I'm skeptical of the claim that the inquiline behavior is something complex. The ant isn't literally aware of "I'm as social parasite and therefore do all these things". It's just behaving randomly.
Arguably, the complex behavior is, in fact, not laying eggs in other colonies, which the mutation breaks.
Scientists should be skeptical of a elaborate hypotheses like "a new, complex behavior has emerged via a single mutation", and look for the simplest possible interpretations of what is observed. Occam's Razor and all that. For any hypothesis, you have to look for reasons and ways it might be false.
It isn't behaving randomly, no organism does. It is reacting to stimuli. The mechanism that determine how it reacts to the stimuli have just changed with the mutation
The articles explanation for the origin of this super gene seems similarly complex. Relying on their being some previous version of ant that is not clonal is a step too far into speculation for me to consider that hypothesis too seriously. Or maybe I’m missing something? Maybe an entomologist would think differently!
I'm no entomologist, but I'm sure there was some previous version of these ants that was not clonal. The last common ancestor of all ants was not clonal.
Mutations turn individual cells into parasites all the time; We call it "Cancer". With how many roles and profiles that our cells can adopt, I'm incredibly unsurprised that there's modes and forms that are purely parasitic,
I would imagine that in most large populations, there are a decent number of parasites. The simple answer is this - Everyone it a "parasite" sometimes. Everyone is sometimes sick, wounded, or simply unlucky and requiring help. It's a standard part of living. In brutal nature, the sick and injured simply die. In social species, though, the sick and injured are cared for, with other members of the group, tribe, society or species giving
It's of little surprise, then, that the genes and regulation that control "Where to signal for help" can become corrupted or overactive". In large, complex species, you'll see the groups carrying out a balancing act. Packs of dogs can both nurse members back to health and exile unproductive members. But at the larger by count scale, it's harder to rack the individual, so I'm not surprised that the systems break down somewhat more.
> The exploited host workers then do everything for them, from taking care of their brood to protecting and feeding them. Such a relationship between species is called obligate parasitism, because the parasites cannot survive on their own.
Really fascinating and terrifying how much your entire way of life can hinge on the expression of one bit of DNA like this. I wonder what this would look like if ants had free will and could choose how to live for themselves - would there be ants that would choose not to follow that deviant parasitic strategy, and instead try to integrate / conform?
You're asking questions which have more to do with our own higher cognition instincts and how our mind factors social behavior, rather than how an ants sees it. So maybe the examples should move towards how society deals with parasites who lack critical social features like empathy, morality, honesty. And if studies are correct, it seems we let them rise to the top.
> So maybe the examples should move towards how society deals with parasites who lack critical social features like empathy, morality, honesty. And if studies are correct, it seems we let them rise to the top.
Some of them, at least. Society has some defenses that shunts most of such cases to mental facilities, prisons, or just plain obscurity. The ones able to avoid those defenses, however, achieve tremendous success at the cost of everyone else.
So just like with parasites in the animal world.
But if we're walking up and down the ladder of abstraction, what about higher-level parasites? I'd call the advertising industry a successful one.
Think this is what we are doing. Few of our 'decision' are free, most are genetic. Genetic being, i was born with some propensity for some particular hormone, which leads to some particular decisions. It is completely beyond our ability to choose, because all of those pre-cursors already chose for us and it feels free. Of course we have free will, we just don't have free will to choose what we will. Schopenhauer had it right.
> I wonder what this would look like if ants had free will and could choose how to live for themselves
What makes you think we have free will and ants don't? I can understand thinking there's no such thing as free will, I can understand thinking that all animals have free will, but how would you argue we have it and ants don't?
The man made fruit fly experiments are quite precisely the opposite of natural selection, which is what I'm looking for.
As for the birds, there was never observed a time when that genetic anomaly was not present, so no evolution has been observed. Regardless, it isn't the case that the species has bifurcated itself into two subspecies, rather there are 4 genders in the single species and each gender only mates with a particular partner gender.
