jimmenegay{at}sbcglobal.net (Jim Menegay) wrote in
news:c6j8sf$56q$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

  
 
>  I understood that we were talking about interactions between
> members of two species.  What I don't understand is why you seem to
> think that there can be no reciprocity and no communication between
> members of different species.  Bees and flowers, sharks and the fish
> that clean their gills, alga and fungus in lichen, proto-eukariote and
> proto-mitochondrion, and a thousand other examples refute you.

> I think that most significant mutualism between species involves 
> reciprocity, rather than the one-sided "cultivation" that can be
> captured in the parameter "e".

I do think that there is  reciprocity between different species - that is 
what symbiosis is about. And I have previously noted on this newsgroup that 
I think symbiosis is a key feature in evolution. I also agree with you that 
_most_ associations between different species are based on mutualism, which 
as I noted above is easy to understand evolving: the oxpecker gets a meal 
of ticks, the warthog gets the ticks removed. The communication that 
accompanies these types of behaviors - cleaner wrasses and client fish 
doing their dances - can evolve slowly and mutually. The dancing wrass 
attracts more client fish, the client fish get a better cleaning job when 
they indicate what needs to be cleaned. 

But some cases are more of a puzzle. If ants are already hanging around 
acacia bushes, why spend the effort to make a bulb for them? What drives 
the coevolution of flowers and pollinators? The flower in some cases has to 
give up other pollinators to specialize for say a species of sunbird, while 
the sunbird is also incurring a cost to specialize for the flower. What 
starts this process? 

And while interspecies communication is an essential part of most symbiotic 
relationships, my point was that it is not the type of communication that 
occurs in the reciprocal altruism seen in vampire bats. Legumes and 
rhizobia have an elaborate chemical communication system, but I don't think 
the first cowpea remembered that Joe Japonicum gave it a jolt of nitrogen  
in return for an excreted growth factor while Tom Trifolii didn't. 
 
Let me stress that "cultivation" is unlikely to be a major factor. I am 
working on another follow to attempt to quantify the effect, and it is 
marginal at best. However, it may, help illuminate some cases of symbiosis 
which otherwise seem to require interspecies altruistic behavior to get 
started.

Yours,

Bill Morse
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