Dawkins on altruism displayed in spite of Selfish Gene
The other example that I said I would return to is the case of the kamikaze bees, who sting honey-raiders but commit almost certain suicide in the process. The honey bee is just one example of a highly social insect. Others are wasps, ants, and termites or 'white ants'.
I want to discuss social insects generally, not just suicidal bees. The exploits of the social insects are legendary, in particular their astonishing feats of cooperation and apparent altruism. Suicidal stinging missions typify their prodigies of self-abnegation. In the 'honey-pot' ants there is a caste of workers with grotesquely swollen, food-packed abdomens, whose sole function in life is to hang motionless from the ceiling like bloated light-bulbs, being used as food stores by the other workers. In the human sense they do not live as individuals at all; their individuality is subjugated, apparently to the welfare of the community.
A society of ants, bees, or termites achieves a kind of individuality at a higher level. Food is shared to such an extent that one may speak of a communal stomach. Information is shared so efficiently by chemical signals and by the famous 'dance' of the bees that the community behaves almost as if it were a unit with a nervous system and sense organs of its own.
Foreign intruders are recognized and repelled with something of the selectivity of a body's immune reaction system. The rather high temperature inside a beehive is regulated nearly as precisely as that of the human body, even though an individual bee is not a 'warm blooded' animal. Finally and most importantly, the analogy extends to reproduction. The majority of individuals in a social insect colony are sterile workers. The 'germ line'—the line of immortal gene continuity—flows through the bodies of a minority of individuals, the reproductives. These are the analogues of our own reproductive cells in our testes and ovaries. The sterile workers are the analogy of our liver, muscle, and nerve cells.
A social insect colony is a huge family, usually all descended from the same mother. The workers, who seldom or never reproduce themselves, are often divided into a number of distinct castes, including small workers, large workers, soldiers, and highly specialized castes like the honey-pots. Reproductive females are called queens. Reproductive males are sometimes called drones or kings. In the more advanced societies, the reproductives never work at anything except procreation, but at this one task they are extremely good.
They rely on the workers for their food and protection, and the workers are also responsible for looking after the brood. In some ant and termite species the queen has swollen into a gigantic egg factory, scarcely recognizable as an insect at all, hundreds of times the size of a worker and quite incapable of moving. She is constantly tended by workers who groom her, feed her, and transport her ceaseless flow of eggs to the communal nurseries. If such a monstrous queen ever has to move from the royal cell she rides in state on the backs of squadrons of toiling workers.
Topic: The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins