The meek did inherit the Earth, at least among ants | Hacker News Reader

The meek did inherit the Earth, at least among ants

nytimes.com

25 pointsmarojejian17 comments

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/science/ants-exoskeletons...

The paper is interesting, but "meek" is the wrongest word they could have chosen - they're territorial, viciously attack intruders, and literally wage war between colonies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_ants

This reminded of a CK Lewis bit about how modern humans deploy a lot of resources trying to save "weak" babies, and thus undoing evolution's natural selection process.

So...Eugenics, then?

Already happening at the in vitro level, might be possible in vivo as well. Neither require the more abusive approaches from the first eugenics era.

In todays world, yes, that is back on the table.

Yep. It's inevitable and societies will have to grapple with it far sooner than most thing.

Eugenics is also "undoing evolution's natural selection process".

As long as some people and societies have more children than others, evolution continues.

You're talking about physical weakness which can be caused by non-genetic factors. Such a person may turn out to have a great intellect or other personal quality.

However, the big story in the west is that most sexual congress does not produce babies anymore.

That perspective is always such a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution and natural selection. (Yes I know It's for a comedy bit but I see this way too often).

Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection were never really about directly competing against other members of their species. There was certainly a component of that but natural selection is predominantly about competing against nature itself.

It's all about developing traits that help a given individual or community/ecosystem survive and thrive. And unsurprisingly in most ecosystems it's not competition from peers but rather competing against weather, environmental conditions, and the food chain/predators. So what you see is that at basically every single level (from plants and microbes, up through insects, birds, mammals, and at all stages of human history) you have a constant push for mutualistic behaviors.

It's why birds warn their entire ecosystem (including other bird species and non-bird species) about predators and danger. Or as another bird example, migratory birds will cooperate and share food even when migrating with birds of different species. Anything that can bolster the ability to survive and thrive for the community as a whole (and often entire ecosystem) ends up driving evolution far more than advantages for a single individual. Doubly so with punishing adversarial advantages for individual that end up disproportionately harming the community/whole.

That's only part of the truth. Animals do cooperate within and even across species, but they also compete, even within a species - wolves, ants, and chimpanzees are all territorial (as are many others), and the latter two are known to engage in war within their own species: https://www.livescience.com/animals/land-mammals/a-decade-lo...

And the competing against nature itself you mention, is often determined by the territory a group is able to claim. Some places get drought, others freeze, and in others food is plentiful. Nature may not be a free-for-all deathmatch, but it's not a pacifist coop either. At least, most species don't behave that way.

Oh certainly. But that's the thing. Even with species being territorial, that serves a broader purpose in the ecosystem. Territoriality for predators is important to prevent concentration of predators, overpredation, and then depletion of prey species (which has many downstream effects).

And because of that, territoriality tends to be fairly low in most species until the food supply becomes constrained. And even then it's a gradient where hostilities generally only escalate out of desperation rather than innate competition. i.e. Competing between individuals or communities tends to occur mainly when they fail to compete against the environment and run out of other options.

But really my point was just about the general sentiment that it's "against evolution" or "against natural selection" to help the weak and that doing so is something that humans do out of a unique sense of love or kindness or whatever.

If natural selection is about avoiding death, then nature must be doing a poor job since everything is dying in the end.

If killing the unfit is the way to go, you should kill your babies until they become immortal.

Natural selection has always been about reproduction.

Paper: "The evolution of cheaper workers facilitated larger societies and accelerated diversification in ants" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx8068

NYT gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/science/ants-exoskeletons...

I love it when biology converges like economics. And there are so many cases in both where scale beats unit quality, in ways that might defy our intuition (or desires).

"Quantity has a Quality all its own" (Stalin?)

Consider: - Roman Legions (or Rome's scale in general) - US WWII tanks vs. Germany's - China's success with low price point products (e.g. solar panels) - (Hopefully) the future success of OS machine learning vs. giant proprietary models

I admit to find attractive the (totally speculative) idea that Neanderthals might have been as (or more) "smart" as sapiens sapiens, 1:1, but we were just much more social and would expand faster / better.

> And there are so many cases in both where scale beats unit quality

In human economics, scale and quality usually come together, not in competition.

But of course, you follow into military examples. Those are really not as clear cut as you put.

Stalin's quantity soon stopped being plentiful because of neglect. Roman military was strong because of advanced techniques and the willingness to throw the status-quo away if it stopped working, often winning even when outnumbered. German WWII tanks were a joke, incapable of working in any real situation.

And the economical one, on Chinese solar panels, I recommend you reevaluate their quality and manufacturing conditions.

fwiw Panzer III and IV were pretty good but they made a bunch of tactical mistakes and the later models were overengineered

In human economics scale and quality are most certainly in tension. Rolls Royce hand assembles their cars because it’s easier to guarantee quality when you have masters doing the work. Toyota on the other hand gets the cost down because it’s mostly automated with very mostly unskilled labor doing some work.

At some point you can refine scale where you also automate the quality issues away, but there’s always still that tension.

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