>As far as Life, I'm in agreement with Dick in that any evolutionary changes
are the result of chance and the math concerning the degree of success at
passing heritable traits to the next generation.



And isn't it also true that polyandry makes passing a trait to a colony-level phenotype even less probable? 

" Consider a situation in which a colony of haplodiploid eusocial insects (ants, bees or wasps) has a trait that arises from the behaviour of the workers, and a new colony is established headed by an outmated queen who is the full sister of these mother-colony workers. The workers in the daughter colony have a probability of 0.375 of sharing nuclear genes identical by descent with the workers in the mother colony. This is less than the parent–offspring probability of 0.5 in non-eusocial animals. Genetic similarity is reduced further if the queen in the mother colony is mated to multiple males (polyandry), as is the case in Apis mellifera, the queens of which mate with approximately 12 males (Estoup et al., 1994; Tarpy et al., 2004). This reduces the probability of sharing alleles from 0.375 to 0.15, which is more than three times lower than in non-eusocial organisms."

Pérez-Sato, J. A., Châline, N., Martin, S. J., Hughes, W. O. H., & Ratnieks, F. L. (2009). Multi-level selection for hygienic behaviour in honeybees. Heredity, 102(6), 609-615.

http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v102/n6/abs/hdy200920a.html


Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT. 

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