[HN Gopher] Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
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Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
Author : ohjeez
Score : 331 points
Date : 2025-01-18 15:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.subanima.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.subanima.org)
| tibbon wrote:
| 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.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| It requires such a depth of evolution as to make it absurd to
| imagine that the genus homo is the point at which altruism
| emerged. Animals care about each other.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| "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 gene. Genes "want" to
| reproduce more of themselves. And if the same gene is in a kin,
| then it can favor enhancing the survival of kin that carry
| copies of itself. At a macro level this can be misreported as
| group selection, but to be sure, the selection is happening at
| the level of the gene, and reaches at most to kin sharing
| genes.
|
| The article then goes on to say
|
| > The nice story I told above about the evolution of altruism
| could just have easily been applied to humans. Yet we do not
| exist in eusocial colonies, so there must be something else
| going on
|
| And he then talks about gene selection and the fact that bees
| are haplodiploidy, which is indeed the cause of the "altruism"
| we see.
|
| His dismissal of haplodiploidy at the end of the article is a
| weak argument. Just because haplodiploidy in other species
| doesn't lead to eusocial groups, or that eusocial groups can
| occur without haplodiploidy are not sufficient arguments that
| dismiss the effects of haplodiploidy and kin selection favoring
| altruism in eusocial bees.
|
| I highly recommend people interested in these topics to read
| the seminal _Selfish Gene_ by Richard Dawkins. [1]
|
| 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| Yes! To put a finer point on it, group selection theories
| don't have a specific physical explanation for how they
| operate, instead veering into philosophical explanations.
|
| Ultimately natural selection must operate on the gene.
| Genes are the only source of information that gets passed
| to offspring through germ line cells in sexual reproduction
| or mitosis in asexual reproduction (don't get me started on
| the fad of epigenetics, which is just a fancy term for
| standard DNA controlled embryological differentiation.)
|
| The replication of genes and the information they encode,
| are the physical cause of the effect of phenotypes.
|
| Group selection theorists (of which there are few) have no
| physical cause that allows selection to occur on the level
| of the group, and there's no sound hypothesis of such that
| I have heard of. You'd need some physical mechanism for
| information flow between individuals in a group for that to
| be the case, and outside of kin inheritance, there's
| nothing like that that exists.
| hbn wrote:
| Think about how most people are naturally scared of heights, or
| snakes. A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you
| play with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a
| snake.
|
| The ones that aren't afraid of those things are more likely to
| die from falling off a cliff or being injected with venom.
|
| I'm personally someone who is freaked out heavily by insects. I
| know logically a house centipede or a harmless spider can't
| hurt me, but seemingly my brain has something in it that
| overrides my entire body when I see one and disgusts me.
| Usually it's irrational, but it probably helps humanity on a
| larger scale to avoid the ones that are dangerous!
|
| There's a lot about the humans body that naturally gives us
| non-logical instincts that help us to survive and breed. People
| like having sex, regardless of whether they want a baby.
| There's no logic to it, but we know what we like!
|
| The more advanced we get, the more it becomes apparent that
| we're just monkeys in shoes.
| caseyohara wrote:
| > A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you play
| with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a snake.
|
| Some cats are afraid of cucumbers, presumably because the
| shape and color resembles a snake. Here's a funny
| compilation: https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > Some cats are afraid of cucumbers, presumably because the
| shape and color resembles a snake. Here's a funny
| compilation: https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU
|
| It's funny in a way, but if you think about it it's
| actually abusive.
|
| Would you think it's funny if you were terrified of snakes
| and someone randomly put a fake snake next to you when you
| were just relaxing?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| group selection works a lot better when the sacrificing
| individuals are sterile, with no other hope of passing on their
| genetics.
|
| See also Eunuchs and Castration as a way to recreate a similar
| dynamic with humans. Castration had the fascinating ability to
| bind the interests of the Eunuchs more closely with the power
| structures and rules, by removing the option of family and
| progeny of their own.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#Asia_and_Africa
|
| [Edit] As crazydoggers points out, it is probably better to
| view this through the lens of kin selection, with reproducers
| as the evolutionary agents.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42749677
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Is that not essentially the only way that selection happens?
| You are just desvribing basic natural selection
| gus_massa wrote:
| It's somewhat explained near the end of the article. Sex in
| bees (and ants) is weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-
| determination_system
|
| Humans use XY system, so we share 50% of your genes with your
| children, parents and siblings (in average).
|
| Bees and ants use X0 system. A female bee share 50% of your
| genes with their own daughters, 75% with their mother and 75%
| with their female parents and 75% with their female siblings
| (in average).
|
| So, from the bee's genes point of view instead of having their
| own children it's better to kidnap their mother and force her
| to have more female children. And a consequence is that instead
| of running away to form their new family in a safe place it's
| better to die protecting their mother.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 75% with their mother and 75% with their female parents
|
| Are these different things for bees?
| gus_massa wrote:
| Sorry, cut&paste typo.
| penteract wrote:
| Your conclusion is right, but in bees, sex is determined by
| Haplodiploidy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy
| ), not X0. Also, the daughters have the same number of
| chromosomes as the mother so they share 50%, not 75% of their
| genes with their mother (they do share an average of 75% of
| their genes with their sisters).
| redundantly wrote:
| The next time my wife asks me why we have something new, my
| response will be "Because in a capitalistic society, you can
| exchange money for ____."
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Money can be exchanged for goods and services - Homer
| Simpson's brain
|
| https://youtu.be/A81DYZh6KaQ
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| There are many valid explanations.
| https://www.ft.com/lol-404-theories
| idatum wrote:
| This link is awesome. Thanks for sharing!
| raldi wrote:
| > the result is the picture at the top of this article
|
| But there is no picture at the top of the article, at least on
| mobile.
| leslielurker wrote:
| It's not loading for me in Firefox on desktop either; I found
| the image in the source code if anyone is interested:
|
| https://www.subanima.org/content/images/size/w1200/2021/11/b...
|
| edit: looks intentional? /* Remove feature
| image from top of articles */ .gh-article-image {
| display: none; }
| LASR wrote:
| This concept blew my mind when I internalized it.
|
| Same reason why honest signals exist. A peacock with very rich
| feathers is a fitness disadvantage. But they find mates more
| successfully. These traits persist in the gene pool.
|
| It's so much easier to just evolve a cheating trait that does the
| job of finding a mate even without the required fitness.
|
| But the signals stay honest for the most part.
|
| Why?
|
| It's because ultimately the species survives, not the
| individuals.
|
| In a lot of cases, something that makes the individual more fit
| also makes the species more fit. But in some cases, they are
| inversely proportional.
|
| Hence you end up with suicidal genes that favor the death of the
| individuals for the greater good of the species.
|
| Now extrapolating to human society, most nations have landed on a
| system where taxes are paid to the government. Every individual
| might complain and try to get out of paying. But we do. Why?
| Maybe because societies where that wasn't a thing were less fit
| and didn't last long enough to still be around.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > It's because ultimately the species survives, not the
| individuals.
|
| No, this is wrong. "Survival of the species" isn't a basis for
| selection. It will not lead to a gene becoming more prevalent
| in a population of interbreeding individuals.
|
| Bees sacrifice themselves because they share genes with the
| queen; genes that are involved in this sacrifice increase their
| relative abundance in the bee gene pool by increasing the
| fitness of the superorganism that is the colony.
| Salgat wrote:
| That's not entirely true. For example, being gay is
| hypothesized to give an evolutionary advantage because you
| can provide care for your sibling's children, who share their
| dna with you. Same goes for early menopause. That can extend
| to small villages where individuals may give up their own
| resources for a greater survival chance of their kin within
| the collective.
| asingnh wrote:
| Are homosexuality and early menopause genetic conditions?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Seems quite likely to me.
| jahewson wrote:
| Everything that makes us human is constrained by the
| possibilities offered by our genes. Epigenetics,
| development, and environment are downstream of that. It
| is our genes that allow for sexual reproduction in the
| first place and why we're attracted to other humans and
| not, say, trees.
| alt227 wrote:
| Pre 1800, the average life expectancy was aged between
| 20-40 [1]. I think the menopause is something that was
| experienced by extremely few people until after then.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Average life expectancy is misleading. You want perhaps
| median life expectancy after the age of 20.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >"Survival of the species" isn't a basis for selection. It
| will not lead to a gene becoming more prevalent in a
| population of interbreeding individuals.
|
| Well, "species" is but a loosely defined set of genes.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And group selection cannot increase the frequency of a gene
| in that collection.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think you are missing a few points. First, is the adversarial
| nature of mate selection.
