rogers@ANTHRO.UTAH.EDU (Alan R. Rogers) (10/06/90)
>2. It has been hypothesized that the rapid speciation in social >primates is due to relative isolation of breeding among different >social groups, i.e., random drift leads to diversification and >eventually speciation. > >3. If this hypothesis is true, then why there is no such rapid >speciation and rich diversity in social insects, especially, >social ants? > >4. Answer: A colony of social ants is not equivalent to a social >group in primates. The former is a single superorganism. The >relative social isolation among ant colonies does not lead to >non-random mating when queens are getting inseminated. That answer makes sense to me, but I'll bet Sewall Wright would have added that speciation usually involves a shift from one adaptive peak to another, and that this requires that the partially isolated breeding groups be fairly small. Primate populations are not nearly as dense as those of social insects, and their local groups are much smaller. In addition, they can't fly. Bodies of water and (for arboreal primates) areas devoid of trees are probably more effective barriers to primates than to bees and wasps. This should also increase the isolation of local primate populations, and thus facilitate speciation. Alan Rogers INTERNET: rogers@arsun.utah.edu USMAIL : Dept. of Anthropology, Univ. of Utah, S.L.C., UT 84112 PHONE : (801) 581-5529