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Does 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?
by Scene_Cast2 8y ago
Does 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.