That’s when it all happened you know, back then with the advent of the social insect. One version of the bee went down the Hive mind route, whereas other versions went down the socially “independent” route – carpenter bees for example. At that point I think the carpenter bee evolved to effectively sidestep what must have been the logical conclusion of the entire evolution of the bee species, right back to the beginnings of life itself.
Look at how life has evolved, from simplicity to complexity, and on a cellular level from independence (and vulnerability) to coexistence (and security). Single-celled organisms joined to become multi-cellular organisms (compare, say, Influenza virus, with…a human body). The trend is towards integration, ultimate communism, in which each individual unit (cell/virus/packet of DNA) is bred for a specific purpose and is controlled and directed from life to death, but then is almost certain to live out that life and die a quiet expected death.
However there does exist other “modes of living” than integration. Viruses are essentially small packets of DNA that are not integrated into a communal “body” in the way that a multi-cellular organism such as a human is. And this decision is repeated again and again at increasingly macroscopic levels. A bee (itself a multi-cellular conglomerate) decides to take a more “individual-oriented” direction in life. Animals decide to live in herds, then improve their chances by evolving selfish behavioural strategies. Even up to humans deciding to live in tribes…and then attacking other tribes. Isn’t that a strive towards diversity and individualism as well?
It is, if you look at life on Earth as a whole. But if you take one individual species and only view those changes in relation to the species itself, you get a different picture.
Look at homo sapiens. At some point the DNA in all our cells existed inside various scattered uni-cellular organisms. Some time in this distant cellular past the mutation coin was tossed – shall we remain individuals, or become part of a collective? Actually you can probably trace this back to when a single cell replicated and something happened (a mutation in DNA) to change the way the cell behaved during replication. A tendency to “hold on” to the sibling cell that has just been created, rather than allow it to drift off into an individual (and probably short) life. In fact I bet that’s it. If a cell has stayed in a place long enough, that place is probably likely to be “safe”, so therefore any offspring (or clones really) might have a better chance of survival if they stayed in the same vicinity as their parent. Pure weight of statistical chance ensures that if you’ve lived long enough, you’re likely to be living in a place that your offspring would also live long in.
If you look at it on that level, you can see that the simple evolutionary advantage of forming a close bond with the cell that just produced you is not questionable. It’s blindingly obvious by looking at simple statistics. So at that point in the development in the cell, if that kind of mutation occurs, it will ensure its propagation successfully each time, simply through the numbers.
So the decision is won when you get to that level, by collectivism (ignore viruses, they just haven’t got to the decision yet). But then when you get further down the evolutionary line that leads to you or me, you get asked the question again, and this time on the “organism” level. That is to say mutation occurs in one of the organism’s cells that is then passed on completely to one or more offspring. We’re dealing with a collective of cells, cells who have lost the right to individualism billions of generations ago, but the decision is now being made at a higher level, and groups of higher cells are involved. The decision is being made by the organism itself (you or me).
Let me straighten that out. The decision is still resulting from a mutation in the DNA of a single cell, but the mutation is not affecting the cell individually, rather the properties, or behaviour of the collective as a whole. In effect evolutionary change is affecting the structure of the entire organism, the cells themselves change relatively little. Though of course it’s only random mutations in sex cells that get passed on to the next generation. Although random mutations do occur in single cells, there’s no way the DNA from your recalcitrant liver cell is going to be transferred to your gametes...especially if you’re a girl, because your gametes are already formed before you are born.
Anyway, as we can see the decision is a highly successful one for “collectivism” at whatever level you make it. It always works.
Unless of course a cell or organism is in a situation which appears safe, but is only so due to a statistical glitch – the apparent decrease in mortality rate of the previous generational line. But ultimately whenever a cell…or an organism…or a herd of organisms…or a tribe of humans...is faced with this decision, it should almost always be the safest course of action. And of course viewed only along the generational line of one species, it is the safest. Multi-cellular organisms cover the planet, so multi-cellularism was a good choice of that particular cell back then. Every species also tends to group together, in a sort of meta-organism, be that a flock, a tribe, a city, or a country. There are exceptions of course at any level, but looked at introspectively, each one is simply the result of a decision that hasn’t been made, because the question has not yet been asked.
No comments:
Post a Comment