For one hint of the importance of this ongoing research
from just two years ago, 2002, we can look at who funds it: financed by Australia's
Department of Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland
and the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, New
South Wales.
In a striking coincidence with my Genetics class,
the lines "The number of round and waggle dancers were not significantly different
from a 1:1 ratio of dance types when compared using a Chi Square Test (x^2 =
0.99; .75 < P < .5)" stuck out like lost scuba diver's seven foot bright red
sausage-shaped inflatable balloon on a flat, empty sea.
Even bees, a tiny insect that MUST behave out of
entirely genetic pre-determined Ethograms within its Umwelt, show "well-documented
intrabee variation in dance forms."
Doesn't that make a Sociobiologists blood run cold!
Notice that, slightly paraphrased, "a bee scores
for dance phenotype ONLY after it executes five continuous circuits of the dance
three different times."
After all the bee watching, they conclude the behavior
evinces "a series of alleles" that determine a threshold distance between the
waggle dance and the round dance, and to my horror (after reading about complex
mice fur color alleles in the Genetics course), the phenotype displays a "dominance
hierarchy reminiscent of that known from the mouse agouti locus.
"We interpret this as Our Black bees carry an allele
dominant over that carried by the yellow bees used, whereas the black bees used
by Rinderer and Beaman are interpretable as carrying an allele recessive to
that of their yellow bees" (referring to ostensibly contradictory results of
a previous study).
Do scientists joke? Why all this emphasis on age?
"Older bees waggle significantly more slowly." Older scientists?
And now for some Found Poetry: "two virgin queens
were reared from the yellow parent and each instrumentally inseminated with
semen of single sons of the black parent."
What is a single son in the Bee community?
Then a gripping statistical discussion about why
they throw out the " next most parsimonious explanation" because of the relative
frequency counts of their phenotypic-behavior specially bred bees.
How did they identify and keep track of the F1 generation?
When will programmers fix these input text boxes
so they retain Tabs on each paragraph? Just what is their phenotype, anyway?
