What's the evolutionary advantage of this?

What's the evolutionary advantage of this?

>20% of your colony don't do anything and waste resources

They're on standby in case of an attack?

nah

they're just neets

>have to stay with your mom forever and she'll outlive you too
It's enough to make anyone a nihilist.

I think I read the same study a while back. The 20% are effectively excess "backup or contingency reserve" just in case of a catastrophic event that wipes out a significant portion of the active colony and they need replacement immediately.

It doesn't mean they'll be used every generation but it's a survival method to ensure colony success.

LEL
But why don't they just work in the meantime?

If 80% of the colony is wiped out, why would these ants be the one who live?
Why would they not work?
makes no sense

A terrible backup considering they don't magically start working once you remove the worker ants.

Often times it happens like this just because it can. "Lazy genes" are inherited that encourage them to just not spend their resources or put themselves at risk, meaning they're more likely to reproduce.

It may lower the colony's fitness overall, but the freeloaders have higher fitness than those who don't freeload, so the freeloader genes pass down, even if it's bad for the whole group.

I may be completely wrong here though- this is what I'd suspect for most organisms, but with ants I think I recall there's something funky about how they reproduce that lowers genetic diversity throughout, causing differential fitness of subpopulations to work differently/not be a mechanism.

Why do people accept evolution and genetics when it comes to animals and insects, but not for humans?

It's just popsci fags who take things weirdly out of context.

With humans it's actually a pretty well known phenomenon. Behavioral scientists, population/systematics biologists, and game theorists often collaborate on human models of behavior and culture change over time. Usually the resultant data is just used to boost the sales of a product, but the science itself is actually pretty interesting.

The main reason why humans have to be taken a little bit differently than other animals with regards to evolution and genetics, is because of how massively plastic humans are. Plasticity is a term in biology used to refer to the ability to adapt within a generation, without genes changing, etc.- A good example would be the shedding of fur. That's a plastic trait that allows for survival in differing levels of heat. I digress on that point though-

For humans, behavioral evolution is just as important as genetic evolution. How human behaviors change over time- that is to say, our tools, or ways of living, our beliefs, etc. changes far faster than our genes change, and as such there's a much greater effect, and due emphasis, on the behavioral portion.

If you wanted to give some kind of objective quality to it, you can take human population levels. If you compare it to any other species with the same # of offspring per generation, generation time, and other similar characteristics, humans by far have increased in fitness immensely, due to the behavioral changes.

So to answer your question totally; Because humans are mechanistically different, but usually not in the ways popscifags just pick and choose what science they find easy to digest or easy to use in their arguments.

Not all the ants are female workers. Unfertilized eggs become males, their role is only to reproduce.

why dont they work too?

>20% of your colony don't do anything and waste resources
Tell that to blacks and hispanics in the USA.

Why work when other cucks will be the slaves and you get to be a neet?

>america is an inherently racist country, especially constitutional
>t-tell t-that those schmocks

Utter pussy

dwarf fortress

literally every ant could qualify as excess "backup or contingency reserve". unless you're implying there's only so much work a colony can do, you're explanation is retarded.

we did for a while... then the jew struck

race is real

Not an explanation. They could work anyway and in fact that would be better for the hive.

You write like a faggot

You write like a faggot, but you're right.

Thank you for the feedback. I'll be sure to change in the future.

Only the queen ant is reproducing though, so the rest of the ants can only pass on their genes by keeping the queen alive and working. There just isn't strong enough selection against laziness to keep the proportion of lazy ants down below 20%

So that's what I am. Just a natural part of my biology.

No, don't change for anybody.
Be a proud little faggot.

>faggot
Why the homophobia?

In fact, to follow up, I guess you could really look at the whole colony as one organism since every ant relies soley on the queen for transferring genetic information to the next generation. Each worker and soldier works for the colony rather than itself. It is similar to the way that each cell in our body is ultimately geared towards playing its part in continuing the germline and so works for the body as a whole, rather than some selfish end.

