This is like one of the great moments in modern science.
I really think it is it's,
it's certainly the moment that people who know who Dick Alexander was
reference as sort of the high watermark, because it's, it's comprehensible.
You know, Dick did a lot of things.
He was very interested in people and other things,
but this particular demonstration was,
so it would be impossible to have predicted such a thing and have
gotten lucky.
Dick Alexander is a legend in evolutionary theory because it's
very hard to use evolutionary theory to make predictions that can be
verified in the world. It's,
it's sort of like this loose amorphous collection of techniques and
viewpoints and people sometimes think it's not even a theory because it doesn't
seem to be predictive. And then there are a few predictions. So am I right?
Darwin started this game off by predicting that there would be a moth with a
really long tongue,
because there was a flower that had a really long distance to go before you
could get the nectar out of it. And he had been sent an orchid by Bateson,
maybe with a foot long Corolla tube.
And he reasoned very straightforwardly that it would make no sense for this
plant to have invested in this very long structure.
If there were not a tongue that could reach down to gather the nectar.
And I believe he did not live to see the discovery of that animal that didn't
know that. But he he was absolutely correct.
There is a moth that has this beautifully long tongue. It's a [inaudible],
hawkmoth one of these sort of hummingbird esque moths. And anyway,
yeah, it's one of the major predictions,
demonstrations that evolutionary theory actually can be used to predict
phenomenon that you haven't been able to observe. Okay. And, you know,
Darwin famously couldn't for example, like,
I don't know how much I've talked about this in the open,
but my favorite Darwin book is the one he wrote after origin of species,
which is on the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are
fertilized by insects.
It makes absolutely no sense as a title because I think that's,
what's so funny about it. And,
but because orchids are so highly speciated it turned out to be the perfect
place to explore the consequences of evolution.
And he couldn't figure out my favorite.
I don't know whether it's clade or a group it's pretty safe. Yeah.
Clade of a, of orchids, the Oh freeze system,
which is just unbelievable because it mimics the pollinators,
the female of the pollinator species using phenom pheromones and some
sort of replica.
Good enough to fool males into copulating with the lower pedal of a,
of an orchid.
It's a step de replica of the female that smells like her.
And it just so happens that when the male lands on it to copulate,
he gets these pollen packets glued to him,
and then he screws up and makes the same mistake at another flower. And he may,
he may or may not put it this way.
Only the ones that screw up twice get to get to fertilize.
The reason that it gets glued to him is that it has worked enough times for the
strategy to have been so beautifully refined. Right.
So Darwin saw that there was this mimicry going on,
but he couldn't put it together. He spends pages and pages not getting it.
So I think it's, it's very funny. So he predicts some things,
but he can't predict something else in a very closely related system. Okay.
Fast forward, Dick Alexander comes up with a crazy prediction,
which I still don't fully. I mean,
it's just amazing that he made it where he says,
I bet that you will find the kind of behavior we associate with
wasps and bees,
which is in this clay called hymenoptera and aunts have use social
breeding patterns in an organization,
but in mammals that will live underground.
So I think the way this story actually worked,
he didn't say you will find, or you could fuck what he said is in principle,
there's no reason that a used social animal has to be an
insect that in fact, you could get such a thing in a mammal.
And then he predicted, I forget how many characteristics there were,
but he named some bars. There's something funny about the system of ants,
bees, wasps,
which is that they've got this very strange haplodiploid chromosomal
characteristic. Do you want to say a word about that?
Cause that makes the prediction more sure.
So it has long been understood that the hymenoptera
behave in this incredibly cooperative fashion,
which effectively all of the workers of the colony forgo reproduction in order
to advance the reproductive interests of the queen.
And yeah.
Was late discovered that actually their genetic system is unlike our genetic
system and that males have basically half a full
compliment of genes. They have enough genes to function,
but they have half the female compliment of genes.
And for reasons that are mathematically slightly complicated and require a
chalkboard,
the females are more closely related to
the daughters produced by their mother than they would be to their own
offspring. They're three quarters relatives to her offspring. And there,
they would be 50% relatives to their own officers.
So they are actually evolutionarily favored
by very standard mechanisms.
Once you understand the crazy genetics underlying the thing,
they are favored to engage in behavior where they forgot to reproducing.
And once you understand the chromosomal difference of the system,
it is far less surprising that it would behave as a loosely coupled in
some way, don't over don't overreact, unified organism,
which is distributed, that there is a way in which,
and that there are ways in which the hive behaves as a superorganism and there
are ways in which it not. Yeah. Well,
all I want to say is I'm not sure how clear we have the story with
respect to what proceeds,
why it's completely plausible that the behavior proceeds the evolution of the
genetic system. Right. And I actually, frankly,
just don't know where that research stands at the moment.
We have found many other insect systems that have various versions of
this. Interestingly though, the termites are not hymenoptera right.
And the termites engage in this behavior and they are you social,
but they're not haplodiploid they're you socially behave very much like ants.
Okay. but they don't have the strange genetic system proving that the,
the behavior can evolve even in the absence of this genetic system. Well,
the reason I bring this up is that if you, if you look at, for example,
Prince Peter, Kropotkin the great anarchist theorist.
He was obsessed by finding analogs in nature of preferred
human structures. And so it's very simple to say,
why can't we work together the way an ant colony all works together.
And then there's a counter to that, which is, well,
they have different chromosomal structures. And then you say, well, but yes,
but that's a kind of a cheap way of achieving you sociality.
There are other ways of, so we through this crazy kind of uhm,
investigation, we get to Dick Alexander who,
and I think you're quite quite correct,
says there is nothing prohibiting us from finding a mammalian
species that exhibits ant and wasp
like behavior. And it would have,
it would be likely to have these characteristics. It would live underground.
And the yeah, underground, I believe eating tubers was on the thing.
It was a crazy list raisings. And you know,
my understanding from Dick Dick is now, unfortunately, dad,
he died a couple of years ago, but
my understanding from him was that he didn't actually expect to find such an
animal. He was speaking very abstractly, just completely theoretically.
And at the point that he unleashed this idea,
it may even have been in a talk rather than a paper.
The information made it back to him. Actually.
What about naked mole, rats,
they match your characteristics and study reveals then that actually they
are you social. They behave very much like ants, bees, wasps, termites,
et cetera. And this is like one of the great moments in modern science.
I really think it is.
It's certainly the moment that people who know who Dick Alexander was
references sort of the high watermark because it's comprehensible, you know,
Dick did a lot of things. He was very interested in people and other things,
but this particular demonstration was,
so it would be impossible to have predicted such a thing and have
gotten lucky.
He had to have understood some things that were extremely deep in order for that
to have worked out. And so, yeah, it's really,
I don't know of another example in,
in in evolutionary theory of a prediction that clean of something that
obscure. I know one. Oh yeah,
yeah.
I once heard a story about a graduate
student who predicted that the breeding
protocols of laboratory rodents
would compromise the laboratory system
in terms of its relationship to so called wild type versions of the same
species.
So you have the bread rodents and you have
the wild rodents and that they would be distinguished by virtue of
the fact that the non-coding
nucleotide sequence at the end of the chromosome known as telomeres would be
wildly different in length.
If the prediction were true from pure evolutionary theory. Wow.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that story, it didn't happen exactly the way you said it,
but you know, it's been a lot of years and take a second to get back there.
I mean, it's you, you did that. I did that.