How is this different from speciation? Easy: any organism can produce offspring of any gender, but they will all be the same species.
Evolution is a theory that is parsimonious to the data at hand. We proved speciation in a lab. As you and I are part of nature, their speciation is natural even if at our will. We isolated a species long enough that they could no longer mate, subjected to separation of environments. Ergo, separation of populations leads to speciation. QED.
But if you decide that only random events cause the effect you're looking for, first restate your hypothesis as such then do your homework on a very well studied field.
Why a restated hypothesis? Because it is intellectually honest to say your first hypothesis is completely answered by the fruit fly experimentation. There is no clear distinction between speciation from random events causing separation and researchers doing so in a laboratory.
Sure, I believe there is no evidence to support the hypothesis: "the species we encounter derived exclusively from random genetic mutations competing via natural selection", or even the weaker form: "random genetic mutations have been responsible for the development of new functionality in Life".
I used to buy into the Evolutionary Theory, or at the very least believe there was actual observational Science behind it commensurate to the scale of the claims atheists make. Hell, I even studied biology at a top university. I suspect you may be less familiar with the opposing view, I recommend the "Creation vs Evolution" lecture here: https://www.thenarrowpath.com/topical_lectures.php#Creation_... . While the site as a whole is rooted in Christian fundamentalism, the lecture itself makes no arguments based on Scripture or Faith.
Now, I believe in the parts of evolution we have observed. Which, in CS terms is something along the lines of: "the backing data-vectors of life forms are subject to stochastic gradient decent mechanics which can result in population-level changes tending towards local maxima in fitness, via a process we call `Evolution`". That said, I have seen no evidence to support the claim that those data-vectors were initialized randomly, or that Evolution is capable of optimizing past these local-maximas.
> Has science ever observed speciation via natural selection amongst a sexually reproducing cohort?
Theories of speciation do seem to lean toward asexuality.
I mean, at an extreme, we can consider asexual-reproduction through cloning -- where genetic-mutations simply get cloned along different lines, allowing for increasingly divergent genetics.
But even when we're talking about sexual-reproduction, [theories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation#Modes ) often focus on [bottlenecks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck ) (e.g., an isolated population on an island) -- which, while nominally "sexual" in the sense of individuals still engaging in sexual-reproduction, is asexual in the sense of the isolated-population disengaging from sexual-reproduction with other populations.
Where, generally, greater population-level asexuality might be expected to lead to greater divergence -- with full-blown individual-level asexuality being an asymptotic-limit.
I'll grant that this example is more compelling than any others provided. The fact that they needed to redefine "species" to find the first example of speciation in the wild is certainly a weak point.
What's interesting with this example is that the changes come from hybridization, not the typically stated evolution mechanism of "tiny random little changes that somehow overtime make brains". Accordingly, this provides no "origin of life" answers, as the life was only able to develop from hybridizing existing life.
Fossil record demonstrates evolution at most. Even then there are plenty of large gaps.
Fossils don’t tell us about speciation, as that’s a concern of reproductive capabilities not physical features. They certainly don’t tell us anything about the selection process being “natural”. (aliens from Tralfamadore coming over in hovercraft to explicitly select for the features they want would leave the same fossil record)
> Has science ever observed speciation via natural selection amongst a sexually reproducing cohort?
posits a world where we can iteratively ask-and-answer questions if scientists are paying attention to speciation. The fossil record provides many many snapshots of different beings, from which we can infer speciation. By seeing the split _as it happens_, we can test hypotheses.
It seems to imply a dichotomy in value between seeing "as it happens" and the fossil record.
Some of the most definitive proof of speciation is the actual fossil record, while simulations or purpose constructed experiments typically achieve the desired results of their authors.
Arguably, the complex behavior is, in fact, not laying eggs in other colonies, which the mutation breaks.
Scientists should be skeptical of a elaborate hypotheses like "a new, complex behavior has emerged via a single mutation", and look for the simplest possible interpretations of what is observed. Occam's Razor and all that. For any hypothesis, you have to look for reasons and ways it might be false.