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Comment by Frieren | Hacker News Reader

> The ants carry out prophylactic amputations. This not only protects the colony from infection but also doubles the survival rate of the injured workers.

To keep everybody around you healthy makes the probability of caching a disease lower for yourself, too.

Grooming behaviour in primates helps in the same way. And it is so important that it is linked to all kinds of mental rewards.

To let disease run amok in your own neighborhood it would be very costly.

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They can look altruistic at the individual level while still being completely aligned with self-preservation at the group level

Ants are also a special case because the vast majority of ants cannot reproduce. Only the queen and drones are reproductive agents, 99.9 percent of the colony are non reproductive, so their investment in the survival of the colony is total, they have no individual agenda.

As I understand it, the individual vs the group situation is complicated by their shared genetic pool.

I'd imagine it as having dozens of clones of myself, and one of them is tasked with reproducing for the rest of us. It sounds like a total lack of individualism, but if the offspring has my genes and is raised like me (potentially by me), how far is it from being my own ?

eusocial animals are really cool you can kinda treat the entire colony as a single organism. weirdly enough this isn't restricted to insects there are actually some eusocial mammals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality

the book coalescent by Stephen Baxter is an interesting take on what that might look like in humans as well if you're interested in the topic.

*gene level

Thank you for saying this. I've been saying this for years. No one listens.

may i ask in what context youve been saying this? I suspect it aint ant colonies...

When an ant colony has damaged ants or isn't making enough ants it's just better to mass import ants from another colony.

just say what youre trying to say

He said it. Ants are just economic units and easily squishable/replaceable.

I don't think anyone is adding anything to it.

No, ants are not the topic of discussion here... the original comment was extending the ant patterns to human communities, and the comment I replied to said they've been saying this for years (presumably about human communities). I'm trying to get rid of the misdirection and see exactly which ant colony practices people are saying should be done with/to human communities, and why.

In a sense, Aldous Huxley explored these ideas in his novel "Brave New World." [0] The novel describes a world were there is a rational order to human society, which has been engineered to be "optimal." A very good read I highly recommend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

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