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TRANSITIONS. “Exactly what kind of group selection drives the species across the threshold? Concrete examples of this adaptation and the transition it affords are provided by halictid sweat bees and polistine wasps. In one recently documented case, two species of sweat bees that switched from collecting the pollen of many plant species to collecting pollen from only a few plant species also reverted from a primitively eusocial life to a solitary life.” https://lnkd.in/drgWvGT View in LinkedIn

WORKER CASTE. “Altruism and eusociality are thus evidently born from the appearance of a phenotypically flexible eusocial allele (or ensemble of such alleles) in a progressively provisioning mother, and from group selection acting on emergent group traits, which are socially binding and sufficiently powerful to overbalance the dissolutive effects of individual direct selection. One small step, so to speak, for a newly created worker caste, one giant leap for the Hymenoptera.” https://lnkd.in/drgWvGT View in LinkedIn

BROOD TIMING. “Simultaneous progressive provisioning, by which multiple larvae are reared at the same time, is especially potent as a preadaptation in the Hymenoptera. From this wholly solitary adaptation, it is but one short step in evolution for adult offspring to remain at the nest and help their mother raise siblings, instead of dispersing to rear brood of their own. In that generation the eusocial colony originates. Then and thereafter, group selection proceeds, uniquely targeting the emergent traits created by the interaction of the colony members.” https://lnkd.in/drgWvGT View in LinkedIn

Spring dandylion already in seed, wasting no time. View in LinkedIn

“TIME REVERSAL of waves in physics doesn’t mean traveling back to the future; it describes a special type of wave that can retrace a path backwards through an object, as if watching a movie of the traveling wave, played in reverse.” https://lnkd.in/dXzBN5v View in LinkedIn