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"A counter anecdatum: I have been keeping a lone, unmated Pseudoneoponera rufipes queen since August 2020." Aren't you comparing very unlike things ? Specific

by rsync 6y ago

"A counter anecdatum: I have been keeping a lone, unmated Pseudoneoponera rufipes queen since August 2020." Aren't you comparing very unlike things ? Specifically, your queen is roughly analogous to an individual, as we think of it. Your parent speaks of a worker ant that is more analogous to an individuals toe or tastebud or something like that ... To put it another way, you have one "ant" (a colony of one individual). Your parent has zero ant (colonies).

coldtea 6y ago
The ants, queen or regular worker, are all complete organisms, so the explanation falls short. Just that the queen is more used to live in isolation (some ant species/colonies just have a single queen ant), whereas the workers are more used to cooperation and collective existance.
- rsync 6y ago
  "The ants, queen or regular worker, are all complete organisms, so the explanation falls short." Yes, but they are not "individuals" as we commonly reference. It's loose, but the best analogy for an human individual is the queen ant/bee/termite and the entire hive, or nest - with all the workers, etc. - are part of that queens own "extended phenotype": "After the gene-centered view of evolution was developed in the mid 1970s, non-reproductive individuals were seen as an extended phenotype of the genes, which are the primary beneficiaries of natural selection."[1] An individual worker ant is, to the queen, better thought of as one of your hairs or one of your tastebuds. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality#Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality#Paradox