Scientists Find a Single Protein Can Switch Some Ants from a Worker into a Queen | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Find a Single Protein Can Switch Some Ants from a Worker into a Queen

sciencealert.com

39 pointswombatmobile11 comments

This makes Larry Niven's Pak Protectors more plausible. In his universe, when an adult human eats a certain food (not available on Earth), it triggers their transformation into a larger, stronger, more intelligent being, evolved to protect us "breeders", along the lines of the transformation of a worker ant into a queen.

But one would think that an occasional rare mutation would trigger at least a partial transformation, so I'll guess this one will remain scifi.

In the stories, being old _was_ the partial transformation (Protectors become sterile - older people become less reproductively able, Protectors get an extra heart where the genitals were - older people have heart problems because they only have one, Protectors are monomaniacally fixated on family, and so on).

The original stories were written in an era when there was an absence of direct proof that humanity was related to other life on earth (that would be the default assumption, and there was tons of evidence, but it was theoretically semi-plausible that we weren't); molecular biology more or less killed that off, ruining the stories :)

Incidentally, this has to have been one of the earliest manifestations of gene-centric evolution in sci-fi; the first story was written in 1967!

You dont have to look at sci fi. Look at what happens to dad and mom brains and hormones after a kid arrives.

Mind sharing some references to some explicit changes that occur?

That was the first thing on my mind too. We need to find that protein in a human and switch it. See what happens. He'll turn into Donald Trump or something.

Off topic, but i hope it's not only me who gets confused by random use of capital letters. Whats up with capitalizing (almost) all first letters in words? Is this some regional thing?

Why "Can" is capitalized but "from" is not for example?

It's 'title case'. Conjunctions (the/and/or/etc...), articles (a/an), and prepositions (in/on/by/with/of/etc...) don't get capitalized

https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/title_case.htm

NO.

> While the results certainly suggest there are two main social hormones controlling caste behavior in Jerdon's jumping ants and that this is done via a single protein factor, we will need further research to actually prove this is so.

That's Xenomorphs right there. lol

Queens hate this one weird trick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com