
The queen does not rule - Vigier
https://aeon.co/essays/how-ant-societies-point-to-radical-possibilities-for-humans
======
lisper
An interesting puzzle: how can evolution produce an organism like an ant where
the vast majority of its exemplars are sterile? And the answer is: ants are
not organisms, ant _colonies_ are organisms. They just happen to be made of
parts that are not physically connected to each other.

The same thing turns out to be true of humans. A single human in isolation
cannot reproduce. Even a single breeding pair in the wild will (almost
certainly) not be able to reproduce. The minimal reproductive unit for homo
sapiens is a village or a tribe. So you too are not really an orgnism but an
organ, a component of a larger reproducing system that, just like an ant
colony, is made of parts that are not physically connected to each other.

~~~
IgorPartola
You don't have to look as far as ants to make the analogy you are making.
Almost no animal, and even some plants cannot reproduce without some minimal
number of "tribe" members. This is true for anything from chimps to
probiotics.

This all depends on how you define "life" and "individuality": slippery
concepts. And it's hard to not confuse those with emergent behavior once you
do get millions/billions of individuals together. Sure you could treat NYC as
its own autonomous living organism. Or you could treat it as millions of
individuals. It certainly doesn't make sense to treat it as gazillions of
cells.

The idea of having free will has been debated for centuries, but intuitively I
think it's obvious that a human has more free will than an ant.

~~~
lisper
> you could treat NYC as its own autonomous living organism

The most accurate description is that NYC is part of the phenotype of the
human genome.

BTW, this idea is not mine, it's from Richard Dawkins:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype)

------
JumpCrisscross
> _To envisage how an ant’s task of the moment arises from a pulsing network
> of brief, meaningless interactions might compel us instead to ponder what
> really accounts for why each of us has a particular job._

It brought to my mind the economic calculation problem [1]. Markets distribute
decision making, commanding resources through the transmission of meaningless
price-discovery and transactional interactions. This has, so far, outperformed
systems which centralize economic planning.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem)

~~~
Retric
There are actually good counter examples where central planning wins. They are
often contentious like Medicine, but the advantage markets bring is robustness
not effecency. In a famine market economies have some people starve more and
others starve less.

~~~
YokoZar
You can't just assume a famine starts and then look what happens. The whole
point of pricing signals is that it changes what gets produced, making
shortages less likely to occur in the first place.

~~~
Retric
We have thousands of years of history with a huge range of causes. But, there
are a large number of famines across all economic systems.

------
booleandilemma
I know the article is about ants and not bees, but it reminds me of that Fight
Club quote:

Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.

------
whiddershins
This makes me think about Carla Scalletti's lecture on emergent systems:

[https://vimeopro.com/symbolicsound/kiss2016-presentations/vi...](https://vimeopro.com/symbolicsound/kiss2016-presentations/video/193469489)

------
tbrownaw
Well, I suppose it would be kinda hard to rule when your potential subjects
don't have the necessary discretion to be capable of being ruled.

------
tossedaway334
The author is mischarachterizing how Adam Smith viewed the division of labour.
While he viewed it as a gain in economic efficency, he also viewed it as
regrettable, limiting, and damaging to people, especially when taken to an
extreme.

    
    
         "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a 
         few simple operations, of which the effects are 
         perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, 
         has no occasion to exert his understanding or to 
         exercise his invention in finding out expedients 
         for removing difficulties which never occur. He 
         naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such 
         exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and 
         ignorant as it is possible for a human creature
         to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not 
         only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in 
         any rational conversation, but of conceiving any 
         generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and 
         consequently of forming any just judgement 
         concerning many even of the ordinary duties of 
         private life... But in every improved and civilized 
         society this is the state into which the labouring 
         poor, that is, the great body of the people, must 
         necessarily fall, unless government takes some 
         pains to prevent it."
    

The moral side of Adam Smith's arguements is often entirely ignored in
analysis of his philosophy. He strongly condems many aspects of a free
market/capatialist economy. Why this is never focused on isnt very clear to
me.

~~~
RodericDay
Adam Smith and the founding group of the United States were all
philosophically opposed to inheritance, and very in favor of estate taxes,
estate taxes being very very compatible with capitalism:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding_fathers)

 _If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and those
guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not —
it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth.

