Actually, that turns out not to be universally true. People are often chimerae – statistically, far more women than men, though I don’t know if anyone knows why.

Cell transfer back up the umbilical cord from the fetus causes chimerization in adulthood, although usually just of blood cells. Essentially the mother receives the “cord blood” stem cell transplant, which then goes on to colonize her bone marrow and do its usual thing. This may be to the mothers advantage, in that she has a chance to benefit from any genetic imrovements from her mate, while still retaining her own immune system. The two cell lines cover for each others faults, basically.

Actually, that turns out not to be universally true. People are often chimerae – statistically, far more women than men, though I don’t know if anyone knows why. Other animals absorb eachother (eg anglerfish, spliced trees, etc). There are a number of other interesting cases where an organism can be made of disparate cells.

But the point is that Nowak and Wilson misrepresented the literature by 1) picking a few, non-representative papers rather than address the body of literature as a whole (see the many replies and critiques of the Nowak paper) and also 2) setting up a straw man argument against the haplodiploidy hypothesis, which although initially compelling was discounted decades ago.

Yes, but that doesn’t really answer the question of how co-dependency to such an absolute degree evolved in the first place.  Evolution is a gradual process as well, so the more immediate logic of colony survival is less compelling over greater time scales.  Ant evolution could just as well trend towards de-colonization if co-dependency was the only thing in the way of gene propagation.  

The short answer to the question is that female ants are more related to their sisters than their offspring.  That creates a logic of kinship.  That logic is expressed through a colonial lifestyle that confers greater reproductive success to the queen and by extension to each individual worker.  Even if a mutation gave breeding powers to workers it would represent little individual advantage, not just a collective disadvantage.

SO in answer to your initial question “If only the queen ant breeds, how does natural selection work for the other ants?”
My answer would be – It doesn’t - They don’t breed therefore don’t pass on their genetic code. Full stop. The base line is that any mutations they might have (as separate from those conferred to themselves and their siblings) are lost.For exampleIf there was a genetic mutation in the mother that meant that all her (non-breading)  offspring had lasers on their heads and this meant that the colony survived and prospered then future ants would have lasers on their heads. If 1 single (non-breading) ant has a genetic mutation that means it has a laser on its head it may well help the colony survive but it has no means to pass on this mutation and so the next colony will have no laser ants.

“How can natural selection happen, if the designated breeder is chosen by birth, and not by fitness? ”The designated breeder IS chosen by selection – If the colony fails the Queen dies – no more ants from that line.  The workers weren’t up to the job – it’s the breeders genetics that were responsible for their inability. 

“And how does not breeding benefit all the individual female workers enough to make that trait stick, as a fundamental aspect of a species?”In the case of ants how could it possibly not stick? If you evolve to the point where you create so many eggs that you need an army of workers to keep them alive, if you then have a mutation that confers breeding powers on all those offspring, both the original colony and all of the offspring’s colony’s will fail – they will have no worker’s left- all the workers are now breeders.

“how does not breeding benefit all the individual female workers” The answer is that it doesn’t, they have no choice in the matter, it benefits the queen – who does the breeding and therefore get’s to breed again –  they whole basis of natural selection.If the individual workers didn’t work for the good of the queen/colony she/it couldn’t survive therefore the queen/colony is naturally de-selected. So only queens with offspring inclined to help her survive.

Asking – how did it get to the stage that there are all these non breeding female workers is a different question.

Also, Ito the article did in no way trash Wilson, if anything it could be criticised as hero worship, who else has their honours mentioned, the fact is most knowledgeable folks in the field rejected Wilson’s paper. You claim she doesn’t provide any evidence of error but disregard the links that lead you to empirical evidence supporting inclusive fitness theory. You can’t really request evidence besides the evidence that is evident, without appearing a little silly.

I agree with you, altruism and self preservation and passing on the best gene’s are not in the spirit of Comte’s beliefs. Therefor, ants are  BORN to perform everything they do, it’s in their DNA code, they can’t help it, there is no decision making, it’s called instinct. 

