Tim Tyler  wrote in
news:bpatm8$18fk$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> William Morse  wrote or quoted:
>> Tim Tyler  wrote in
>>> Anon.  wrote or quoted:
> 
>>> The other possibility is that those hives with rebellious workers
>>> had fewer offspring, and the workers that rebelled tended to leave
>>> fewer offspring as well - so the net effect of rebelling against the
>>> existing queen is actually worse than cooperating with the rest of
>>> the hive to raise sisters.
>>> 
>>> I believe that many workers don't get to choose whether they become
>>> queens themselves.  It is determined by other workers feeding them
>>> a rich diet from a young age.  Where that happens, the idea of
>>> the workers "choosing" to receive the queen's signal is not
>>> appropriate - since the workers obeying the queen's orders
>>> are different ones from the ones that can still become queens.
>> 
>> You seem to be positing that there might be a
"rebellion" gene, that 
>> would allow the workers to have their own offspring but would
>> adversely affect their integration with the hive.  The hives with
>> rebellious workers might have fewer offspring, but the rebellious
>> workers by definition would have more offspring than the
>> non-rebellious workers who had no offspring at all. In this case the
>> "rebellion" gene should spread. 
> 
> If you are doing this sort of sum you probably ought to be using
> inclusive fitness.

You are right on that count - but then don't I have to consider the 
overall fitness of the group?
 
> If you do that then the fact that the workers have no offspring of
> their own is of reduced importance - since they can further the
> interests of their genes by raising sisters.
> 
> It might well pay for them to raise sisters - rather than get into
> a big fight with the other reproductives.

I think we are getting back to the question of level of selection being 
different from the level of replication (my fault - I started talking 
about a "rebellion" gene). On this point I may be more in agreement with 
you and in partial agreement with Dawkins via his concept of "extended 
phenotype" (I am familiar with the thought from "Selfish
Gene" but have 
not yet read the book by that name). Guy strongly disagrees, but we 
seemed to have reached an impasse in that discussion.

What I was trying to focus on in this thread was the actual reproduction 
of social groups. Many of the properties of such groups are affected by 
age and size of the group and by emergent properties caused by 
interactions between members of the group. As such they are not under 
direct control of genetics but are better described by developmental 
processes such as those discussed in "The Dependent Gene". Rather than 
getting sidetracked by a level of selection argument, I would prefer to 
discuss some of the details of the dynamics of such groups. 

For instance, one of the classic examples that I recall from my childhood 
of an animal exhibiting behavior "for the good of the group" is the musk 
ox. When confronted by danger, these supposedly gathered in a circle with 
their horns facing out and the young in the middle. I have no idea of the 
actual details of this behavior, relatedness of the group members, 
whether it is just females or males and females that do this, whether 
there is enforcement by a dominance hierarchy, etc. I suppose I will have 
to actually do some reading on the subject, but this is the sort of thing 
I had in mind.


Yours,

Bill Morse
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