Thursday, March 08, 2012
Sitters and rovers again
Reported in SciAm, a good observation of behavior in bees. By now it should be fairly unsurprising to find sitters and rovers as distinct personality types in all living things.
Again, sort of unsurprising but a good solid experiment.
The most interesting part is the admission at the end of the article:
There's your Grand Blueprint, which seems to be taking shape as a basic theme for biologists.
Makes you wonder how long they can continue to defend the opposite notion of random unguided mutation and selection. If the 'tool kit' was there before the genes started to be used, how did the 'tool kit' develop randomly? What was the selection pressure for a broad set of design imperatives that hadn't been applied yet?
After studying hives—both in the wild and in the lab—and analyzing genetic and biochemical profiles of bees’ brains, researchers have found that some bees, like some humans, seem to be programmed to seek out new experiences, or novelty.
To figure out if some bees searched for new food and for new real estate, the researchers first pinpointed the food scouts. Under the cover of night, when bees generally don’t forage, hives were moved to a new location outside of familiar territory. The researchers then singled out bees that served as food scouts—the ones that located flowers and returned first to tell other bees where to find the choicest pollen. Then, to see if the food scouts were also more inclined to hunt out new homes, the researchers watched eight different colonies over two years to see which bees took the lead when swarms broke off to find a new home. It turns out that the nest scouts were more than three times as likely as other foragers to also be food scouts.
Again, sort of unsurprising but a good solid experiment.
The most interesting part is the admission at the end of the article:
It is possible that insects and vertebrates developed similar signals independently, but a more likely explanation is that “these mechanisms represent part of a basic tool kit that has been used repeatedly in the evolution of behavior,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
There's your Grand Blueprint, which seems to be taking shape as a basic theme for biologists.
Makes you wonder how long they can continue to defend the opposite notion of random unguided mutation and selection. If the 'tool kit' was there before the genes started to be used, how did the 'tool kit' develop randomly? What was the selection pressure for a broad set of design imperatives that hadn't been applied yet?
Labels: bee, Grand Blueprint
¶ 5:28 PM
