Yeah, I think that was the reasoning.

But they forgot that life finds a way and the hybrids wouldn’t just stay where they put them.

They not only outcompete European hives, they’ll straight up raid and destroy other hives stealing their young.

Because their African half evolved in a resource scarce environment. If they run across other bees they view it as a direct threat on their resources. Pretty sure it also causes them to establish new hives much further away than European bees. Which is why they keep spreading so fast.

I’m just glad no one’s tried to crossbreed honey badgers with wolves to combat the hybrid bees yet.

Workers and queens are female.

A young female when given royal jelly triggers it becoming a queen and reproductive organs instead of a stinger.

The males are drones. They have male reproductive organs instead of stingers, and they just hang out and try to bone the queen.

But the worker bees are the ones that actually, you know, do the work.

So that’s why European bees won’t “swarm” someone and all sting them. You get a few warning shots and a chance to retreat, just moving away is enough for it to stop.

Meanwhile, African bees had to deal with shit like honey badgers. And as we’re all aware, the honey badger gives very little fucks about anything.

So they don’t half ass defense, they send out a shit ton of bees that won’t stop until the threat is chased away and keeps running away. If they didn’t the honey badger wouldnt even notice.

Then some genius decided to cross breed the species, and we get “Africanized killer bee” that treat everything they come across as a honey badger.

When the stinger gets pulled out of the bee, the sac with the venom comes out too, still attached to the singer

Attempts to remove it injects more venom.

The life of the bee is worth less than the increased deterrent to animals attacking the hive.

The life of a handful of bees really isn’t worth much at all to the hive. So even when there’s no longer giant ass bears going after hives, there’s not a lot of pressure for the bee to lose the barb.

Edit:

It’s also important to remember that evolution isn’t just competing against predators/prey. It’s competing against competitors too.

If one hive of bees has barbs and worse stings than the one next to it, the one without barbs is gonna get attacked.

So the barbs don’t have to be enough to convince predators that honey is never worth the sting, just that this honey is more painful to get than that honey.

Overtime the less painful honey may be pushed out of the local ecosystem. At which point it’s just barbed bees, and the cycle might start over again with another way stings are more painful.

It’s cheaper to prevent than treat…

But in an ultra capitalist healthcare system, cheap is bad.

There’s more profit in no preventive treatment so you can bankrupt people later.

The system is working exactly as intended, they’re making as much money as they can.

Which is why even with Dems controlling the White House, Senate, and House for two years…

None of them even talked about healthcare.

Neither party wants to change it, because they get donations for not changing it.

The intensity and the wavelength of light influence entrainment.[2] Dim light can affect entrainment relative to darkness.[15] Brighter light is more effective than dim light.[12] In humans, a lower intensity short wavelength (blue/violet) light appears to be equally effective as a higher intensity of white light.[11]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_effects_on_circadian_rhythm

For anyone else, I won’t try to change your mind.

You’re talking genetic variation, I’m talking phenotype variation…

Like, 1 in 200 people is colourblind, or something?

…

Again, you’re talking genetics, where it is clearly broken down in 2,3,4.

However like pretty much everything else, it’s not that clear cut just because the plans were.

Two people with the same amount of different types of cones are not guaranteed to have the same rod/cone ratio. Even when they have similar genetics for the ratio, things rarely go according to plan as a human develops.

Like, you know that’s why facial symmetry is attractive right? It shows that things on both halves went according to plan. Which especially for women is a huge bonus for reproductive health.

Especially for something made up of a whole bunch of small things like rods/cones, it’s not even perfect for identical twins.

…

A specific wavelength may effect you…

That wavelength is not present in moonlight/starlight, which is not “full darkness”.

For the vast majority of human evolution, “full darkness” wasn’t safe, and wasn’t even really possible.

I understand what you and OP are trying to say. And you both kind of have the general idea but none of the details.

Like how you got taught basic things in 6th grade, but by 12 grade you’re learning what you thought was the whole truth, was just a general overview.

Which wouldn’t be bad if you recognized it, but loads of people want to insist the short summary the learned as a child is as deep as it gets

Cats are traditionally thought to be dichromats, as well.

And humans usually have three, but sometimes it’s two, and even rarely 4…

With that much variations (including other ways) it’s hard to say human eyes are optimized for any condition.

There are very few examples of things in nature that are truly optimized for all of its environment.

Humans are just too widespread with too much variation to say we’re optimized for anything.

We just have too much in species variation.

The experience of people working the night shift, who use blackout curtains to sleep during the day, would disagree.

Wow, I didn’t know my own experience disagreed with me…

Or that during my childhood when my dad was swing shift, he was apparently a freak of nature too…

But that’s for a relatively highly regimented sleep cycle. If you slept and worked completely at your leisure, you might end up with one shorter sleep period at night, and one even shorter nap during the day. And without any day-night cycle at all, some people naturally adopt cycles of varying lengths.

Again, human variation is a big thing.

But an individual will change their sleep schedule as they age, which is another supporting point for what I’m saying.

Evolutionary biologists hypothesis that it was so out of an entire tribe of early hominds, at least some members were likely to be awake. It wasn’t an inate guard duty rotation. But kids and middle age went to bed early, teens went to bed super late, and by then the elderly were waking up.

If something happened, someone screamed and everyone woke up. And the fires stayed lit all night.

A healthy human can still pick out something small way better than a goat

Sometimes…

Depending on if you’re talking about motion, color, or lowlight.

But since when is “optimized” just “better than a goat”?

Like, cats easily blow everything else out of the water.

I feel like I’d definitely break an ankle if I tried sprinting otherwise

Yeah, we played paintball even, but stopped because one guy ran straight off like a 6 foot mini cliff. A couple of us were chasing him and he just disappeared. Was freaky as shit like that scene from LotRs.

