Most species have social behavior and live in groups, to different degrees. Individuals in a society and cells in an organism are also analogous.

So while you're right to call them acting like cells in organism, I'm uncertain what "than individual animals" would mean.

While this is true, eusociality is fairly distinctive. The part where most of the colony can't breed is what really stands out.

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

This does make individual hymenopterans less like individuals of other species, which are in competition with others of the same gametes for the privilege of breeding and the survival of their offspring.

Hymenopterans are more individual than slime molds: they're multicellular, have their own organs, and so on. But less individual than any other form of multicellular animal life. It isn't altruistic, in a Darwinian sense, for a drone to give its life for the colony, because it isn't able to breed, the only way it can pass on its genome is by protecting the queen.

I'm pretty confident what was meant is "than more individualistic animals".

But most of our cells can "breed". Inability to divide happens only where it's necessary, like blood cells. It's not a social feature on its own. So I'm unsure why this is important about ants.

Is "can breed" the ultimate clue of individualism? But again, this makes most of our cells... "individuals".

This is incorrect on a fundamental level.

Breeding is sexual reproduction. Parthenogenic whiptail lizards lay eggs and reproduce themselves, but they don't breed.

Only our gametes can undergo meiosis and recombination, the necessary processes for breeding. Our other cells can engage in mitosis, duplication. There are only the two processes, which is why I say this is fundamentally incorrect.

The queen and drones are the gametes of hymenopterans in a very real sense. They have cells which can undergo meiosis and recombination, workers do not.

In fact, in some unusual species of ant, there are motile and fertile workers, in addition to and sometimes instead of the sessile queen. These are called... gamergates.

This is glossing over some of the weirdness found in various hymenopterans, it's an ancient and diverse clade.

Individual ants are animals, that's not controversial. Eusocial animals are less individual than any other animal, and their social groups are more like a single organism than the social groups of any other sort of animal. This, too, is not controversial.

It is not incorrect. In fact, your arguments aren't even mutually exclusive, depending on the context.

One is not an individual or a group inherently, it is solely based on the concepts you are using to create the context.

Our cells will die when we die. Most of our cells have no future, but the ones that become our children and recombine with somebody of the opposite sex do have a future.

That doesn’t mean the rest of our cells don’t exist in a state of genetic indifference. They have evolutionary pressure to improve the fitness of the individual, otherwise it’s a dead end for all genes involved.

Competition between reproductively capable individuals is different. An ant that acts selfishly will reduce the fitness of the hive with no genetic reward. It’s a losing strategy. But in a society, a selfish person can reap the rewards while taking advantage or damaging the society they belong to.

The fact that humans exhibit behaviors like self sacrifice and loyalty points towards the idea that humans’ evolutionary strategy is somewhat mixed. Selfishness and selflessness coexist because our fitness is to some extend, dependent on the society, or to the hand that feeds us.

To think of an analogy people could die when planet earth dies, or people could die if their tribe gets wiped out, as they can't any longer fence for the resources individually. Or people will die if a bad actor will launch nuclear bombs for their own selfish gain, pollute the earth etc.

I imagine some cells like cancer cells also act selfishly while damaging the host and reaping temporary rewards themselves.

So it seems like analogy of people and few bad actors makes even more sense in terms of cells as opposed to ants who all act only towards the greater good.

Tldr; In order to succeed and survive you need many working together, however it is possible to get ahead temporarily acting selfishly, not caring about the greater good, but having too many of those bad actors will end bad for everyone. Which happens with both, people and cells.

There's some linguistic ambiguity here. We can talk about "individual things" as in individual grains of sand, etc. and we mean "one instance of multiple similar".

Then there's "individuality", which for social animals means that a member of society is largely self-sufficient. Take any human and besides a sexual mate, they can pretty much survive, even thrive, by themselves. But take an ant, unless it's a queen, and it'll run around confused and die. The ant is inseparable from its hive. It is not an individual. It's a physically separate body from other members of the hive, but unable to exist on its own.

Ant queens mate only once in their lifetime and can live for 20+ years. All the individual ants born in a colony in that time are from the same genetic material.

Yes this is basically cancer, minus the "middle class" ants being infertile. There are virus-induced cancers too, which we should probably reconsider as a form of selfish mutualism in light of this.

> The hive is the organism.

Literally part of the article.

You might really enjoy the Children of Time series. I won't spoil it, but ants play a very unique role.

> The analogy is certainly not perfect

Why not? Because this is exactly right.

Note that all sexually reproducing organisms are like this: a single individual cannot reproduce. And for social animals like humans, a single mating pair cannot reproduce in the wild. (If you doubt this, watch a couple of episodes of "Naked and Afraid.) The minimal viable reproductive unit for humans is a tribe or village of a few dozen individuals.

In a way, don’t humans too?

And coming at it inversely, I've also seen some hypotheses that neurons are a bit more autonomous than many think, and that the brain could be seen as a complex colony of billions of single-celled organisms working together, with some analogies to aspects we see in large-scale human coordination problems and game theory.