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Originally Posted by jwb
EO Wilson brings up how ants are programmed to leave the nest and die alone if they are injured, to no longer burden the colony with maintaining their existence. This is the exact opposite of what humans refer to as selfishness if you are breaking it down based on the best interest of the individual. It's clearly not in that individual ant's best interest. It's a sacrificial act that benefits the colony as a whole. You might say it benefits the specific genes the ant is carrying but then again, genes have no real agency and thus when we describe them as "selfish" it means something very different from the common parlance.
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Selfishness is a term used perhaps a little peculiarly in biology, but you nail it with the bolded part. Because the unit of evolution is the gene (I would argue), to understand why the act of wandering away to die has evolved, you have to look at the genes and take their perspective.
To them, anything they can do to help their copies live on and proliferate into the future, even inside other ants, is beneficial.
You're right that they have no agency and so can't be said to actually be selfish or have any kind of motive, but it's still often a useful way to think of it or communicate the way they compete and evolve. For example, exploitative strategies will tend to evolve if given the chance. Actual selfishness that humans and other animals exhibit is rooted in the way natural selection works on genes.
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I have to say I'm not that clear on the distinction between monogamy and polygamy in ants. As far as I understand one queen typically lays all the eggs so are you saying that in the case of polygamous ants she is impregnated by multiple drones and lays eggs from each of them??? Or how does that work?
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Yes. The classic way of reproduction was a queen flies off to bang a single male and the two of them would become the parents to a whole colony.
This, coupled with males having just one set of chromosomes as opposed to the usual two, is what makes getting a new sister have a higher related fitness benefit than having a baby.
For a gene inside a worker, the chances for that gene to be copied to that worker's offspring is only 50%. The chance for that gene to have a copy inside a new sister is 75%. Hence, genes inside workers should promote the proliferation of sisters rather than own offspring.
This logic breaks down under polygamy, because workers with different fathers will be less related to eachother and less than what they would be to their own offspring. So polygamy may cause workers having sex to become a competitive strategy again. You mention some cases where workers might wanna bang and I would guess that might be in polygamous colonies where it can be an indicator that eusociality is in the process of breaking down.