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Bees Reveal Nature-Nurture Secrets
NoFear writes "The nature-nurture debate is a 'giant step' closer to being resolved after scientists studying bees documented how environmental inputs can modify our genetic hardware. The researchers uncovered extensive molecular differences in the brains of worker bees and queen bees which develop along very different paths when put on different diets. The research was led by Professor Ryszard Maleszka of The Australian National University's College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, working with colleagues from the German Cancer Institute in Heidelberg, Germany and will be published next week in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology."
There is no nature-nurture debate.
...that a possibly major scientific paper is published in an open access journal. This trend seems ever more powerful, to the benefit of all, except the usual vultures (Elzevier, Springer, Wiley...).
But we’re gonna need a lot. Beads aren’t cheap. Are beads cheap?
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
Researchers preferred to have a frank discussion of the results with their children before releasing the results to the playground.
What is the cause of the behavior of a program, its code or input? Obviously both in virtually all cases. The code sets what inputs it can respond to, and the inputs determine which response occurs. Flexible programs have long-term state, allowing inputs to have an effect on response far into the future. Why is there even a debate as to whether it's the code or input that entirely decides behavior? The particular behavior depends on the program, of course. A program which merely echoes its input back, without any state, is less-flexible than one that receives a script, then interprets it.
People may not like to hear it, but the parent comment succinctly embodies the motivations for all nature-nurture studies and indeed a significant chunk of genetic/biology studies seen in the popular press.
People can be bigoted and racist if they want; but we are free to object when they try to call their opinions science.
May the Maths Be with you!
When bees were asked about this study, they just cheered that they're making the news again after so long.
All glory to Arstotzka!
I often hear it referred to as "the nature/nurture debate," as if people are actually debating whether we are products of our genetics or our environment. There is no debate, we are products of both. I suppose there are lots of little debates about how much each affects some particular trait. But the implication here that there is a single, central debate that can somehow be "resolved" is absurd.
To quote Matt Ridley:
The discovery of how genes actually influence human behaviour, and how human behaviour influences genes, is about to recast the debate entirely. No longer is it nature versus nurture, but nature via nurture. Genes are designed to take their cues from nurture
Goodbye, nature vs nurture
Replace human for bee or for organism and I think the quote still stands. It is not that the behaviour of an organism is for the most part determined by it genes, or either that is is determined by it nurture.
Nurture will give direction, Nature will limit the abilities.
How much you'll train a dog, it will never be able to play chess. How much you'll train a toddler, it will never be able to have capabilities to follow a scent trail like a bloodhound.
I play chess with my dog all the time. He's the only one I can beat!
For BEES!
That will be totally applicable to humans.
Once we learn to fly.
And turn yellow with black stripes.
And grow bee fuzz.
And grow another pair of limbs...
[...]
How much you'll train a dog, it will never be able to play chess. How much you'll train a toddler, it will never be able to have capabilities to follow a scent trail like a bloodhound.
No one is debating absurdities like that though. The question is more like, was Manson destined to be a serial killer or was that a social effect? Or phrased more dangerously, if I add some environmental inputs, can I make sure no one is gay ever again?
The upper classes have, in the past and even now, claimed a genetic superiority that justifies their position.
If nurture is the big thing that determines outcomes, it makes sense to spend money on early childhood education and on schools. Society will be much better served if the kids in the ghetto becomes doctors and lawyers rather than career criminals.
On the other hand, if genetics determine everything, there is no point spending money in the ghetto. The population is defective and we should just build a fence around them, toss in food and wait for them to kill each other off.
It seems pretty clear that a big portion of our population sides with the nature side of the argument. It is easier to spend money on jails than on inner city schools.
The trouble with this bee study is that it is too nuanced. In that regard it isn't such a big step forward. It isn't the thing that will convince most of the public (which is us) to change our entrenched prejudices.
For those in the research community, the nature vs. nurture argument has been moot for rather a long time.
I remember reading an article years ago mentioning that queen bees become queens because their were fed a special diet not because they are genetically different. In fact they said it while explaining how if a queen bee dies the workers simply pick a worker larva at random and feed it royal jelly and it becomes a new queen bee. The article spoke of it even then as a well accepted fact, not some breaking news.
So this can't be the news. From reading the article I gather the researchers discovered the actual chemical mechanism, whatever it is. That's the only news here. But most comments' authors here on slashdot seem to talk about 'nature vs nurture' as if we discovered worker larvas can become queen bees just this minute.
What's more interesting is to note that the bees' DNA is obviously crafted to look for that different 'royal jelly', and uses it as a trigger. The royal jelly doesn't change the DNA, it's just a code for which the DNA looks.
Nurture will give direction, Nature will limit the abilities.
I think you may be confusing nurture with training. In any case, nurture can certainly be limiting (as in eating habits effect on athletic performance) and nature can give directions (the giraffe will eat from tall trees).
