Tim Tyler  wrote in
news:bogi64$1pa4$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> Anon.  wrote or quoted:
 
>> But there are many species of social hymenoptera where the workers
>> can become fertile, but this is supressed by the queen.  So, how did
>> the supression mechanism come about?  Why did the ants evolve so that
>> workers receive the queen's signal?  Doing so reduces their
>> individual fitness.
> 
> If if "really" reduced their inclusive fitness, the situation would be
> like the queen drugging the workers - and making them act against
> their better interests by manipulating their nervous systems.  A
> possible scenario - but probably not a very stable one.
> 
> 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. 
In fact it does not, which would seem to be an argument that selection is 
occurring at the level of the group rather than the individual (in this 
case).

Yours,

Bill Morse
t
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