Hacker News Reader

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?”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

> 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.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> "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.

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).

IIRC genetic drift can reach 100%.

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”.

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).

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?

> 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.

> 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.

What, the fact that their teeth can grow so long that they'll circle around and stab their brains?

It's only circular reasoning if you ignore the mathematical model of evolution. Evolution is simply that your chances of picking a red ball from a jar increases proportionally to the number of red balls in the jar.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

>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.

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'".

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.