With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777,
every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and
entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property.
Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as
the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely
echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is
manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every
generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from
posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There
is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to
have to dispose of their goods after death."

The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression
to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship
was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule. North
Carolina's 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for
succeeding generations, the old system had served "only to raise the wealth
and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal
and undue influence in a republic" and promoting "contention and injustice."
Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast "tend to
promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a
genuine republic."

Others wanted to go much further; Thomas Paine, like Smith and Jefferson, made
much of the idea that landed property itself was an affront to the natural
right of each generation to the usufruct of the earth, and proposed a "ground
rent" — in fact an inheritance tax — on property at the time it is conveyed at
death, with the money so collected to be distributed to all citizens at age
21, "as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural
inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."

Even stalwart members of the latter-day Republican Party, the representatives
of business and inherited wealth, often emphatically embraced these tenets of
economic equality in a democracy. I've mentioned Herbert Hoover's disdain for
the "idle rich" and his strong support for breaking up large fortunes.
Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first president to propose a steeply graduated
tax on inheritances, was another: he declared that the transmission of large
wealth to young men "does not do them any real service and is of great and
genuine detriment to the community at large.''

In her debate in Delaware yesterday, the Republican Senate candidate Christine
O'Donnell asserted that the estate tax is a "tenet of Marxism." I'm not sure
how much Marx she has read, but she might want to read the works of his fellow
travelers Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Herbert Hoover, and
Theodore Roosevelt before her next debate._

~~~
program_whiz
All wealth is inherited. Are you proposing each person is cast out and begins
again in cave man form with nothing but the unowned land to start with?
Everything you have, knowledge, money, inventions, cultivated land, food, your
body etc, were created and passed down (inherited) from a prior generation.

Also this idea penalizes someone who's parents died when they were born, who
would have paid for every opportunity until they were of age, now they have
nothing. Meanwhile those who have parents or some other caretaker to pay for
and facilitate all kinds of experiences thrive.

If you really think that's the case, then please stop using all the things
you've inherited from prior generations (i.e. turn off your computer,
electricity, plumbing, clothing you wear, food grown by others, streets built
before you).

~~~
dang
> _If you really think that 's the case, then please stop using all the
> things_

Please don't use escalating rhetoric like that on Hacker News. We're trying
for civil, substantive discussion here. Playing this sort of card is mildly
uncivil in its own right and tends to lead to worse.

------
winstonewert
The author has an overly narrow view of what constitutes division of labor.
Division labor doesn't mean that can't switch tasks or that you can only do a
task you were specifically born with the special ability for. Indeed, any
system of division of labor has to operate with the sort of adaptability she
describes in ants.

~~~
djsumdog
I think what the author is trying to get at here is that there is no control
system. There is no central brain coordinating things. Each individual ant
brain evolved to do different things based on the signals it receives from
others. Useful behaviours that lead to a higher fitness tend to survive and
progress to future generations of ants.

When you look at the human analogy, the queen doesn't have all the resources
and food she could ever need. In human society, we prise those people at the
top who convince others to give them resources. Human societies are not equal.
They never have been. In fact, equality is a completely human social construct
that we must actively and consciously pursue:

[http://khanism.org/society/created-
equal/](http://khanism.org/society/created-equal/)

~~~
program_whiz
Even our concept that the brain "controls" things is just our own projection
of things. Think about it, you get hit hard in the leg, so the leg releases
chemicals that trigger a bunch of repsonses, perhaps using the brain as the
intermediary point of communication, but to say the brain "controls it", is
just one way to look at it. The brain was really told what to do by the leg,
or maybe the nerves, or the blood. There is no system in nature that has
centralized control, all systems with "central authority" are really just a
projection of human conditioning.

For example, even in government, how exactly is centralized control
maintained? Its a bunch of distributed interactions that cause people to go
out and take actions that result in overall changes, but there isn't a
"government" per se that is like a giant telepathic mind controlling anyone's
actions, its just millions of interactions of people choosing what to do (some
soldiers, some merchants, some politicians), flowing in all directions.

~~~
SixSigma
See also: the only person Hitler ever killed was himself.

