Darwin: Talking of “Natural Selection,” if I had to commence de novo, I would have used ⁠“natural preservation⁠”

To get back to honey bees, I think this is a very significant point. Without variation, we would never have come to this world with its unbelievable diversity (not to mention all the species that have come and gone). But at the same time one of the key characteristics in evolution is that it is very conservative. Many species are virtually unchanged after millions of years. It seems as if when nature hits upon a successful organism, she can _preserve_ its features for a very long time. Bear in mind that while DNA replication is prone to copy errors, there are also DNA repair mechanisms which have evolved precisely to do error checking so that key functions of the organism are not short circuited. One example is the wing vein pattern in honey bees. Using one fossil wing it was possible to determine that honey bees had in fact been in North America at one time, before they went extinct, some ten million years ago. Looking at the wing, it is obviously that of a honey bee. (attached)

> Apis nearctica is represented by a single female worker preserved in paper shale from the Middle Miocene of Stewart Valley, Nevada. The species is most similar to the extinct species A. armbrusteri Zeuner from the Miocene of southwestern Germany.

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