5 ms·
>> The fertile eggs become female worker ants and unfertilized eggs develop as males One interesting consequence of this is that male ants have no fathers. All
by kevinventullo 8y ago
>> The fertile eggs become female worker ants and unfertilized eggs develop as males
One interesting consequence of this is that male ants have no fathers. All of their genetic code is inherited from their mother, and there is no variation in what they pass on. This lack of variation in what fathers pass on means that two ant sisters share 75% of their chromosomes instead of the 50% you see in most other animals, which some researchers believe is the underlying cause for the high level of cooperation in ant species (eusociality).
More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy
- BurningFrog 8y agoYou can also, if you're in a certain quirky intellectual mood, think of an ant colony as a single organism, since all the ants in it have 75% identical DNA. Its body just happens to be physically disjoint.
- Scene_Cast2 8y agoDoes collaborative behavior play a role then? For example, I would not consider a herd of cloned sheep to be one organism. Let's call it a grey spectrum then?
- wahern 8y agoWhich came first, the chicken or the egg? Your analogy only works if you somehow engineered the sheep to reproduce like ants and waited for many successive generations. If the reproductive change stuck, the behavior of the sheep would presumably evolve in a way that they began behaving like a single organism, including individual sheep exhibiting extremely self-less behavior, such as how individual ants from a colony or individual cells from your body behave.
- iguy 8y agoExactly. Cloned sheep are still sheep, optimised by for a life in which they have no clones. Whereas ants are instead optimised for this colony life. As are leaves of a tree, for instance, who are 100% willing to sacrifice themselves.
- jahbrewski 8y agoAnd if you’re in that quirky intellectual mood, could you also think of all of humanity as being a single organism, since we all share about 99.9% of our DNA? Certainly a thought I find hard to shake observing cities from the window of an airplane..
- dogcomplex 8y agoI'm not someone who studies this stuff, but I'd wager that the 99.9% thing isn't quite the same context as the 75% thing, and two ants in the same colony are more similar than two humans. Not to detract from your comment about all humans being one organism and whatnot (hell, maybe ants and our bodies operate on a different level of consciousness that as specialized intellectual creatures we typically override woooah mann). I mostly just wanted to fish for more info on this 75% thing from someone who studies DNA and can confirm my hunch - and maybe has more info on correlation between DNA similarity and cooperative behavior.
- mcv 8y ago> I'm not someone who studies this stuff, but I'd wager that the 99.9% thing isn't quite the same context as the 75% thing, > and two ants in the same colony are more similar than two humans. Exactly. There are several very distinct contexts for discussing percentages of genetic similarity, and although it's usually clear from context which one people are talking about, making it explicit would prevent nonsensical conflicts like this 99.9% vs 75% one.
- 8y ago
- kitd 8y agoHofstadter raises this in "Godel, Escher, Bach" discussing the characteristics of emergent intelligence.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAlso true for bees!