|
| A female peacock who falls for a trick will have fewer
| offspring that survive. The discerning hen will do better.
| Honest communication works because it is backed up actual
| fitness. It doesn't require group selection.
|
| Second, I think there is a lot more going on with respect to
| taxes. Taxes have existed for maybe 10,000 years. An armed man
| demanding half your stuff or they kill your family is a tax
| too. Same for a mature lion that eats what another animal
| killed. I would argue taxes are an inherent result of power
| imbalances among humans. Differences give rise to power
| differentials, which give rise to security concessions, which
| consolidate into kingdoms and nations.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Taxes have existed for maybe 10,000 years. An armed man
| demanding half your stuff or they kill your family is a tax
| too. Same for a mature lion that eats what another animal
| killed. I would argue taxes are an inherent result of power
| imbalances among humans. Differences give rise to power
| differentials, which give rise to security concessions, which
| consolidate into kingdoms and nations
|
| Tax fits the model pretty well. Defending against bandits who
| steal everything and move on is expensive, so kings that
| claim much smaller portions of wealth and scare off bandits
| tend to lead to better nations. (Then you've got modern
| democracies, that typically tax much more, but in a way which
| is actually compatible with higher growth because the money
| tends to be spent back into the sluggish parts of the economy
| rather than spent on zero sum competition with neighbouring
| kings/lords over territorial tax bases and precious import
| collection)
| WalterBright wrote:
| A fascinating read about such things is "The Red Queen" by
| Ridley.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...
|
| It's all about the propagation of the genes, not the survival of
| the organism.
| n8henrie wrote:
| Read this in my early 20s and _loved_ it. Many ideas that have
| stuck with me. Hoping to reread it with my wife soon, nearly 20
| years later, and see how it aged.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Why do humans live long enough to be grandparents? It's because
| grandparents take care of the grandkids while the parents work.
| derektank wrote:
| I find the grandparents hypothesis compelling at first glance
| but it sort of begs the question, why don't we live
| indefinitely in the first place? There are obvious answers, we
| make tradeoffs to improve performance early in life at the
| expense of long term function, but it doesn't seem like the
| reproductive benefits of caring for a grandchild that only
| shares a 1/4 of your DNA necessarily tips the scales of
| selection towards longevity. Especially when, in theory, men
| remain fertile their entire lives and thus there should have
| always been some selection for longer life spans. You would
| expect the reproductive benefits of a 70 year old caring for
| their own child might be at least comparable to 70 year old
| caring for a grandchild.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > why don't we live indefinitely in the first place?
|
| It doesn't seem to be necessary for the survival of our
| genes.
|
| > You would expect the reproductive benefits of a 70 year old
| caring for their own child might be at least comparable to 70
| year old caring for a grandchild.
|
| They're competing with 20-30 year-olds with better physical
| fitness for a mate. This would be relevant for ~99% of human
| existence even if it's not totally relevant today.
| WalterBright wrote:
| why don't we live indefinitely in the first place?
|
| 1. need to make room for the young, ecosystems are not
| unlimited
|
| 2. we accumulate parasites and diseases as we live. Dying
| kills them off, too
|
| 3. much slower evolution, implying losing ground compared
| with quickly evolving competitors
| thrance wrote:
| Members of some species take care of the children of others,
| as well as theirs (Orcas come to mind, humans too if course).
| There is an advantage in helping others with similar DNA than
| you, because they will reciprocate.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Obviously because Tree-of-Life didn't survive on Earth, so we
| could never achieve our final form.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector
| jajko wrote:
| I don't think its that simple. If we look back far enough, it
| was more like the man/men hunted or gathered and women took
| care of kids, fire and cooking.
|
| If I look at less distant ancestors, they all worked in the
| fields, and so did grandparents (who were not as old as these
| days when 15 was a good age to start bearing kids, so 35 years
| old granny was normal). So it again falls mostly on women.
| Grandparents, those still living, much less.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's the historian factor as well.
|
| They've found that African Elephant populations are largely
| constrained by water availability. Creating artificial watering
| holes is helping restore elephant populations better than most
| other attempts.
|
| But the matriarch is typically one of the oldest female members
| of the group, and elephants remember watering holes that they
| haven't visited since they were young. During a drought they
| will check all of these secondary and tertiary water sources.
| If that elephant is killed by poachers, the herd may lose the
| last remaining record of water resources and suffer for it.
|
| I also recall watching a documentary about a troupe of
| primates. They adopted a young male kicked out of another
| troupe. Nothing remarkable about him until, again, a drought
| year. Turns out not all knowledge of edible foods is
| instinctual. They discovered him eating a fruit none of the
| tribe had eaten before. When he didn't die they all started
| eating it too.
|
| So I think we underestimate the value of record keeping with
| respect to longevity and inter-group mixing. It's not all genes
| and safety in numbers.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| In Maori culture in NZ, tribal elders (kaumatua) function
| much the same, they are the keepers of knowledge, history and
| cultural practices for their group(s).
|
| I suspect you'd find the same in many cultures that didn't
| have writing to transmit knowledge.
|
| (There's also the aspect of "mana", a very hard word to
| translate, "face", "influence", "power" or "really respected"
| are good approximations.
|
| A kaumatua with mana accords your group (iwi/tribe or
| hapu/sub-tribe) with their mana.
|
| So, say your Granddad was a renowned warrior or diplomat,
| even though he's in his 80s, the respect his opponents
| developed for him still persists, and flows onto you.)
| spqr0a1 wrote:
| While a bee stinger may get stuck in you, that's not so when
| stinging fellow insects.
|
| The barbs don't catch on an exoskeleton like they do for thick
| and elastic mammalian skin.
|
| An elegant way to deliver more venom to larger targets.
| randall wrote:
| Wow that's super interesting! What a novel mechanism.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| If you're careful with the index fingers of opposite hands, you
| can remove the stinger from your skin without killing the bee.
| shakna wrote:
| I don't think I've ever been stung in such a convenient
| position as to allow that.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| as opposed to index fingers of the same hand..
| qup wrote:
| Not the same hand, he's talking about two hands on the same
| side
| mech422 wrote:
| but I need my second left hand to film for Insta! :-P
| koolba wrote:
| There's only one frood who could pull off that
| extraction.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Not really. The bee that stings you will flap her wings very
| vigorously, and it will rip its stinger off in less than a
| second trying to get away from you. Unless you're
| deliberately trying to get stung and save her, you won't have
| a chance.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Depends on the colony. The bees that have stung me have
| always taken 5 or 10 seconds to start trying to dismantle
| themselves in earnest, which (depending on location) is
| usually enough time to rescue them. (I'm not sure whether
| they _survive_ my rescue, but at the very least they can
| fly away, and their stingers don 't remain in my skin.)
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Yeah, I was hoping the article would mention this, but no dice.
| :(
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Nature's design is often elegant. But also (sometimes) cruel.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Can someone answer this without an evolutionary presupposition?
| krapp wrote:
| What are you asking for, a parable? A metaphor?
| gnkyfrg wrote:
| Dying worker bees ensure survival of the group without a
| measurable impact on death of the colony, which when seen as a
| super organism, means only a part of the organism, leaving the
| reproducing parts intact, since workers don't mate anyway.
| krisoft wrote:
| It is in the article "A honey bee dies when it stings you
| because its stinger is covered in barbs, causing its abdomen to
| get ripped out when it tries to fly away. And surviving with
| your guts spilling out everywhere is pretty bloody hard."
|
| That's the baseline answer. It is a simple observation, and at
| this level of question you don't need to worry about evolution
| at all.
| pestatije wrote:
| they are so pissed off by your presence that they say fuck it,
| ill fuck this bastard no matter what
| gnkyfrg wrote:
| > we humans and nearly all other mammals certainly don't have a
| singular queen and a sterile caste of workers.
|
| No we have many queens and many sterile workers. Almost all women
| have children and increasingly more men don't father children.
| We've outlawed polygamy, but society is trending that way anyway,
| especially considering online dating statistics. 80% of women are
| choosing from the top 20% of men.
|
| Men die in war. Look at ukraine. A million men dead, while women
| dance in clubs. Vietnam, on the American side: 55,000 men dead, 8
| women dead. Most women stayed home, like the queen bee. Most of
| those men were sterile for all intents and purposes.
|
| If we don't introduce artificial measures, the natural tendency
| is toward fewer women mating with more men and the end result is
| one to many. There's a British lady trying to mate 1,000 men.
|
| We are more like bees than we like to think.