I created a lot of enemies in that course. I argued that all doctors, firefighters, priests and so forth were not living altruistic lives because they were receiving paychecks, it was a career choice, not an altruistic one.  

I finally came to the conclusion that any truly altruistic act becomes bastardized by the media, they remove the altruism aspect of it and call the doer a “hero”. Altruism is a very selfless act, almost always unrecognized and no satisfaction on the doers part. 

However, I discovered one thing; witnessing an act of altruism is absolutely life changing and amazing. No article, paper, news report or novel could ever replace witnessing such an event. If it’s filmed, it can only be trusted if it was remotely filmed by something like a traffic camera. 

Altruism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgjyhKN_35g

Keep Commenting. 

Is there now, or has there ever been, a solitary ant? If so, when?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2001/feb/17/books.guardianreview57

The loudest of Wilson’s critics have been those who insist that there is no source of altruism other than that rooted in kin selection.  Wilson rightly rejects this view as inconsistent with empirical observation.

In ancient Britain, fostering and adoption were commonplace.  The descendants of those people built a mighty empire, that could absorb vastly different cultures and races within itself.  These facts may be related; Ruth Patrick once said “Diversity, to me, is the hallmark of a healthy ecosystem”.  Group selection theory explains why genetically unrelated individuals can benefit from co-operation and altruism in a way that explains both history and evolution better than kin selection theory does.

Does it not seem odd that the proponents of “kin selection is everything” are ignoring experimental results that show they are vastly incorrect?  I mean seriously,  14% instead of 66%?  You are OK with that level of inaccuracy?  If somebody said “my theory predicts this object will measure over 300 degrees centigrade” and you measured it and found it was only 72 degrees, wouldn’t you assume that the theory was no good?  I certainly would; in my world, empirical evidence trumps hearsay every time.

Also, “lose” is spelled with only one “o”, not two.

It’s strange, then, that this is the first time I’ve ever heard this accusation.  Especially since I used to work at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philly!   I worked daily with people who knew Wilson personally and who were definitely not “right wing”… it’s odd that they never mentioned any such thing.

Can you support this statement with a links to Wilson’s works that you find offensive?

Animals respond to adult stresses by helping their offspring pick which alleles to express.

That’s how a queen ant can produce servants fit for a given situation, even if its sperm donor died long before the situation started.

If you say “What does a sterile uncle gain from helping raise his nephews and nieces?” then you have to do some math and odd jumps to say that some of his genes get passed down, and so it benefits *him* in some slight way.

But if you turn the question around and say “What does a grandmother gain by having two offspring, one of which is sterile but greatly helps in the raising of the grandkids to reproductive age?” then the answer is a lot simpler: If the grandmother can have more viable grandchildren, then more of *her* genes get passed down.

I think it confuses the matter to say that the sterile uncle helps in order to get his genes passed down. Instead the uncle is helping the grandmother’s genes get passed down, and the grandmother’s genes have been selected such that producing the occasional sterile helper gives them a better chance of reproducing down through the generations.

So the question isn’t “what do the worker ants get out of being sterile, and how could evolution select for them?” it’s “what does the queen get out of producing hundreds of sterile, obedient workers, and how does evolution select for *her*?” That answer seems to be much simpler.

Is it chickens laying eggs to reproduce more chickens, or eggs hatching into chickens to reproduce more eggs ?

New generations of queens are created one to several times each year depending on species, so even though colonies are lesser in numbers than other individual organisms, there is still a lot of room for natural selection.

Btw, the ants in the picture look an awful lot like California Harvester Ants, who are presently as a species, under attack from the invasive Argentine Ant (not to mention the continual predation by Uncle Milton). Argentine Ants in their new foreign homes are thought to have all descended from a very similar genetic stock which allows them to form super-colonies spanning thousands of miles, which poses ever more amazing questions about the nature of natural selection, social insects, and the environment.

I don’t know exactly how this relates to the debate (though they mention that a bit in the Wikipedia article) but it seems like an important bit of context.