How a Superorganism Evolves

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-182
Author(s):  
Robert E. Page
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Organizational Structure ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Defensive Behavior ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Nest Design ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Colony Level

Superorganisms are reverse-engineered by natural selection. The totality of the organizational structure of a colony, its colony-level phenotype, is exposed to natural selection. Those colonies with phenotypes that are best adapted to their environment survive best and reproduce the most reproductive offspring. The heritable features of those colony phenotypes increase in frequency in the next generation, and the population evolves a social organization. Natural selection doesn’t “see,” doesn’t act on, the individual components of organization, only the gross product. Therefore, the intricacies of the design, such as reduced fertility of workers, nest design and maintenance, and defensive behavior, are reverse-engineered. They evolve as a consequence of their effects on the whole colony.

‘Short-Spanned Living Creatures’: Evolutionary Perspectives in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Aaron Green
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Simple Structure ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Crystal Palace ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Evolutionary Perspectives

Abstract In Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Charles Lyell appraised the distinct contribution made by his protégé, Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species (1859)), to evolutionary theory: ‘Progression … is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection [… Darwin’s theory accounts] equally well for what is called degradation, or a retrogressive movement towards a simple structure’. In Rhoda Broughton’s first novel, Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867), written contemporaneously with Lyell’s book, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham prompts precisely this sort of Darwinian ambivalence to progress; but whether British civilization ‘advance[s] or retreat[s]’, her narrator adds that this prophesized state ‘will not be in our days’ – its realization exceeds the single lifespan. This article argues that Not Wisely, but Too Well is attentive to the irreconcilability of Darwinism to the Victorian ‘idea of progress’: Broughton’s novel, distinctly from its peers, raises the retrogressive and nihilistic potentials of Darwin’s theory and purposes them to reflect on the status of the individual in mid-century Britain.

scholarly journals Task allocation and site fidelity jointly influence foraging regulation in honeybee colonies

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
pp. 170344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thiago Mosqueiro ◽  
Chelsea Cook ◽  
Ramon Huerta ◽  
Jürgen Gadau ◽  
Brian Smith ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Site Fidelity ◽  
Collective Behaviour ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Resource Collection ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Collective Foraging ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Colony Level ◽  
And Task

Variation in behaviour among group members often impacts collective outcomes. Individuals may vary both in the task that they perform and in the persistence with which they perform each task. Although both the distribution of individuals among tasks and differences among individuals in behavioural persistence can each impact collective behaviour, we do not know if and how they jointly affect collective outcomes. Here, we use a detailed computational model to examine the joint impact of colony-level distribution among tasks and behavioural persistence of individuals, specifically their fidelity to particular resource sites, on the collective trade-off between exploring for new resources and exploiting familiar ones. We developed an agent-based model of foraging honeybees, parametrized by data from five colonies, in which we simulated scouts, who search the environment for new resources, and individuals who are recruited by the scouts to the newly found resources, i.e. recruits. We varied the persistence of returning to a particular food source of both scouts and recruits and found that, for each value of persistence, there is a different optimal ratio of scouts to recruits that maximizes resource collection by the colony. Furthermore, changes to the persistence of scouts induced opposite effects from changes to the persistence of recruits on the collective foraging of the colony. The proportion of scouts that resulted in the most resources collected by the colony decreased as the persistence of recruits increased. However, this optimal proportion of scouts increased as the persistence of scouts increased. Thus, behavioural persistence and task participation can interact to impact a colony's collective behaviour in orthogonal directions. Our work provides new insights and generates new hypotheses into how variations in behaviour at both the individual and colony levels jointly impact the trade-off between exploring for new resources and exploiting familiar ones.

scholarly journals Comprehensive Downtime Prediction in Next-Generation Internet

1970 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
W. F. Al-Khateeb, S. Al-Irhayim, and K. A. Al-Khateeb
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Calculation ◽  
Multiprotocol Label Switching ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Label Switching ◽  
Next Generation Internet ◽  
Reliability Parameters ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Single Figure

The benchmark for the reliability quality of networks depends mainly on the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the reliability parameters. Downtime prediction of a communication system is crucial for the quality of service (QoS) offered to the end-user. Markov model enables analytical calculation of average single figure cumulative downtime over one year. The single average approach, generally, does not adequately describe the wide range of service performance that is likely to be experienced in communications systems due to the random nature of the failure. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to add downtime distribution obtained from network availability models to predict the expected cumulative downtime and other performance parameters among a large number of system populations. The distribution approach provides more comprehensive information about the behavior of the individual systems. Laplace-Stieltjes transform enables analytical solutions for simple network architectures, i.e. the simplex system and the parallel system. This paper uses simulations to determine reliability parameters for complex architecture such as the Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) backbone planned for next-generation Internet. In addition to the single figure downtime, simulations provide other reliability parameters such as probability of zero downtime. The paper also considers the downtime distribution among a population of equally designed systems.Key Words: Reliability, availability, downtime, Multiprotocol label switching

Units and levels of selection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samir Okasha
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Kin Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Levels Of Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Transitions ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
The Individual

In a standard Darwinian explanation, natural selection takes place at the level of the individual organism, i.e. some organisms enjoy a survival or reproduction advantage over others, which results in evolutionary change. In principle however, natural selection could operate at other hierarchical levels too, above and below that of the organism, for example the level of genes, cells, groups, colonies or even whole species. This possibility gives rise to the ‘levels of selection’ question in evolutionary biology. Group and colony-level selection have been proposed, originally by Darwin, as a means by which altruism can evolve. (In biology, ‘altruism’ refers to behaviour which entails a fitness cost to the individual so behaving, but benefits others.) Though this idea is still alive today, many theorists regard kin selection as a superior explanation for the existence of altruism. Kin selection arises from the fact that relatives share genes, so if an organism behaves altruistically towards its relatives, there is a greater than random chance that the beneficiary of the altruistic action will itself be an altruist. Kin selection is closely bound up with the ‘gene’s eye view’ of evolution, which holds that genes, not organisms, are the true beneficiaries of the evolutionary process. The gene’s eye approach to evolution, though heuristically valuable, does not in itself resolve the levels of selection question, because selection processes that occur at many hierarchical levels can all be seen from a gene’s eye viewpoint. In recent years, the levels of selection discussion has been re-invigorated, and subtly transformed, by the important new work on the ‘major evolutionary transitions’. These transitions occur when a number of free-living biological units, originally capable of surviving and reproducing alone, become integrated into a larger whole, giving rise to a new biological unit at a higher level of organization. Evolutionary transitions are intimately bound up with the levels of selection issue, because during a transition the potential exists for selection to operate simultaneously at two different hierarchical levels.

Sociobiology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Behavioural Science ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Darwinian Theory ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Mendelian Genetics ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Mental Testing

Following Darwin, biologists and social scientists have periodically been drawn to the theory of natural selection as the source of explanatory insights about human behaviour and social institutions. The combination of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian theory, which did so much to substantiate the theory of evolution in the life sciences, however, has made recurrent adoption of a biological approach to the social sciences controversial. Excesses and errors in social Darwinism, eugenics and mental testing have repeatedly exposed evolutionary approaches in the human sciences to criticism. Sociobiology is the version of Darwinism in social and behavioural science that became prominent in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Philosophical problems of sociobiology include challenges to the explanatory relevance of Darwinian theory for human behaviour and social institutions, controversies about whether natural selection operates at levels of organization above or below the individual, questions about the meaning of the nature–nurture distinction, and disputes about Darwinism’s implications for moral philosophy.

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