| lysace wrote:
| 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 :)
| hinkley wrote:
| As an easily distracted high schooler just trying to enjoy one
| of his favorite classes, I discovered I could swat a flying bee
| dead with my folder. They were getting in through some gap in a
| window facing an alcove an I think we had four or five one year
| before Facilities fixed the problem.
|
| It worked out, but you don't really want to go squishing bees
| in an open area since they release chemicals that put their
| siblings on alert. If they stay put a glass and a piece of
| stiff paper are a better solution. But these were buzzing
| around my fellow students making everyone freak out.
| ec109685 wrote:
| The gate keeping of all that calculus for a CS degree is silly.
| Wasn't the strongest at math, so grinned and bared but don't
| really have a grasp of it anymore, and it would have been a
| shame to not have graduated with a CS degree because of it.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I dropped CS for calc 2
| hightrix wrote:
| Same. And now I'm 15 years into my software engineering
| career and the only regret I have is that I didn't spend
| more time with linear algebra.
| lysace wrote:
| I know right - that was the fun kind of math.
| lysace wrote:
| In Sweden it was a heritage from Ericsson. They needed/need
| engineers who knew that stuff. Supposedly. I should have
| picked something with less EE even though I also loved
| electronics.
|
| It seems much better these days.
| cryptonector wrote:
| It's "grin and bear", as in grinning while bearing the load.
| The past tense would be "grinned and bore". FYI.
| swyx wrote:
| basically you are Spiderman
| lysace wrote:
| Huh. How about that.
| tradertef wrote:
| beeman
| captn3m0 wrote:
| As I've been listening to Mythos recently, I must point out that
| it is also because Zeus cursed the Bee
|
| > In his final response on the matter he declared that she will
| be a Queen of a colony of workers that will aid her in gathering
| honey. However, Greek Gods were never truly honourable in their
| wishes unless it benefitted them directly. In addition to her
| swarm of workers she was also granted a fatal sting, but this
| sting would be fatal to her or her colony if they ever used it on
| another. It was from then on that the honeybees' was barbed;
| meaning that if their weapon was ever to be "deployed" that the
| individual that used their sting would not survive the attack.
|
| https://crawliomics.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/zeus-the-honeyb...
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| >Thirdly, the haplodiploidy hypothesis only works if all sisters
| share the same father and if a queen is biased to produce more
| daughters than sons.
|
| The sex ratio doesn't actually seem like a problem for the
| theory, because it sounds like for a worker bee, the relatedness
| of the marginal sibling is 5/8 in expectation, vs. 1/2
| relatedness of the marginal offspring.
|
| I think you also have to discount the relatedness into the
| future. If the colony you are born into is already established,
| your 5/8 related marginal sibling has a much higher likelihood of
| survival than your 1/2 related marginal offspring when you take
| into account the risk of breaking from the colony and starting
| your own.
|
| That probably goes some way to explaining the first problem of
| multiple fathers. Marginal half-siblings are only 1/4 related to
| the worker, but they may have a greater chance of survival.
| myflash13 wrote:
| 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 a type of barbed
| stinger that doesn't rip their guts out and kill them? Or why do
| they even need a stinger at all, as many insects don't have one?
|
| Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the way
| they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often
| unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as
| bad religion. Why do species survive? Because they were the
| fittest, because they survived. But why?
| sedatk wrote:
| 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 having no hips
| whatsoever. Because it's not a significant parameter in their
| survival. Same with barbed stingers of bees.
| jstanley wrote:
| 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, there's no _contradiction_ , but this is totally
| circular reasoning that could be used to prove anything.
|
| The connection graph between "They survive because they're
| the fittest" and "They must be the fittest because they
| survive" is just a circle disconnected from all other
| knowledge.
|
| Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more
| confused by fiction than by reality.[0]
|
| But with this circular understanding of natural selection,
| you could be given a description of _absolutely any_
| conceivable configuration of organism and your response would
| be the same: "they must be the fittest, because they
| survive, because only the fittest survive" and you haven't
| gained any understanding at all.
|
| There will never be a contradiction, because the argument is
| disconnected from any larger system of reasoning that could
| plausibly contradict it.
|
| "Hey, there is a random monkey in the Amazon that has 3 hoops
| on its head and a big hole through its abdomen, isn't that
| weird? Why are they like that?"
|
| "Ah, the hoops and the holes are required for Fitness. Only
| the Fittest survive, you know. So if they have 3 hoops on
| their heads and big holes in their abdomens, that is what
| makes them Fittest. Amen."
|
| "Why aren't other monkeys like that then?"
|
| "Other monkeys don't need hoops and holes for Fitness.
| Otherwise they too would have hoops and holes. :)"
|
| A better understanding of natural selection would be
| _confused_ about the hoops and the holes, and that
| _confusion_ would correlate with either the random monkey
| species actually not existing, or the model being wrong.
|
| As regards the bees: there probably is a reason that dying
| when stinging confers Fitness. But we should _find out_ what
| that reason is, rather than state "Fitness because Survival"
| and feel like we've answered the question.
|
| [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-
| stren...
| Retric wrote:
| > 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 100 foot long teeth, but we don't live in a world
| without constraints.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > 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.
| stavros wrote:
| What, the fact that their teeth can grow so long that
| they'll circle around and stab their brains?
| kevinventullo wrote:
| 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 expect.
|
| Maybe a better title for the post would be something like,
| "Isn't it weird that bees die when they sting? Shouldn't
| they have evolved away from that?"
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Per everything I've ever read on this, a bee that has
| stung meat is no longer able to survive. It will either
| try to pull itself out and disembowel itself, or it will
| remain stack and die of hunger. What makes you think a
| bee that stings, say, a dog that can't swat it will then
| go on to survive?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Watching a youtube video by a beekeeper demonstrating
| that a bee stuck in his arm will gently wiggle itself
| around until it can pull free and fly away. Between that
| one guy with his live demonstration and his plentiful
| experience being stung by bees, and you with everything
| you've ever read, I'm obviously going to stick with him.
|
| You should read better sources.
|
| Here, an example of how bees behave after stinging meat:
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7wH8dYiGbig
|
| Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo
|
| A bee that stings meat will pull itself out unharmed, _if
| you let it_.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Not at all my experience. My Italian bees are pretty hot
| though, so that may be why. My Russian bees are much
| nicer, and I've never been even stung by one of them, so
| maybe that's it. My hot bees will rip their stinger out
| within a second, and they emit a very particular
| frequency that I feel and that lets me know very quickly
| that I'm in trouble -- to be fair I've only experienced
| that vibration a handful of times because I've gotten
| much better at not leaving any exposed skin or any way
| for them to get in my suit.
|
| All those bee rescue videos you see where the beekeeper
| doesn't wear a veil are not telling you the whole story.
| Before they go work on extracting the hive they'll first
| check that those bees are not hot and angry. If those
| bees are africanized then they'll use a suit and smoke
| and they will not bother making or posting a video about
| it. I.e., those videos are all cherry-picked experiences,
| all the good ones.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Does any of that support the idea that "a bee that has
| stung meat is no longer able to survive"?
|
| This is clearly false. Why repeat it?
| cryptonector wrote:
| The ones that manage to leave the stinger in never
| survive in my case. Idk what to tell you. That's just my
| experience. Can they survive? Yes, they can. Does it
| happen? Yes. Does it happen often? No, I don't think so.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Here is an example of a bee disemboweling itself:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/shorts/u9YDf9w6Ps8
|
| Here is another one:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fMxZ4vKmOZo
|
| So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes
| of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people
| studying bees have written?
|
| For example, this article interviews two bee scientists
| that confirm that the majority of honeybees die via self-
| disembowelment after stinging a human:
|
| https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-die-after-stinging
|
| However, they mention an interesting other thing, that
| may actually help explain what happens much better: bees
| don't die when they sting other insects or spiders, they
| only die when their needles get stuck in our thick skin.
| So perhaps the most likely explanation for the evolution
| and survival of the barbed stinger trait is that it's
| beneficial when bees fight their common enemies, and that
| bees simply don't interact that much with mammals and
| their thick skins.
| imtringued wrote:
| I'm not sure why this answer is buried down so deep. It
| should be pretty obvious.
|
| The average bee has no reason to ever fight a mammal.
| Optimizing for a rare event like that makes no sense.
| It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees
| that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has
| become a frequent occurrence.
|
| Surviving attacks against humans that help you survive is
| a really strange priority.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| To be fair, many forest mammals will try to eat honey
| (bears and honey badgers being just two well known
| examples) and those have skins much thicker than even
| ours, so I suspect that bees have the same issues when
| stinging them. And those mammals are much more of a
| threat to a hive than insects and spiders, as they will
| virtually destroy the entire hive structure if they are
| not deterred, and likely kill thousands of larvae and
| bees.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees
| that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has
| become a frequent occurrence.
|
| This can't possibly be true; the honeyguides are a family
| of birds whose evolved behavior is to find humans and
| lead them to wild beehives so that the humans can forage
| the honey (and the honeyguide can forage the leftovers).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes
| of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people
| studying bees have written?
|
| No? You claimed that bees stinging meat cannot survive.
| Your anecdotes do nothing to support that. Decide what
| you want to say, then look for support. Where do you get
| the idea that two examples of something happening provide
| just as much support for the idea that it always happens
| as four examples of it not happening do for the idea that
| it doesn't always happen?
|
| But for what it's worth, Aristotle wrote in the 4th
| century BC that bees stinging humans often recover, but
| that they will inevitably die _if they lose their
| stinger_.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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?