I also have to account for the fact that there was some light pollution

Yeah, I’m talking really hillbilly stuff, zero light pollution.

but in the darkest conditions that happen at sea apparently you can’t see your own hands.

A ship gives off a lot of light pollution, but even without that, between the water reflecting and nothing blocking light, it’s brighter out there unless there’s heavy clouds cover. And even then it’s gotta be a lot of clouds and rough waves or else the light would still be refracting some.

Now a watertight compartment on a ship with the light switch on the outside?

Yeah, that’s complete darkness. It’s not just “can’t see your hand in front of your face”. It’s the absolute and complete absence of light. That’s total darkness.

And it fucks with you very quickly.

“Full darkness” isn’t even a real thing in nature.

And

It’s not like climbing into a cupboard, shutting the door, and sealing all the cracks with duct tape.

So I thought it was pretty clear I meant that to get “full darkness” where you really can’t see, requires extra steps to intentionally make it happen. Just that for the vast majority of human evolution, we weren’t really capable of it, and would have no reason to even try.

We’re diurnal, and have eyes optimised to see maximum colour and detail instead of well in dim light (at least by mammal standards)

Human variation.

There’s two main structures in our eyes.

1. Rods: take large amounts of any wave length of light

2. Cones: take in a very small amount of a specific wavelength and only that wavelength

Most of the area (like 95%) are rods. And there’s a couple (usually three) types of cones.

Some people have more different types of cones, and can see more differences in color. Some have less types meaning less cones overall even.

But the eye won’t just have more blank spots. So it fills in with more rods.

This is actually related to why the further away from the equator people got, the lighter their eyes got.

With longer variation in day/night cycle, it was advantages to let as much light in as possible. That outweighed the downside of too much light during the day, as that could be solved with hat brims, or that age old move where you make a visor with your palm.

By limiting the amount of light going to your rods, your cones get less “washed out” and that’s how we get more detail/colors.

But even in a single population, there’s going to be a lot of human variation. Rod/cone distribution has a high amount of variability even when genetics are steady. Genetics has a large effect, but it’s not like the body always follows directions closely.

Nope.

It’s a very specific wavelength of light that inhibits it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin#Regulation

That’s why there’s “blue light filters” on electronics these days. That wavelength isnt included with moonlight/starlight… maybe on a big full moon there’s be some.

And why people prefer soft yellowish lights when relaxing and not the bright ass LEDs.

I mean, my night vision was always better than most…

But growing up as kids we’d be sprinting thru the woods playing tag at like 10pm summer nights, not a single electric light in sight

You’re not going to recognize someone 100 yards away, but you’re not walking around with your hands in front of your face to make sure you don’t run into anything.

If you’re under an open sky, or even a primitive shelter, you’re not in complete darkness.

We didn’t…

“Full darkness” isn’t even a real thing in nature. It’s hard to tell with light pollution, but even in the absolute middle of nowhere with no artificial lights, you’re going to be able to see fairly well. Even with no moon, starlight isn’t just an expression. And on a full moon it can be surprisingly “bright” if you’re just out there for a while.

It’s not like climbing into a cupboard, shutting the door, and sealing all the cracks with duct tape.

You may be used to needi g full darkness to sleep, but that’s a learned habit. I guarantee if there was nothing you could do, it wouldn’t take you long to adapt your “requirement” of total darkness.

Lewis’ prequels > Lucas’s prequels

If your lifespan was an hour, every generation that witnessed a sunrise or sunset would freak the fuck out and think the world was ending.

I’ve always thought of entropy like that, it seems one direction, but only because we’re on a comparativly tiny timescale.

Used to subscribe to the “big crunch” theory that it’ll just all start over. But the more Penrose and Hawking I read, the more I think the Big Bang just isn’t that unique.

There’s a lot of signs that the vast majority of existence is dark matter, and with how it interacts with regular matter, I don’t think we have sequential big bangs like a single light slowly flashing. I think it’s more like fireworks in the sky.

There’s probably not anyway to travel through the dark matter to get to another “bubble”, and even if we did, that bubbles laws of physics could be drastically incompatible with us.

Like, if you remember the Narnia books it’s like that “main world” where it was just an infinite number of ponds and jumping into one shoots you out to some world world everything works better. I think The Magicians kind of ripped off the idea, and by now more people may be familiar with that then one of the least popular (but underrated) books in a children’s series from ww2.

Entropy is functionally persistent, but only because everything we can see and interact isnt all there is. There could be multiple other bubbles of matter happening right now, it’s just about what frame of reference we have.

Eh, the further South you go the more common it is to just see them out in nature.

South Carolina has “palmetto bugs” which are the same species as Hawaii’s B52s, just a little smaller.

In places where roaches can survive outside making it impossible to really prevent them from coming inside, people just tend to call them a new name.

Hawaii is fucking wild with roaches…

I think every single species is active, at least on Oahu.

There’s “B52s” that live outside in dumpster/trash. They’re big enough that if you see one on the ground you immediately think it’s fake. And when they’re flying at night you can’t see them in the air, but you can fucking hear them which is even more terrifying. They’re technically just American cockroaches, but because the island life (especially Waikiki) is pretty much perfect for them, they just keep getting bigger and bigger on the island.

Plus with all the people around, they’re not really scared of humans. These aren’t the roaches in movies that scatter when a light comes on or they see a person. They’re used to us by now.

And with so many people riding scooters…

Getting hit with a giant flying cockroach in the face at 40mph isn’t exactly fun, but it’s definitely memorable.

All the hotels, restaurants, and buildings are infested with the smaller breeds. There’s just nothing to do when conditions are fine for them to live outside all year. Even if you somehow killed every one in your building, more are just going to come in from outside to fill the void.