Or you take the third approach: it was inevitable that Manson became what he is. We humans are composed of non-thinking, non-sentient base elements (mainly hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and other trace metals). As such, our bodies are bound by the physical laws of this universe. Change the position of one quark at the beginning of the universe and our solar system may not even exist today (let alone Charles Manson).
The article calls this a novel demonstration of DNA methylation, even though we've known about this phenomenon for quite some time. Granted, epigenetics is an emerging branch of biology, but this is hardly new.
[...]
How much you'll train a dog, it will never be able to play chess. How much you'll train a toddler, it will never be able to have capabilities to follow a scent trail like a bloodhound.
No one is debating absurdities like that though. The question is more like, was Manson destined to be a serial killer or was that a social effect? Or phrased more dangerously, if I add some environmental inputs, can I make sure no one is gay ever again?
The discussion is sometimes even more subtle than that, though: it's more like "on average are there systematic differences in genetic material between a group of serial killers and normal individuals, and on average are there differences in social circumstances (causally unrelated to the differences in genetic material) between a group of serial killers and normal individuals?"
Discussing causality with a single individual is very complex.
I think sometimes people discussing "nature-nurture" issues are discussing totally different topics (as your reply to the parent is suggesting). E.g., understanding the physiological constants involved in throwing a basketball isn't the same as understanding the source of the differences between pro basketball players and most of the rest of us.
In any event, I thought the quotes about this article were absurd. E.g., ""In the bees, more than 550 genes are differentially marked between the brain of the queen and the brain of the worker, which contributes to their profound divergence in behaviour. This study provides the first documentation of extensive molecular differences that may allow honey bees to generate different reproductive and behavioural outcomes as a result of differential feeding with royal jelly."
I'm sorry, I'll be the first to advocate for animal models of behavior, and fully acknowledge that people and bees aren't as different as many assume. However, the behavioral phenotypes involved are *way* more easily characterized than in people. Maybe if 10% of the population had a completely different behavioral and physical phenotype, and was being fed some special substance, I might be willing to go along with statements like the ones being made. The research is really interesting, but the genetics of behavior is not going to be resolved by this study. Sorry.
So this pretty much answers much of what we already know ...
The answer is 42 and we are all just components of a giant computer
There is an interesting book, called "A general theory of love", it describes a model - the triune brain*, which stipulates that the brain is made from 3 different regions (reptilian, limbic, neocortex) and explains how they interact with each other.
The authors provide a lot of examples which illustrate that in the case of mammals, nurture plays a very important role. Children who do not play, or who don't hang out with other humans grow up to be solitary, lacking social skills, their lives are shorter, they get sick more often, etc.
Experiments with other primates yield similar results; read about "the wire mother" and "the pit of despair".
Insects have a much more simple nervous system; the findings described in the article mean that even at such levels - there's still something that can override whatever is defined in the DNA. In the case of complex life forms with a neocortex - this wouldn't be a surprise; I'm impressed by the fact that bees have such a feature.
* The triune brain model is known to have some issues, but it is still an interesting read.
The saddest poem
Nurture not only makes a queen out of the common female lava (that would have become a female worker) but also the drones that are MALE. So, as suggested, the DNA of a female worker and the DNA of a queen may be the same but royal jelly 'triggers' the DNA to make a bigger queen; then what about making the drone? The DNA of a female, be it worker or queen, can't possibly be the same as a male, the drone, can it?
Bees are not a good example here. Their genome contains two fairly fixed paths (queen bee, worker bee) that are chosen depending on what kind of food the bee is fed as a larva. The individual cannot "transcend" its set of genes, it's just that the bee genome contains these two paths.
Richard Feynman talked about this in one of his books, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman (I think). He said with a bit of practice, he could tell which objects in a room were handled by which people. I don't see why you couldn't train a human to follow a trail with some level of success.
I'm glad that scientists have finally solved that pesky nature/nurture debate that headline writers seem to like so much. I mean there was me thinking that most people with any sort of intelligence and/or access to publised studies realised that most matters were "a bit of both".
Replace human for bee or for organism and I think the quote still stands.
It's been obvious for decades now that "nature vs nurture" is a stupid way to decompose the various influences on human behaviour, but journalists and idiots (but I repeat myself) will continue to ask the "burning" question "nature vs nurture?" for at least a couple of decades more.
Even so, /. in 2025 will probably carry stories with headlines:
"Nature or Nurture: Which explains the failure of Linux on the desktop?"
"Engineers look to unexpected places for variable geometry low-speed wing design: birds!"
"Company goes green for totally unexpected reason: to save money!"
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
yeah, bur creationist, young earthist and other crazy crackpot theorists need this kind of hyperbol. How otherwise are they going to pretend that " [hard science xyz] is a theory in crisis as proved by major debate therefore we have to teach content of bronze-age book as a viable alternative" ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]