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > 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.
|
| If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in some
| individual bees, but many other bees didn't have them,
| like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then I'd
| agree.
|
| But a trait can't be universal in a species, and even in
| many related species, unless there is explicit selective
| pressure _for_ that trait, or if it 's a remnant from a
| common ancestor that had it. Your high cholesterol
| predisposition example is actually perfect, it shows what
| happens with traits that don't have significant pressure
| for or against them: they remain confined to a subset of
| the population.
|
| > 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.
|
| They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation
| that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the
| organism still viable is extremely low.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in
| some individual bees, but many other bees didn't have
| them, like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then
| I'd agree.
|
| What makes you believe they are _not_ a "variation" in
| individual bees? Colony genetics are fascinating and can
| facilitate some pretty extreme variation.
|
| Could a single queen's mutation be responsible for all
| barbs? You have some hidden constraints here that I don't
| think we agree on.
|
| > They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation
| that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the
| organism still viable is extremely low.
|
| This is simply wrong. There are always plenty of
| potential mutations that cripple viability, sure. But
| pleiotropy in general is relatively common. In some
| species more than others.
|
| Your reasoning here is heavily flawed. You firmly believe
| evolution and genetics work in a particular way that
| simply does not reflect reality. You are putting your
| belief in "survival of the fittest" first. I encourage
| you to broaden your horizons.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _" It's not a big disadvantage to survival" can't be
| the explanation for a trait_
|
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, traits can propagate even if there is no selective
| pressure for them. But they won't reach 100% of the
| species, even less so 100% of several geographically
| separated species (such as African and European bees)
| just because they aren't that bad. Could we contrive a
| story where it could be possible something like this does
| happen? Sure, but it would be very unlikely (basically,
| it would require only a small population that happened to
| have this minor handicap to have randomly survived some
| mass extinction event that killed off the entirety of the
| rest of the species).
| mibsl wrote:
| IIRC genetic drift can reach 100%.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| _This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed
| them before being super organisms_
|
| I don't know where you got that. It seems perfectly
| plausible that the stingers evolved in the superorganism,
| and that the selective pressure was something like
| "drones protect the hive via stingers which kill them"
| versus "drones can't sting at all".
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This is a different argument, one which I can agree with.
| I was specifically saying that the argument for how a
| species acquired a universal trait can't be "because it
| didn't hurt their fitness that much", you have to have
| positive pressure for a trait to spread to the entire
| species (or it must be a trait left over from an ancestor
| where it had these pressures).
| iwontberude wrote:
| How is it circular to argue why one species would do better
| in an environment than another based on phenotype and the
| physical interactions it enables? It's all relative to
| other species. As long as you understand that, there is no
| logical fallacy. I do very much appreciate the focus on
| informal logic though.
| jstanley wrote:
| Because you could encounter _absolutely any_ organism and
| make the same argument. There is no configuration of
| organism that would cause you to say "huh, I guess
| Survival doesn't depend on Fitness after all!"
|
| Because it takes the observation of Survival and uses it
| to infer Fitness, at the same time as saying that Fitness
| confers Survival.
| glenstein wrote:
| >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 argument falls apart. For starters,
| species go extinct all the time for reasons tied to their
| evolutionary trajectory. And there are species still
| living that unfortunately seem very imperfectly adapted
| to their constraints and likely to go extinct without a
| run of good luck or human intervention (e.g. pandas). We
| seem perfectly capable of recognizing when such species
| are "on the ropes". Additionally there are relative
| advantages we can clearly observe from animals in
| overlapping niches, and we can marvel at the
| effectiveness of adaptations in ways that don't involve
| circular assumptions (e.g. algae's capability for
| efficient growth is astonishing and without equal on the
| planet).
|
| And, we could surely conceive of preposterous examples
| that defy expectations (e.g. the other commenter's
| example of mice with 100ft teeth).
|
| It probably _feels like_ it proves too much, because it
| 's confirmed over and over again in nature everywhere, at
| all times. But in an alternate world where that wasn't
| the case, counter-examples would abound (such as the
| mouse with 100ft teeth). So re-iterating the core lesson
| about the role of natural selection is not just a
| circular assumption, it's the culmination of hard earned,
| accumulated evidence, ready at any moment to be
| falsified.
|
| The honeybee is a perfect example, because the stinger
| _does_ pose a real question about how we understand it 's
| relation to fitness, and it requires delving into all
| kinds of complicated dynamics about genetically related
| drones are to the queen, the role of the sacrifice in
| supporting the hive and so-on. If we didn't have
| explanations like those, it would indeed pose a problem
| with explanations that presume fitness.
|
| That's a real payoff from being alert to the need to have
| robust explanations; I don't think anyone is just saying
| "well it's fitness" and calling it a day so much as
| they're honoring the explanatory power of a well
| confirmed theory.
| dwattttt wrote:
| Translating the word Fitness from a term of art makes
| this very clear: if you said "good enough to survive", no
| one would question the statement "I wonder why they
| survive. Guess they must be 'good enough to survive'".
| myflash13 wrote:
| > 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 wasn't fit
| enough. If you assume survival of the fittest then of
| course it is true.
|
| Here's another circular explanation: things are the way
| they are because God created it that way. This
| explanation rises to the top precisely because it has
| explanatory power all across nature without evident
| counter-example, right?
| labster wrote:
| Actually your example of creationist species isn't
| circular at all, it just has no predictive power. Unless
| you want to say that God really likes beetles, I suppose.
|
| In the end evolution is random, but exerts some pressure
| towards fitness in some environments. Some traits are
| legacy or are just plain random; just because an organism
| has a trait does not mean it is useful now, or indeed has
| ever been useful for fitness. The whole package must be
| reasonably fit for some environment, but that doesn't
| mean all the traits improve fitness.
| 8note wrote:
| 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.
| labster wrote:
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Again, this is circular logic. You assumed that the only
| reason that species go extinct is because it wasn't fit
| enough.
|
| 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.
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| This whole line of argument from the parent comment and
| its ancestor seems to ignore we can see where certain
| evolutionary features reach local minima, like the retina
| of the human eye. It's obviously not the fittest thing
| wrt the octopus retina, but does well enough you can read
| this.
| notRobot wrote:
| "Fittest" is what we call those who happen to survive in
| their context. Systems that successfully replicate
| themselves in their context tend to stick around. Those who
| can't, _go extinct_. We obviously still study why they
| survived. That 's what the article speculates about. So
| yes, in a sense, any organisms you see is the "fittest" in
| the sense that it was able to survive (replicate) in its
| context while countless others were not.
| icehawk wrote:
| > The connection graph between "They survive because
| they're the fittest" and "They must be the fittest because
| they survive" is just a circle disconnected from all other
| knowledge.
|
| The GP said that bees survived because they're "fit enough"
| not that they survive because they're "the fittest" and
| there are definitely species that don't seem to be
| surviving because they're not fit enough.
| shwouchk wrote:
| 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?
| darkerside wrote:
| This assumes that Fitness is a meaningless aphorism. I
| would posit that Fitness is a meaningful concept that can
| be learned. It is defined by what happens to be
| reproductively helpful to a species, which is tautological,
| but to understand the definition, it just means you need to
| understand that particular species ecosystem and lifecycle.
|
| If you really analyze any word, it loses all meaning except
| what we've assigned it.
| RangerScience wrote:
| Survival of the fittest is the flawed quote, usually used by
| those with supremacist conceptual frameworks (that there can be
| an objective "better", etc). This shows up a lot in fiction,
| where the quote is used as justification for cruelty,
| atrocities, and the like.
