xia@cc.helsinki.fi (10/05/90)
Dear Colleagues, In a recent lecture in Swedish Academy of Science, Dr. E.O. Wilson of Harvard proposed the following thesis: 1. Speciation in social primates is rapid, with rich species diversity. 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. I have seen no data on inbreeding in social primates, neither have I seen evidence for random mating in social ants. Besides, there are inbreeding species with little speciation and random-mating species with rapid speciation (Forget this last sentence because an inbreeding species today may be random-mating in the remote past.). Any comments on this? Perhaps Allan Rogers has something to say about primates? BTW, Dave of Genbank mentioned Joel Felsenstein. I hope that anyone who is currently associated with Joel or whoever famous could managed to get a few more familiar names into this newsgroup. Xuhua