Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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).

> "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%.