|
| IMHO, the much better quote is:
|
| > It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the
| most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most
| adaptable to change.
|
| See https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about-darwin/six-
| thin...
| HPsquared wrote:
| I'm very tickled by the lack of attention to detail here. The
| article does present that quote, yes, but it's preceded by
| the sentence:
|
| "None of the fake soundbites is more insidious than the
| first:"
|
| i.e. it's a fake quote
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > It is the one that is most adaptable to change
|
| That is what fit means.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It is not only the best adapted class that survives, aka the
| "fittest." They only need to be good enough to survive and
| reproduce. In other words, the principle should be stated as
| "survival of the good enough." I know it doesn't roll off the
| tongue as well, but is more accurate.
|
| Perhaps, survival of the fit. (period)
| notRobot wrote:
| Here's an explanation of how this works:
|
| All creatures are very complicated. Thus reproduction doesn't
| produce perfect clones, "mutations" take place. This is largely
| because there are so many different ways to derive one
| individual out of two individuals' complex genitic material.
| This is all a feature. This is why individuals have unique
| characteristics. Think about how different humans are from each
| other, even though we're all _humans_. This same thing applies
| to all creatures. Every individual is different. Those who have
| "disabilities" (disadvantages in their context) are less likely
| to survive. So those with advantageous traits survive and pass
| their traits on through reproduction, making those specific
| traits more prevalent.
|
| The answer to "why didn't x evolve to do y?" is usually just
| that that specific mutation might have never occurred or caught
| on randomly. This is also why different species do different
| things differently. It's all random mutations. Some were
| beneficial in their context and environment so those who had
| them were more likely to survive and pass those traits along.
|
| It's not that "the objective of life is to survive" in a
| spiritual sense, it's that life randomly happens and some of it
| survives and it makes more life like itself. In some ways, I
| suppose the purpose of life is to create more life. Systems
| that replicate themselves successfully survive. We call these
| "life". It's really a linguistics thing.
|
| Hope some of this makes sense. I enjoyed thinking about this.
| myflash13 wrote:
| If your answer is "it's a random mutation" then that settles
| the "why" question permanently. Why all this idle speculation
| about bee's stingers, then? It was a random mutation, and it
| survived, done.
| notRobot wrote:
| 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.
| myflash13 wrote:
| Still doesn't explain why other species in the same
| context survived without it or with an opposite trait.
| afavour wrote:
| Sure? Doesn't mean the species-specific examination isn't
| interesting.
| autoexec wrote:
| Why shouldn't different or even "opposite" traits also be
| successful? When faced with random inheritable
| differences across different species over long periods of
| time why wouldn't the result be a variety of them, every
| one of which just didn't prevent reproduction from
| passing those traits on to the next generation? Some
| traits might be seen as "better" or "worse" by comparison
| but as long as they get passed on, we'll see both. It
| isn't about being "best". It's about being "good enough"
| asdff wrote:
| Because the trait is not the end all be all. It's a
| random walk to an outcome that leads to enough offspring
| to survive for the species to be there at all. It's
| probably not even the most optimal solution whatever is
| there, just happens to be competitive among the rest of
| the ecology to not be snuffed out.
|
| You might be interested in this concept:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape
| stouset wrote:
| > Why do species survive? Because they did, and because the
| objective of life is to survive. But why?
|
| In evolutionary biology, that _definitionally_ is the ultimate
| answer. One species survived, another didn't. Sometimes that's
| because the adaptation helped them outcompete, sometimes it's
| because they were already competitive and this preexisting
| disadvantage from an earlier round didn't hurt enough to
| matter. We can try to find intuitive explanations past that
| which feel satisfying but it's always going to be a rough
| approximation.
|
| Let's use chess as an analogy. Allow an engine to analyze a
| position and tell us the best path forward. But why did it
| choose that line? We can (and do) come up with explanations
| that help us fit a move into our understanding of the game:
| moving this pawn allows that knight to occupy a better spot
| where it can exert its influence on the rest of the board, or
| whatever. But that's merely a convenient simplification for our
| gut understanding. It's not _really_ the actual answer. The
| ultimate "why" is "because it produces the best possible
| eventual outcome no matter the response".
| johndhi wrote:
| Love this comment. It highlights a major misunderstanding of
| biology that many people who didn't study it in depth have:
| that every, or most features of living beings do not have an
| "evolutionary explanation." T-rex arms aren't short so they can
| open flowers - they just happen to be small because that's the
| type of creature that happened to survive after a lot of
| changes.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Maybe this explains why humans are snoring? It just wasn't /
| isn't evolutionary important.
| prerok wrote:
| Well, the explanation I heard is that snoring provided
| protection during sleeping to scare away predators. I don't
| know the source for this theory, so take it with a grain of
| salt :)
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I heard that too, but it doesn't sound likely. If I was
| sleeping and there was a predator passing by, I would
| prefer it didn't notice me... :)
| pandemic_region wrote:
| The fact that heavier (and thus more attractive as prey)
| people are more likely to snore could give credibility to
| your explanation.
| newsuser wrote:
| Most likely, yes, like the loudness of baby crying. Humans
| are pack animals so any predator attracted by snoring or
| baby cry, and deciding to check it out would be in a very
| very big trouble.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >many people who didn't study it in depth have
|
| Or are incapable of studying/reflecting in depth.
| pks016 wrote:
| 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.
| myflash13 wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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.
| trgn wrote:
| women go to the bathroom together because if you squat to pee
| in the tall grass of the savannah you need somebody to lookout
| for predators
| amelius wrote:
| The main problem I see with how some popular science
| journalists approach evolutionary biology is that they always
| think from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to the
| group.
| ripitout wrote:
| Love how the top comment is "I don't see how evolution explains
| everything in biology". Classic HN.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| 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_.
| atorodius wrote:
| > 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
| wruza wrote:
| Imagine taking your favorite fractal <formula here> and picking
| a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to
| explain what happens there. Would you be better satisfied by
| <formula> 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 random
| point in one of _its_ non-trivial regions, trying to explain
| what happens there. Now ask yourself the same question and what
| comes to mind.
|
| More short analogy would be that biology is physics with all
| elementary particles being different.
| enugu wrote:
| This is an interesting analogy, thanks.
|
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| This analogy doesn't really answer it, it only shows that
| there's no generic answer. So "fittest" basically means
| "the result". It's a definition, not explanation. But it is
| used instead of "the result" because we have some insights
| into _how_ it was calculated, and we know that the nature
| simply creates {mi,bi,tri}llions of variants and then some
| minuscle amount has better chances to pass and mix these
| genes, outplaying others in this game. That's where fittest
| comes from. Any attempt to explain it fully meets with a
| local complexity, in which only high-level questions can be
| answered in the same limited high-level manner. So there is
| some compressibility, but it's clearly jpeg. Cause if a
| whole planet of distinct particles would strictly follow
| some rule to compress the observations into, it would be a
| rule of physics, not biology. E.g. why do animals fall to
| the ground? Due to gravity, here's <formula>, works for
| all particles.
| enugu wrote:
| Sure, you won't get exact predictions on which genetic
| codes are realized. Similar to how statistical physics
| doesn't predict microstates, but the macro picture is
| understood. Even that might be too ambitious for
| complicated systems, but you can still have sensible
| predictions from evolution theory which looks at a
| landscape and says that there will be animals with tall
| necks and predators with very fast speeds even if you
| didn't know beforehand about giraffes and cheetahs.
|
| In the fractal analogy, the compressed theory does not
| predict that exactly this point does/does-not lie on the
| fractal, but predicting whether a small disc around the
| point intersects the fractal.
| raincole wrote:
| I think you misunderstood what people mean by "why" in the
| context of evolution.
|
| For example, you ask a random person what his job is.
|
| He: I fix TVs
|
| You: Why?
|
| He: Uh, that's what keeps a roof over me and keeps my family
| fed?
|
| You: But clearly other humans do other jobs and still have
| roofs. So it's not a real "why". Your statement is falsified.
|
| > Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the
| way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also
| often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular
| logic as bad religion
|
| How DNA works at molecular level is science. How creators
| became what they are now is _history_. History usually doesn 't
| have the same level of falsifiability as science does.
| raincole wrote:
| * creators -> creatures
|
| This typo somehow fits the theme in a discussion over
| evolution ;P
| kragen wrote:
| > _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.
| _orz_ wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway519 wrote:
| Why did the spaghetti monster give bee srings barbs?
|
| Because the bees prayed for protection and got saucy about it.
