level reflects our cultural infatuation with
> > the autonomous individual. It's easy to take this criterion of
> > parsimony too far: sometimes we need to add a little theoretical
> > complexity to deal with the complexity of the world!
>
> Agree wholeheartedly. And someone did mention bees on this thread. How
> do you explain the queen bee-worker bee phenomenon at the individual level?
>
> Joanna
>
>
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>



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