*Many* good points raised. It is hard to prove Einstein was
right about much. Perhaps in some things he was wrong. He
said that, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

Do we attribute great altruism to a mother duck who feigns
a broken wing and, just out of reach of a fox, baits it away
from her ducklings? Bees die. Infected, they die sooner.
If they are foragers, odds are that they die outside of the
hive during the day, and in the nest during the night.

If they are nurses, odds may be that they will tend to die
inside the nest. In the case of nurses, one may find, with
study, a truer leaning to the suicide question. But if bees
come and go, generationally, and may be regressed
significantly in a relatively short period of time, or have
other characteristics altered in mere years, surely a bee
dying away from a hive when overcome with disease will
promote that traight, whereas a bee that returns, will
promote those genes to be less likely to be passed on.

In this, it is likely they are lemmings, driven by geneology
to wander aimlessly when at deaths door. They do not
have the capacity to think as eskimos, any more than
ducks. Semantically, some may term it a rudimentary
thought on behalf of the mother duck. How much is it a
thought, per se, for a child to run and hide under the
covers when hearing a noise? Or an ostrich to hide its
head in the sand, (for whatever reason they do it?)

An ologist may study and prove the likelihood adequately
of such a theorum. The rest of us need only imagine it,
and thereby, understand the essence and basis of it.
In fact, we may ignore it and allow ourselves to benefit
from it; preference to survive, given toward the lesser
unfit. Fitness, determined by a tendancy to do that which
lends to the survival of its kind.

Ants the size of elephants, or visa versa, do not survive well.
Bees that stay home, sick, do not help their genes survive.
Man that goes to work sick, may help or hurt his colony's
genes, but may not help his kind as a whole, to do well,
as sickness is spread in our method of socialization and
interaction, which is different than that of bees.

Bees which leave to die, help their family genes and the
genes of their whole kind; so that got passed on after
inumerable generations. Man seems an insurmountable
obstacle, or we might see bees evolve to become something
with a method to avoid man and failing health issues, that
some termed, CCD, brought on by being pushed to be
giants, supplimented constantly. In a way, that is happening.
Those that put up with it, are dying... <G>

BillSF9c

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