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Comment by zentropia | Hacker News Reader

Worker ants are all sister and they don't reproduce, so no problem letting others do the hard work.

I think the “letting others do the hard work” makes it easy to interpret your comment as somehow very negative.

The reproductive success of an ant hill is determined at the hill level, so the ants have no evolutionary incentive for selfishness at all.

Individual ants in a colony can be understood as cells of a multicellular organism operating at a higher level of independence. It's a fascinating adaptation and one wonders what "selfishness" would even mean in such a context. Do ants have memetic behavioural evolution or are their reactions to environmental stimuli purely genetically determined? It's actually quite a fascinating question with a number of implications and avenues for exploration.

True. The evolutionary success of ants happens at the colony level rather than the individual level, so they have an evolutionary pressure to "unfairly" divide the labor like this if it's more efficient overall. I'm sure there is no "awkwardness" for them. We humans cannot evolve this way because it disadvantages the productive ones. No wonder communism works so well for ants and bees.

(Not saying successful communism is impossible for humans, especially at smaller scales, just that evolution is working against it, rather than for it).

Evolution is working for it, on those smaller scales, though. Families will happily help each other, friends don’t need a detailed ledger to figure out who’s buying the next round. Most people have a good inherent sense of fairness I think.

It’s also pretty easy to imagine a family member to whom money is never given because he cannot be trusted.

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