News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite by titzer on Thursday November 09, 2017 @02:12PM (#15664996)
> The colony is really the organism, and the soldiers serve it, abiding by prevailing odors, likely without very much free will. Or at least as much free will as your arm has, to reflexively recoil from a burn, or lash out at some unassessed threat when reacting in fear.

Yep. And now go up a level. What are _you_ in the organism that is humanity? That concept is worth a lifetime of thought as you go about your job, consuming resources and processing information that is given to you to process.

Re:'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite by pavement on Thursday November 09, 2017 @02:43PM (#15665269)
But the “organism of humanity” lacks biological drivers and hallmarks for differentiation of classes within the same species within a reproductive familial chain of ancestry.

All class divisions and duties are contrived, and artificially forced by what amounts to oral tradition and other communicative habitual norms like handwriting, long after invention of the wheel and mastery of fire by prehistoric humans. It is artifice, that can be wiped away if we fail to learn the craft of language by adolescence.

Liken this to hunting patterns among cetaceans, which we’ve only recently noticed with intensive study. Few animals are capable of language, but that emergent detail alone, remains an extremely ephemeral quality of social organization, capable of being destroyed by large-scale disagreements resulting in what we call war. Refugees can be reduced to orphanage and stone age civilization in a conflict severe enough.

Ants and other eusocial insects are not quite so vulnerable to having their classified reproductive divisions destroyed in less than a generation, simply because a small number of them have rationalized and chosen to dispose of a way of life. Forces of nature and other outside actors would have to opportunistically disrupt their biological qualities which seem baked in once hatched.