About the social order

In a comment to the Spanish version of a previous article in this blog, JI Gs wrote this:

All societies have an explicit social order, whether they are fundamentally believers or not in the immaterial; even animal societies, let alone insects, have a strict social order and the immaterial has no need to act to generate it or to maintain it.

I have two considerations to make:

Solitary bee (Megachile) and social bee (Apis)

• Comparing human societies with insect societies is a false step. The human social order is based on a set of moral rules that has remained fairly constant over time, except in relation to sexual morality (see the appendix to The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis). The social order of insects is programmed in their genes and their nervous system. While in the human species it is possible, even frequent, that one or more members of society rebel against one or more rules, or even attempt to overthrow the entire social order, the members of insect societies cannot rebel. In other words, man is conscious and free, insects are not. Any comparison between them is out of place, because they are based on totally different structures.

How insect societies arose

Solitary bee (Megachile) and social bee (Apis)

Among the insect order Hymenoptera there are many species that live independently, but there are also many others who live together in societies. Social life has evolved several times, both among ants (all of which are social) and between bees and wasps, many of which live alone. This fact should be explained: why is social life so prevalent among these insects, and how could it have evolved? In other words, did it provide any evolutionary advantage? In which way?

In insect societies, most individuals renounce reproduction and dedicate their lives to care for the queen (the only member of the society who lays eggs) and for their brothers and sisters, while they are larvae. Normally there are at least two separate castes: those who are sexually active (male and female) and those who are not (usually asexual females). The differences between active and neutral females come from the type of food they receive during their larval stage.

Outstanding problems in the history of life

Gregor Mendel

In a previous article I wrote about the origin of life and related problems. That is only the first of the outstanding issues regarding evolution. There are many more, for we are far from having an explanation for everything that happened during the history of life.

The theory of evolution through natural selection was first proposed by Darwin and refined by his followers when new discovered biological phenomena solved some of the problems posed since the beginning of the theory:

1.      The laws of heredity (Mendel, 1865).

2.      Mutations (Hugo de Vries, 1900).

3.      The laws of genetics (Thomas Hunt Morgan, early twentieth century).

4.      The synthetic theory of evolution (Simpson, Dobzhansky and others, around 1930)

5.      The transmission of inheritance through DNA (Oswald Avery, 1944).

6.      The structure of DNA and the deciphering of the genetic code (Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin and others).

7.      The neutral theory of evolution (Motoo Kimura, 1968).

8.      Punctuated equilibrium (Stephen Jay Gould, 1972).

9.      Epigenetics (early twenty first century).

Rosalind Franklin