|
| Is that better? Are you really looking for equivalence? Is that
| fit enough?
|
| Instead of spreading evolution FUD, there are many0laces you
| could educate yourself. S9meone with a HN acvount is more than
| able to seek these out. Therefore your motives for this comment
| seen more disingenuous.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| I have a personal theory that genetics and survival just need
| to be good enough. They may find other local maxima and improve
| things. But they don't need to be perfect in every dimension.
| There is room for stuff that doesn't make sense to human logic.
| In addition because species don't generally breed with other
| species you need to find those optimisations through chance
| within a species. And genes are not a feature list. Turn one
| gene on and something else may turn off. There are trade off
| too.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| I can't believe no one has mentioned, this is exactly the
| teleological fallacy.
|
| 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.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Evolution isn't a perfect engineer
| yieldcrv wrote:
| this is wild because the article starts off with explaining how
| "why" is a bad question, and then doubles down on this entire
| thesis explaining why a bee dies when it stings _you_ , a human,
| and the evolutionary nature supporting it
|
| except, its entirely wrong and the foreshadowing about "why" was
| super important: bees don't 'expect' to die when they sting you.
| they can sting many creatures and not get their abdomen ripped
| out because the barb doesn't get stuck in the thing they stung.
| _just like wasps_.
|
| so this 20 page dissertation is completely baseless.
| metalman wrote:
| Bee's are a product of many millions of years of evolution, so
| the why, is that it works! Ever watch bees?, bugs?, other things,
| up close and in the danger zone? I do. A bee's stinger will embed
| in you, or me, and then the venom sack rips right out of the bee
| and it is possible to watch the venom sack pump venom without the
| bee itself attached anymore. I was attending my mother in her
| herb garden and commented on there bieng honey bees around, which
| she disputed, so I caught one, and held its legs while it tried
| to sting me, and showed her this, but my hands are so callused,
| that its stinger would not go in, then I let it go. She says I am
| an improbable creature, and describes me bieng a half Vulcan and
| half Klingon.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| 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. Assuming honey bees'
| genetic variation is not much more extreme than human variation,
| we're talking about 99.5% vs. 99.75% sharing, which sounds more
| like an explanation of why altruism would be preferred in general
| rather than uniquely affecting bees.
|
| The article does eventually circle around to acknowledge this,
| but it's easy to miss and very underdeveloped compared to the
| discussion of kin selection: "So why do bees die when they sting
| you? Perhaps because they're disposable parts of a larger super-
| organism which has evolved by multi-level selection."
| prerok wrote:
| 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.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Based on the information I found, the % difference between
| two randoms humans in terms of base pairs (including non-
| coding DNA) is even less than the difference in terms of
| genes, so the distinction does not materially alter the
| discussion. Also the article framed its explanation in terms
| of genes, not base pair sequence.
|
| "Between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation--
| biochemical individuality--is about .1 percent."
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20363/
|
| https://book.bionumbers.org/how-genetically-similar-are-
| two-...
|
| Forensic comparisons are mostly about comparing the number of
| short tandem repeats at handful of loci, a very small part of
| the the whole genome.
|
| If you have any information that indicates the DNA similarity
| between people is less than 98-99% I would love to hear it. I
| have not personally analyzed the sequences from the 1000
| genome project to check, and am relying on summaries written
| by other people.
| prerok wrote:
| I see, thank you for the explanation!
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It doesn't matter how much bees have in common. The idea is
| that in bees, altruistic traits, that is those that produce
| more sisters by helping the queen have a 75% chance of being
| passed, because sisters share 75% of a worker bee genes. Most
| of the genes are the same, of course, bees won't become dogs or
| anything like that, but a few of them differ, and these are the
| one that matter.
|
| Could worker bees be fertile and have a selfish traits that let
| them have more children, they would only have a 50% chance of
| passing these, because children share 50% of genes.
|
| So: 75% of altruistic genes pass vs 50% of selfish genes.
| Altruistic genes win. Humans can't pass 75% of their genome
| this way, so that altruistic genes have no intrinsic advantage
| over selfish genes.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Right, "sharing" here must mean DNA that was cloned from the
| same ancestral DNA strand, not merely that it shares the same
| informational content. I got lost in the analogies that frame
| things in terms of what's "better" for the organism and lost
| sight of this.
|
| The most important thing from the perspective of replication
| of a DNA strand is the number of copies of DNA passed to the
| next generation, and future generations, right? Which would
| be 0.75 * (mean marginal increase in next-generation sisters)
| + 0.5 * (mean # offspring). The probability that these next-
| generation individuals actually get to reproduce in turn
| would also factor in somewhere.
|
| What's also interesting is that if we take the point of view
| of the queen (through whom the altruistic genes must pass),
| the queen's reproductive strategy is relatively few children
| + hordes of sterile helpers + killing her own sisters. So are
| we talking about a fitness advantage of altruistic traits
| (maximizing # sisters), or a fitness advantage from selfish
| traits [maximizing P(fertile child survival) I guess, since #
| children is small] that produce hordes of sterile helpers?
|
| Edit: Circling back to the organism perspective, in the sense
| of "I would gladly give up my life for two brothers or eight
| cousins.", how many bees is it worth giving up one's own life
| for in that specific sense? We do have a common ancestor
| after all and thus a non-zero R-factor.
| erikig wrote:
| TLDR;
|
| Suicidal altruism and costly signaling for the survival of the
| super-organism. Also, zombie poison delivery pumps.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Am I the only one who grew up with bees dying after stinging
| carrying a sort of unspoken significance or meaning?
|
| I don't think I ever heard someone actually state it, but growing
| up I had the feeling that bees dying when they sting you was in
| some sense "significant" because it meant that bees had to be
| selective in when they chose to resort to violence.
|
| It was almost like an unspoken fable or illustration about the
| importance of controlling aggression.
| ianbicking wrote:
| It points to another evolutionary pressure that isn't mentioned
| as often: if an animal is too aggressive humans will
| exterminate it.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I had this experience with a wasp nest near my house. I
| figured "live and let live" until one day I walked out my
| door and a wasp flew directly over and stung me without
| provocation. So I got some insecticide and got rid of the
| nest.
| praveen9920 wrote:
| Stepping back a little and try to projecting that logic onto
| humans, are we more like super organisms? Interestingly, Our
| social constructs does have similarities of both superorganism
| and non- superorganism
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| It's even more extreme than that. If you took a random sampling
| of humans to a version of Earth that had never experienced
| humans, it would not go well. We're heavily dependant on
| society and modern technology. We've evolved together.
|
| E.g. smaller birth canals and C-sections.
| cryptonector wrote:
| 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 to hatch or have
| hatched already. She also has to possibly use her stinger when
| she goes out to mate (though she does go with attendants who will
| defend her if attacked).
|
| I was surprised not to find mention of this in TFA.
|
| > A honey bee dies when it stings you because its stinger is
| covered in barbs, causing its abdomen to get ripped out when it
| tries to fly away. And surviving with your guts spilling out
| everywhere is pretty bloody hard.
|
| There's another interesting detail here: when the worker tries to
| fly off after stinging, she has to try _really_ hard because the
| barbs hold the stinger in place, and trying hard causes two
| things to happen: - noise that attracts other
| workers to attack the same creature -
| spreading of the dying bee's distress pheromones that
| also attract other workers to sting the same
| creature
|
| So when you get stung by a bee near other bees you will be in
| trouble. That's how you go from one sting to hundreds. And
| hundreds is enough to kill a human. That's why you don't go near
| a hive without protection. Being in or near a swarm is safer than
| being near a hive: the bees in a swarm don't have much (larvae,
| honey) to protect, so they don't attack.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Useful reminder nature is terrifying even at its smallest. I'm
| a little surprised this wasn't taught to me in school.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Yeah: caterpillar parasites
| teeray wrote:
| The queen bee is a formidable final boss with a bad-ass origin
| story.
| cryptonector wrote:
| She's also her daughters' slave. They make her work (lay
| eggs). They decide when to make new queens. They decide when
| to swarm with the old queen, and when they do they put her on
| a diet first so she can lose weight so she can fly (they
| won't let her eat much for two weeks), and they'll push her
| out of the hive when the time comes.
|
| Humans only really get stung by queen honeybees when
| manipulating them. Normally the queen will be inside the hive
| and stay inside the hive except once or twice early in her
| life when she goes out to mate.
| stavros wrote:
| Why does she go out to mate? Aren't the drones in the hive?
