Neapolitan

Plants are too well grounded to think dirty 24/7. Plants think interesting thoughts though they may be reticent at times and keep their opinions to themselves. Needless to say their interests branch out to many subjects.

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Tristan_Geoff

eyyy I see what you did there

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YW Fam: All MB Music Projects Under One Roof

Emo/Pop Punk Journal

Techno Journal

Lucem Ferre

Can I wear an ant cologne and be accepted in their colony?

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Art Is Dead. Buy My ****.

Guybrush

It seems like you could

It does seem like ants can tell nestmates apart from non-nestmates (from another colony) based on smell, but it is unclear to me whether they are able to sniff out kin from non-kin.. which should be an important factor in how interactions evolve.

Edit:

Might seem so simple it's really dumb, but perhaps a combination of being unable to recognize kin coupled with some kind of constraint that inhibits the evolution of this ability is all ants need to evolve these weidly altruistic supercolonies.

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Something Completely Different

Tristan_Geoff

are you antkin?

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YW Fam: All MB Music Projects Under One Roof

Emo/Pop Punk Journal

Techno Journal

Marie Monday

*a scant

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The Batlord

They should make a cake the size of a building. Then dig an intricate series of tunnels in the ground. Then you take a hundred people and just have them get in a line and just go grab pieces of the cake and take it into the human hill and then go back out for more until the cake is gone. I'd do that ****.

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The Batlord

Fanta is disgusting. ****ing antI-semites.

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jwb

Yes, this actually is part of the logic behind Wilson's suggestion that some types of colonies could qualify as superorganisms.

There was a documentary I saw years ago by national geographic which highlighted the ways in which colonies exist along a certain sort of spectrum of eusociality. It was the same documentary I mentioned earlier which showed one of the workers in a colony start to try to go into the process of laying eggs and she was physically restrained and prevented from doing so by her sisters.

This was in a long legged ant colony, where the difference in morphology between the queen and the workers was not as drastically pronounced.

The workers weren't infertile, they just tended not to reproduce. In other colonies, however, the workers are born sterile and cannot reproduce. Their only reproductive outlet is through the queen which in essence means they are intrinsically tied to the well being of the colony.

That is how it is suggested that traits can be selected for on the basis of making the colony more efficient. To my mind it's not much different than traits being selected for that make your body more equipped to survive to reproduction.

If the genes of the colony flow strictly through the queen, then it seems like conceptualizing the colony as a sort of "body" with the queen as its reproductive organ is not all that different from the picture Dawkins paints of how genes eventually started coding to build robots (organisms) to carry the genes around and propagate them.

Maybe there is something I'm missing but I don't quite see the conflict there. Since it's genes that are being selected for, not individuals, why must we insist the individuals necessarily be self interested?. If a colony of individuals which are born into specific castes to work for the purpose of facilitating the queens reproduction is a more effective way of spreading said genes than allowing for more individualism then why wouldn't natural selection favor it?

BTW I read the selfish gene years ago... Could probably use a refresher but I'm familiar with it and as I noted above I don't really see a conflict between his thesis and the idea of a superorganism

jwb

Also you asked am I in Wilson's camp... Not at all I'm only vaguely familiar with him tbh. I don't take any hard stances one way or the other but the way he articulates the superorganism seems to make sense to me... But wtf do I know?