RE: Literal and Not Literal
September 7, 2019 at 3:42 pm
(This post was last modified: September 7, 2019 at 3:45 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(September 7, 2019 at 2:57 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: Of course it is directly observable. All bees share a style of gene that manifest different in different bees but all serve to perpetuate this style of genes. This style of genes causes the female bees To developed their reproductive organs, becomes fertile, a particular subset of their behavioral genes manifest and the become queen bees, if they fed a particular type of honey called royal jelly during their larva stage. When female bee larvae are fed normally they do not develop their reproductive organs, but instead turn on a different set of behavioral genes and become worker bees. Queen bees reproduce. Worker bees do not. Worker’s own gene line therefore always dies with the worker. Yet workers work to serve and protect the queen, to the degree where they will sacrifice themselves by stinging intruders, which invariably kills the bee as well. Why do they sacrifice themselves for the queen? Because the queen share their style of genes.
You can observe how all bees share this style of genes by randomly selecting bee larvae form different colonies to feed with royal jelly, and sure enough, the which turn in queens has nothing to do with their ancestry. It is perfectly correlated with the diet they are fed.
So two observations:
1. The word "share" brings with it the abstractness I want to remove. Like my earlier Bob analogy, sharing something implies that instances of it can be summed up to produce a whole. So in what sense are genes being shared in your example?
2. When you answer your question of why bees sacrifice themselves by saying they share genes with the queen, are you certain you have exhausted all other possibilities? In the same way the phenotypic difference in these bees is caused by the royal jelly, not a direct genes, can't their behavior also have non-genetic reasons?
As a test, we can agree that bees within a colony share the same gene pool. I don't know to what extent you consider bees between colonies as sharing genes, but assuming it's less by any given percentage, would introducing a larva from one colony to another reduce the likelyhood of it sacrificing itself for the unrelated queen later in life?
