All of evolution is path dependent. Dying after a sting does not have to confer extra fitness to exist, right now. rather it had to have conferred some fitness

All of evolution is path dependent. Dying after a sting does not have to confer extra fitness to exist, right now. rather it had to have conferred some fitness relative to the alternative traits circulating at the time it was selected. obviously if you go by gradient descent you are not guaranteed to reach a global minimum or even a local one, given a constantly changing fitness landscape. In most of these discussions, optimizing nature of evolution is taken as granted - we do not need to prove how evolution works yet again - there are plenty of evidence and discussion elsewhere - take it or leave it. This node is well connected to other knowledge, and if you disagree, you need to convince a whole discipline of science, not me. From the optimizing premise of evolution, various inferred hypotheses can be made, explaining a range of phenomena, just like, in physics, from the premise that probabilities of events are given by the amplitudes of solutions of certain pdes with specific initial conditions, we were able to devise tractable mathematical models of various nuclear reactions, here a model of development of certain abstract traits was explained (“altruism”). The author fully acknowledged that this is a simplified model and does not match reality in some cases, and in other cases does not explain well enough. improvements to the model were proposed. Isn’t that how science works, in the best cases?