Comment by Frieren
7 hours ago
> 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.
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...
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 ?
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Lots of people do lots of things that increase the downstream burden on the healthcare system, including being obese, sedentary, driving cars, having a poor diet, engaging in substance abuse, contact sports, skydiving, rock climbing, etc.