Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
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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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
Most use insect strays. Lighting an A4 sheet under the nest also works. Both are gruesome ends for the nest.
Over time I noticed their attacks are driven by motion. When their nests are disturbed they buzz around, home in on the nearest moving thing and sting it. That usually provokes more movement, with more stings sure to follow. Running involves lots of movement, and you have to cover a lot of ground before they give up.
They hurt like buggery, but they've never done me serious damage and this behaviour suggested a different approach might work. Sadly it was when the kids were near adulthood when I worked up to the gumption to try it out. You approach the nest with no weapons, and no defences. You move slowly. Very slowly. With your bare fingers, you twist the nest around and around, until it breaks and falls to the ground. (I hope they fly off to live another day, but who knows.) The wasps do get angry and buzz around for a while, but don't know what to attack. You have to back away very with the same grace you used in your approach.
I've made it work for small nests. I've had fail for large nests, but even then not reacting when you are stung does seem to limit the damage to a couple of stings. I'm not to proud too claim it's a fine demonstration of some manly qualities.
I haven't done it in a while. Time has moved on, kids have moved out, I've moved houses into a bushland setting, or maybe I've just got older and finally earned the gift of wisdom [0]. Nonetheless the story continues to be useful - it's great for keeping sons and son-in-laws in their place.
[0] I suspect it's the move to bushland. I've never seen these wasps when bush walking. Yes, mankind has inflicted a lot of suffering on these wasps. But I suspect the suburbs we built are a utopia for them.
But in this particular case the queen is no different from worker bees, right? They wouldn't die either from stinging other bees...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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...
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.
Oh boy, today's the day you learn something new about rodents.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
This is clearly false. Why repeat it?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Why not? Honest question.
Intuitively, I'd say that there are plenty of traits that propagate as long as they aren't expensive in terms of genetic survival. It's the nature of random genetic mutation, random traits will develop and some of them won't really affect survival and may propagate.
I don’t 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”.
Because it takes the observation of Survival and uses it to infer Fitness, at the same time as saying that Fitness confers Survival.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Also you don’t understand physics, the proof is that you can make predictions and then verify the results.
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.
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.
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?
If you really analyze any word, it loses all meaning except what we've assigned it.
What you're saying is that "but why did you pick that specific ball, what were the factors at play?". I say "probability", and you call it circular reasoning. You expect me to explain the physical forces at play that pushed forward a specific ball on the top when you filled the jar, and made it collide with your fingers, and your brain's reasoning chain to pick the first ball that you touched, so you pick that one.
But, basically, you can't. It's impossible because 1) we can't time travel. 2) we can't stop the universe and examine all of its properties. We work with the mathematical model we have and expect everything to work aligned with it. "Why do certain monkey species have holes in their bellies?". You can reason about that question, you can even come up with some answers, but it would be impossible to prove due to our universe's observability constraints.
But the mathematical model works, it even works beyond our physical realm (e.g. it works to solve mathematical problems). And no, it will never explain why certain monkeys have holes in their bellies. That's an entirely different domain of causal analysis.
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...
"None of the fake soundbites is more insidious than the first:"
i.e. it's a fake quote
That is what fit means.
Perhaps, survival of the fit. (period)
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.
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.
You might be interested in this concept:
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”.
Or are incapable of studying/reflecting in depth.
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.
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.
Mever considered this. Good stuff
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.
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.
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.
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.
This typo somehow fits the theme in a discussion over evolution ;P
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://crawliomics.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/zeus-the-honeyb...
> 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...
But there is no picture at the top of the article, at least on mobile.
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;
}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.
I couldn't read past the article's pretentious opening.
Yes, I had been behind. I'm doing OK now :)
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.
It seems much better these days.
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.
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.
Well, "species" is but a loosely defined set of genes.
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.
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)
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Are these different things for 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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 kaumātua 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.)
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
E.g. smaller birth canals and C-sections.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services
- Homer Simpson's brain
Would be a cool challenge for all the quantum supremacy folk
Suicidal altruism and costly signaling for the survival of the super-organism. Also, zombie poison delivery pumps.
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.