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Switching Tasks Changes Worker Bee DNA
`puddingebola writes "A report in the journal Nature Neuroscience (paywalled) says scientists have observed epigenetic markers in bees that correspond to their roles in the society. From the article, 'Honeybees are born into their place in society. Those fed royal jelly as larvae emerge as queens and do little but lay eggs. The rest become worker bees and divvy up the jobs that need doing around the hive. While some worker bees remain at home, others take flight in search of nectar, pollen and other hive essentials. The entire honeybee workforce are genetically identical sisters. But analysis of the worker bees' DNA revealed that foragers had one pattern of chemical tags on their genes, while those that stayed home had another. When bees swapped one job for the other, their genetic tags changed accordingly.'"
I want to do Flo, the Progressive Insurance spokeperson. I bet that would be a night I'd never forget.
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able "
Why even include sources that cannot be accessed by the majority of readers?
Taks transcribed to DNA. Hmm. This doesn't sound all that far from a mechanism that could transcribe thoughts... primitive or otherwise... back into DNA to be passed to offspring. Much like the concept of inherited behaviors actually, which clearly exist. We could explain inherited behavior by random selection... higher mortality of individuals not exhibiting the behavior... but that would be awfully slow compared to a mechanism that could pass learned behaviors to offspring. And such a mechanism would give the species possessing it a huge advantage, therefore by the law of evolution it almost has to exist.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Totally feel the bees on that.
Whenever I need to completely switch gears from one project to the next (like going from Drupal into Zend Framework), I will require at least two weeks of downtime (although I would never dare admit to it to my manager). It's unavoidable. It's like my brain is jammed between channels and no matter how much I beat the horse, it will be this way while my neurons rearrange themselves. Then, one sunny day, bing it's all realigned and reprogrammed and I'm off to the productive races.
Wish there were medical-creative downtime available....
Epigenetics is not about the DNA sequence itself, but rather about how the DNA is managed and accessed. Generally it refers to the protein that helps to condense the DNA and make some parts more accessible than others. Really the more noticeable change would be in their RNA, which is the sequence of expressed genes.
Basically if your genome is a tape library, RNA is your local hard drive, which is pulling files as needed from the tape library. Your system RAM is, of course, protein.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
not to multi-task.
more cowbell
Bees are known to be sensitive to the pherenome balance within the hive. Observationally, bees tend to regress from field tasks to hive tasks following a succesfull swarm and the establishment of a new hive (but not too great a proportion, so it seems likely that a initial lack of hive worker pherenomes could lead to changes within individuals that would reestablish the overall hive balance. Examined individually in individuals or hive regulatory mechanisms respond like a large collection well-tuned PID (Proportional-Integral-Differential) controllers, only a small portion of which have been recognized.
A Hive is not identical sisters. There are usually 3 to 5 males who mated with the Queen, so there are factions which are more closely related and they try to elevate their Queen larvae when the time comes to create a new Queen. Also, even the sisters with the same 2 parents are not genetically identical, they still have the usual mix of traits from both parents from when the egg was fertilized.
It's exactly what the elite don't want you to know - that human life can adapt and do great things given the chance. But they want us kept down in the mud to toil.
"Epigenetics is not about the DNA sequence itself, but rather about how the DNA is managed and accessed."
But intelligence is not just about the brain itself, it's the ability to access and use the full potential of higher thought that is already there.
I noticed this a while ago. People in New Jersey, doing whatever it is people in New Jersey do, have their DNA changed to the point that their skin becomes orange and several other peculiarities...
Worker bees in a hive are not geneticially identical, nor are they all sisters in the usual sense of the word. Queen bees are typically multiply mated during a mating flight and store sperm for life. Male bees develop from unfertilized eggs and they only have one set of chromosomes which each of their offspring inherits in full. Pairs of worker bees therefore either have the same father so they share on average 75% of their genes, or they have different fathers so that they share 25% of their genes.
wow flying fpga's
The DNA sequence doesn't change, only its methylation patterns. This is to be expected. The same thing happens in all organisms.
Waiving their private parts at our aunties, again. Father was a hamster, mother smelt of eldeberries, all that.
Gently reply
I wouldn't be surprised if iPhone users have mutated chemical tags too. Look for the "religious" gene first, and don't forget to check the "fashion-victim", "metrosexual softie" and "RDF-sensititvity" genes, then verify that the "die-hard technologist" gene is turned off.
Wait, I'm going to write a research proposal just now...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I'm confused. The title says that the bees' DNA is changed, but the summary says that chemical markers ON the DNA are changed?
I didn't RTFA since the hook was so ambiguous.
You guys understand the brain bugs in Starship Troopers, bred whenever a problem needed magical solving, and the engineers in The Mote in God's Eye, were both sarcastic commentary about highly intelligent science and engineering knuckling under to let political idiots run the show and tell them what to do.
See also A Deepness In the Sky. Or parts of Atlas Shrugged, for that matter.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I have the same problem when I swap between Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. I can get fairly good at one of them, but never good at both of them at the same time.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Or the short story "Swarm" at the end of Schismatrix Plus...
I can see the fnords!