| geoka9 wrote:
| Maybe for the same reason we don't marry our cousins? :)
| Jedd wrote:
| I think two answers, though as per TFA there's probably a
| lot more behind this:
|
| First, she wants to get the _best_ genetic material, and
| flying high is one of those tests for drones to pass, and
|
| Second, needs to acquire genetic material from different
| bloodlines, hence does the business with several drones
| (obviously not an option within the hive).
| cryptonector wrote:
| The drones in the hive are her brothers. She needs more
| gentic diversity, so she goes out to mate with other
| colonies' drones. Her attendants know where to go find
| them because they've scouted them before.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| The drones are also clones (?) of the prior queen. They
| are unfertilized eggs, so they contain a genetic copy of
| half the queen's DNA. Mating with a drone from you hive
| would be like mating directly with your genetic mother.
| It's going to result in real bad inbreeding real quickly.
| Especially since queens mate a single time, and live for
| only a few years.
| cryptonector wrote:
| They're like half-clones, yeah. Queens can mate more than
| once though, but usually just once, and if more than once
| just twice. A well-mated queen will have sperm from a
| dozen different drones.
| stavros wrote:
| Ahh, thank you, I thought she mated with her own drones
| and was wondering how they got any genetic diversity like
| that.
| inopinatus wrote:
| it's a Game of Drones
| fuzztester wrote:
| Do you Lisp?
| ianbicking wrote:
| 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.
| cryptonector wrote:
| 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?).
| fuzztester wrote:
| Checked them. Found:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee
| cryptonector wrote:
| > Africanized honey bees are typically much more
| defensive, react to disturbances faster, and chase people
| further (400 metres (1,300 ft)) than other varieties of
| honey bees.
|
| My bees will chase me about 200 yards, and probably more
| if I had to go further to go inside a building (they
| don't like dark places). They lay ambushes, too. They'll
| wait outside the building I go into and will attack again
| if I go out.
|
| Well, they used to anyways. Since switching to top-bar
| hive bodies they're much nicer.
| treis wrote:
| >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.
| ajuc wrote:
| 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
| cryptonector wrote:
| There are bees that are monogamous, where the female and the
| male act a lot more like birds as far as mating and young
| rearing goes, and there are eusocial bees that where the
| female absolutely dominates.
|
| Honeybees keep very few males (drones) around, and in the
| Fall they push them out of the hive and let them die of
| exposure to the elements. Honeybee workers work themselves to
| death. The queen is their slave. It's a pretty crappy life,
| but they make wonderful honey, and they collect wonderful
| propolis.
| zamfi wrote:
| > It's a pretty crappy life
|
| By human standards, sure.
|
| Weird take I know, but since only one female bee in the
| hive passes along her genes (which are shared with the
| other bees), it's a very different incentive structure.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| From what I can tell, the entire hive is "the" organism,
| and individual bees are like cells in the body. There was
| an episode of _Cosmos_ , where Neil deGrasse Tyson
| described bees as the other of two major intelligences on
| Earth, and suggested their structure as a model for alien
| visitors[0].
|
| If we judged ourselves by the cells in our body, we'd
| probably conclude that humans aren't "happy."
|
| White blood cells basically run suicide missions against
| intruders, so they are sort of like swarming worker bees.
|
| [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ubE9hjrsHmI
| ivankelly wrote:
| The bees in a swarm have filled themselves with food before
| swarming, so they're stuffed, so it's hard to flex the abdomen
| to make a sting
| cryptonector wrote:
| Yes, there is this too.
| the_af wrote:
| 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 location in my arm, and it hurt a lot. I was stung in the
| same body part by the swarm, not in random locations.
|
| No wasps were harmed during this accident.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Wasps absolutely have attack pheromones, and they absolutely
| spread those when they get injured (in the same way that bees
| do when they're injured) and when they attack (but here they
| might be able to do it "consciously"?).
|
| What's nice about wasp stings is that because the stinger
| with the venom pouch and pump doesn't get stuck in your skin
| you get a much smaller dose than with a bee sting.
|
| When I've been stung by bees where the stinger didn't get
| stuck in my skin the sting was no big deal. When the stinger
| gets stuck in my skin it's much worse.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Wasp bites are a lot more painful than mosquito bites.
| the_af wrote:
| Mosquito bites are not painful at all to me.
|
| 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.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >Mosquito bites are not painful at all to me.
|
| interesting. I had a friend who was like that. once he
| invited me to a jazz concert near a river in the city
| where we both lived. river = mosquitoes. it was around 7
| to 8 p.m. there was a shitload of mosquitoes around, and
| they were biting me and other people like mad, but he
| seemed completely unaffected. I asked him, aren't you
| being troubled by them? he said no.
|
| I had had enough, and ran away from both the concert and
| those mosquitoes.
|
| I have been stung by wasps a few times, and it is a lot
| more painful than a mosquito bite.
|
| yellowjacket seems to be an American term. I had to look
| it up.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowjacket
| the_af wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I hate mosquitoes and don't like
| being stung (both because of dengue fever risks in the
| case of aedes, and because it itches a lot afterwards),
| but I never find their bite painful. I suppose it depends
| on the kind of mosquito? I do know -- cause I've been
| bitten -- that _horseflies_ hurt like hell, because their
| mouth parts have evolved to pierce cattle skin!
|
| "Yellowjacket" is the translation I found for a kind of
| wasp we have in Argentina's Patagonia, where we call them
| "chaquetas" (Spanish for jackets). I think they might be
| imports and not native though, but now they are _very_
| frequent in our region.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Depends on the wasp/bee species. Not all of them swarm. Also,
| ants are related to wasps, and you will see similar behavior
| with them.
|
| I had a friend, when I was a kid, that shot a white-faced
| hornet nest (not actually hornets -they are big yellowjackets
| -even worse) with a BB gun, from, like, 50 meters away.
|
| The hornets figured out who shot their nest, and swarmed him.
| May have just been that they attacked any nearby critters,
| but he certainly paid for his folly.
|
| White-faced hornets are better to have in your yard, than
| yellowjackets. They are a lot less aggressive, only attacking
| if their nest is at risk. They also eat yellowjackets, so you
| have hornets _or_ yellowjackets, but not both.
| the_af wrote:
| Wow. Those hornets seem surprisingly clever.
|
| I know Yellowjackets, we have them in Argentina. Their bite
| is said to be _extremely painful_ but I haven 't been
| bitten yet despite some pretty reckless behavior on my
| part.
|
| One nice afternoon I was having a snack in a cafeteria, by
| the open window, and a bunch of yellowjackets started
| dipping in my drinks and my pie. Apparently they like raw
| meat (locals use it to drive them away from their own food)
| but I only had sweet stuff on my table. I got annoyed and
| killed a bunch of them with my bare hands, with no
| repercussions (killing dangerous insects with your fists or
| palms is surprisingly easy if you strike fast against a
| flat surface -- obviously I waited till they moved away
| from my stuff).
|
| I was later told this was a terrible idea because their
| bite is very painful (see above: I'm not the smartest about
| bugs and have been bitten more than once due to
| recklessness!).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| White-faced hornets[0] are a lot more painful than
| yellowjackets[1] (they are about twice as big, but pretty
| much the same configuration).
|
| I don't think yellowjackets will swarm, if a forager gets
| killed. Don't step on one of their nests, though (they
| dig holes). Also have a friend who did that, once. Also,
| if you get close to one of their nests (hard to see),
| they might swarm you.
|
| The biggest difference, is that yellowjackets are much
| more aggressive foragers, so it's easy to piss off
| individuals. I had [yet another] friend that imbibed one
| that went into his can of soda. He tells me the
| experience left his lip swollen like a cartoon, for
| several days.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolichovespula_maculata
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowjacket
| cryptonector wrote:
| Neither bees nor wasps will swarm if far from their nests
| mainly because there won't be many as they forage in a
| solitary manner.
|
| But when hornets attack as a group, then they swarm, and
| they use their pheromones to aid in swarming. See:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onq9ixC7OEg
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D00mEROqKwU
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx2EA_ooCf0
|
| where beekeepers use sticky sheets to get one hornet and
| then all the other hornets will join the one because they
| are all attracted to its aid by its pheromones.
| the_af wrote:
| > _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 to hatch or have hatched already_
|
| But in this particular case the queen is no different from
| worker bees, right? They wouldn't die either from stinging
| other bees...
| cryptonector wrote:
| My understanding is that the barbs in the stingers don't get
| stuck in insects, but I don't know if that's a fact. At any
| rate the queen is sometimes irreplaceable, so she needs every
| survival advantage possible.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| Great point about the queen bee. The queen also uses her
| stinger inside her own hive. If the hive believes she is
| nearing the end of her reproductive abilities, they'll rear
| other queens. She has to defend her position and quickly goes
| to kill the new queens when they emerge or she'll be replaced.
