Wilhelm Goetsch (1887 - 1960): pioneering studies on the development and evolution of the soldier caste in social insects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The eco-evo-devo of social insects addresses long-unanswered questions in Myrmecology, especially how novel castes originate and evolve. While this is an emerging field of broad interest to myrmecologists, German scientists prior to 1960 were quite active in studying such questions, but their attempts have largely been forgotten. The collective amnesia is partly because these papers are written in German and therefore inaccessible to the non-German speaking myrmecologists and partly because individual-level mechanistic approaches to studying social insects were eclipsed by population genetic approaches with the publication of Hamilton’s classic papers in 1964. Here, we present the first of a series of commentaries and translations of insightful papers written by German scientists before 1964 on the development of social insect castes as it related to colony function and social evolution. The goal of these translations and commentaries is to reveal findings and ideas that remain understudied to this day. Our first translation and com mentary is of two papers by Goetsch from 1937 and 1939 on caste determination and evolution in Pheidole ants and Anoplotermes termites.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".