| Beekeepers generally replace their queens every 2 years or so,
| and have to remove the old queen to prevent this behavior as
| well.
|
| > That's why you don't go near a hive without protection.
|
| This is true and recommended for just about everyone.. however,
| I have known some beekeepers that can do it. If you smoke the
| bees well, they'll get calm enough that they won't sting. It's
| thought to be likely because the smoke covers pheromones, and
| also because the smoke causes the bees to begin hoarding honey
| in case they need to quickly leave a burning hive.
|
| I was never brave enough to attempt it, however during my time
| beekeeping I was amazed at how magical smoke was. Picking up
| handfuls of bees in their hive and not being swarmed feels like
| a super power.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > I was never brave enough to attempt it, however during my
| time beekeeping I was amazed at how magical smoke was.
| Picking up handfuls of bees in their hive and not being
| swarmed feels like a super power.
|
| I'm not brave enough to attempt it either, except -maybe,
| someday- with a) smoke, b) a veil instead of a suit, c) nukes
| rather than mature hives, d) in top-bar hive bodies rather
| than Langstroth boxes. Fuck Langstroth boxes -- you can't
| help but kill bees in those boxes, and the moment you kill
| one you're in trouble. Top-bar hives make it much much easier
| to not kill any bees.
| cryptonector wrote:
| BTW, when I get stung, if the stinger doesn't get stuck I
| sometimes don't even notice till much later -- this happens
| when I get stung through my gloves. If the stinger does get
| stuck in my skin the first thing I notice is the buzzing of the
| bee that stung me. The frequency of the buzzing of the bee that
| stung me and that is trying to rip off the stinger is
| absolutely terrifying because I know what comes next: a dozen
| more bees will flock right to where the one bee stung me and
| will all try to sting me, and since the one bee was able to it
| might be the case that her sisters will succeed as well. That
| buzzing spreads her injury pheromones, and the frequency of its
| sound also acts as a very loud and clear signal to her sisters.
| The buzzing lasts about 1 second or less; the pain from the
| sting comes a second or two later. It takes her sisters about 1
| to 2 seconds to find the bee that stings successfully. Getting
| stung by a dozen bees at once is panic inducing, and the
| swelling that will create will take two weeks to subside. I was
| stung 13 times at once one time, and 5 times another time. It's
| no fun.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Why are bee stings such a common occurance to you? Are you a
| beekeeper?
| cryptonector wrote:
| I am.
| majgr wrote:
| What I noticed is that pitch of buzzing is higher when bee is
| attacking, not after sting. Higher pitch means probably
| higher frequency of wings, so bee has more velocity and it is
| more nimble. When I was kid visiting frequently a place with
| 100 hives in a summer. I started to recognize that pitch of
| attacking bee and learned to keep head lower, between arms.
| Sometimes I was chased by a bee several tens of meters. It is
| good to use cover of some trees or bushes. I believe bees are
| aroused by smell of venom itself. Sometimes, when hive is
| opened, bees turn their abdomen higher, towards opening
| showing stings. I think I saw that drops of venom forms
| around end of sting. Smoke particles, probably bonds to venom
| vapors, neutralizing its influence on other bees, because
| after couple smoke puffs venom smell is not noticeable any
| more. Also, smoke causes bees to change their process, from
| ,,intruder alert", to ,,tree is burning", and are turning on
| ventilation. Each summer, first sting swelled the worst, but
| consecutive ones were less so, so I think some tolerance
| develops, but it won't last a year. The worst is being stung
| in fingertip, because it causes nail deformation, for some
| time.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Oh for sure, they do buzz differently when they are in
| protec/attac mode.
| cryptonector wrote:
| It's not just ventilation. When they smell smoke they also
| go eat a bunch of honey so they can swarm away with the
| queen and start over elsewhere.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Nice, another beek!
|
| I have had a hive where I had queens that lived quite fine
| together. Weirdest hive as one of them was a _caucasia_ and the
| other a _cordovan_. Never did get stung with those ladies.
|
| Mine was by accident, but I hear that some beeks do it since
| cannot get the genetic combination, they just do it as a
| mechanical combo, to get preferred traits. Like _buckfast_ and
| _russian_ to help with swarming and defensiveness.
| cryptonector wrote:
| I've heard of queens co-existing, yeah, but that must be very
| rare. I wonder if somehow they either smell close enough to
| the same that they and the workers don't notice, or if they
| are sufficiently different that they don't recognize their
| smells as those of other queens.
| credit_guy wrote:
| For some reason I was never afraid of bees. I have a cousin who
| keeps bees, and she showed me a bee hive once. Neither of use
| used any masks or gloves. I remember when she showed me the
| queen, and I was pointing at it to make sure I got it right,
| she told me to not touch her, because then the other bees will
| sense the foreign smell on her and will kill her. In any case,
| I was surrounded by thousands of bees, but none stang me or my
| cousin. There's some urban legend that bees smell you, and
| depending on the smell they decide to attack you or not. I
| suppose I drew the lucky lottery ticket.
| ciupicri wrote:
| Does TFA stand for "the f...ine article"?
| cryptonector wrote:
| And/or the fine author.
| permo-w wrote:
| the featured article
| cruftbox wrote:
| Hobby 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.
| isityouyesitsme wrote:
| your comment was excellent.
|
| I couldn't read past the article's pretentious opening.
| majgr wrote:
| Sometimes I observed how it worked after being stung by a bee.
| It is better to remove sting using force from one side. When
| two fingertips are used to remove a sting all venom is being
| pushed into the wound.
| _orz_ wrote:
| 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.
| gunian wrote:
| Kind of got me thinking is there any tool or is someone working
| on something that can parse a DNA and give you the end result for
| any species? If not what's the main challenge
|
| Would be a cool challenge for all the quantum supremacy folk
| supernova87a wrote:
| The interesting question to me is, "does the _bee_ know it's
| going to die if it stings you?"
|
| And therefore, acts judiciously in deciding when, if ever, to
| sting? So that it only does it when it's life-threateningly mad
| at something?
| buggy6257 wrote:
| Because Melissa pissed off Zeus.[1]
|
| [1] https://crawliomics.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/zeus-the-
| honeyb...
| lisper wrote:
| > The haplodiploidy hypothesis, though nice, is not without its
| problems. Firstly, there are plenty of species with haplodiploid
| genetics which do not form eusocial colonies.
|
| That is not a problem. Reproductive fitness must always be
| measured relative to an environment. Just because colony life is
| a successful strategy for haplodiploid species in some
| environments does not mean it will be a successful strategy in
| all environments. You can see this in other species. Female lions
| live mostly in cooperative groups while male lions and all other
| large cats (leopards, cheetahs, and tigers) are solitary.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| To prove Mr Feynman right: because I stomp on it.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| For the record, almost no bees die when they sting you. This is
| just a weird myth that people repeat nonstop.
|
| This _only_ happens to honeybees, and _only_ when they 're
| stinging humans. Most skin is much thicker than ours, more
| similar to our feet callouses. The stinger isn't supposed to go
| in. That's closer to a sword's foil.
|
| The reason they panic when it happens is it's not supposed to
| happen.
|
| The stingers are mostly meant for combat with other insects. You
| can watch these fights on youtube. They never, ever end with the
| bee self eviscerating.
|
| This is a simple example of people trying to look smart by
| explaining things which, when you check, just aren't true.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Isn't that just so unbearably sad? These little creatures work
| tirelessly their whole lives, buzzing from flower to flower,
| pollinating the plants that sustain ecosystems and our food
| supply. They barely get to live a few weeks as worker bees, and
| then if they ever need to sting to protect their hive... that's
| it. Their life ends in an act of ultimate devotion.
| leobg wrote:
| They can actually survive if you let them.
|
| Here's a video of a guy filming himself being stung by a bee,
| then watching as the bee spins around, works its stinger loose,
| and flies away:
|
| https://youtu.be/G-C77ujnLZo
| mirzap wrote:
| Bees don't die right away; they all fly off after stinging, but
| they will eventually die for sure.
| apopapo wrote:
| This entire article is flawed in my opinion. Bees are not
| "suicidal". They are not meant to die after they sting. It's just
| that they have not adapted to stinging mammals with elastic skin
| (and probably will not). Bees can absolutely live after stinging
| if they manage to dislodge the stinger from the skin.
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