Not every cell works as it "should", some even become cancerous. However, as long as the body as a whole can tolerate it long enough to transmit the genome to the next generation, it doesn't matter. If the ant colony can tolerate the burden of lazy ants long enough to produce new queens, then their presence doesn't matter. Biological evolution hardly ever involves optimisation. Another example is the highly wasteful genomes of eukaryotes. Having a massive genome is fine for eukaryotics so genomic parasites are able to thrive in these conditions. Bacteria on the other hand need to keep their genomes as small as possible so they are very efficiently ordered. Bit of an essay lol, guess I got sidetracked.

Not everything has to be an advantage. Evolution is random not some arrow pointing towards "progress"

If the ants can get away with being lazy and not working why would they change? All that matters is if they can survive or not.

>Why the homophobia?
Why the ableism?

did they add sugar?

A professor told me a while back that researchers were able to cut some bacteria's genome down to a fifth of its original size by getting rid of extraneous DNA, which allowed it to reproduce like mad. However, they still didn't have any clue what like half of the remaining genes actually did. I might have gotten those fractions mixed up.

>Biological evolution hardly ever involves optimisation.
Doesn't it, though? I thought organisms with a unilaterally useful trait very rapidly outcompeted and replaced their inferior comrades? But maybe you mean that very slight knocking sound that only becomes a reproductory problem in 1/10000th of cases, then yeah that's hard to select against because it's so irrelevant.

maybe the removed genes were emergency supplies, and they doomed the strain to perish to some inevitable disaster in case they ever left the cushy agar plate

No, I appreciate the feedback. I agree with you, but the point I wanted to make earlier but kind of got sidetracked from myself, is that over time you do see group or colony fitness playing a role in what subpopulations exist.

Of course it's in a constant flux, where if a "selfish gene" pops up, it's not going to be weeded out, but the moment a gene pops up that makes it more difficult for individuals to be lazy, there will be overall selection for those who have that gene. With ants, the genetic dependence of the queen gives it a sort of really heavy buffer which slows the speed of evolution by the added homogeneity of having one mother for all ants, but it doesn't stop long term selection trends.

The example I'm fond of when looking at community fitness vs. individual fitness is a test that was done on chickens in the 90, wherein they tested the egg production (which can be analogous to # of offspring, directly relative to fitness), of individuals in a coop vs. coops, and selected for them differently. In one set of trials, they selected for the chickens that would lay the most eggs, which is typically how farmers have done it in the past. In another, they had 5 coops of 20 chickens, took the coop that had the most eggs, and filled the next generation of 5 coops with eggs from the initial high yield. What they found was an over 160% increase in egg yield if I recall correctly.

The reason, and why this is important in studies in the wild, is that chickens that could breed the most and lay the most eggs would be super aggressive towards the others. So individual fitness didn't really correspond to the highest group fitness. Any kind of community animal- or even plant- will experience this phenomenon, where sometimes there can exist high fitness individuals that aren't the best for group fitness, with the balance constantly fluctuating.

Depends on the environment they can test bacteria in.

Also, many genes (estimated 50% of our ENTIRE genome) are actually remnants of what are called "jump genes" which are transposon elements called LINES and SINES. These are basically DNA sequences that code for something that can replicate its own DNA sequence, cut into your genome, and place its own sequence down. Over billions of years you'd expect this to add, over time, quite a lot of copies of itself. It's kind of spooky, but we're like 50% genetically retrovirus or retroviral element/remnant.

Quota hires.

>I thought organisms with a unilaterally useful trait very rapidly outcompeted and replaced their inferior comrades?
The problem lies in the working definition of "useful" in this context. What we can see as a useful mutation may fail to pass itself on. If you wonder why this is so, consider something like some crazy beneficial mutation happening right next to an active volcano which wipes out the local population. Or consider a peacock with more of its own resources spent on a better brain rather than elaborate plumage: it may be more successful at living but it has to be more successful at reproducing and there's no reason to suppose all beneficial mutations result in increased chances of reproduction.

by useful I mean it actually results in higher reproductive success, useful in evolutionary terms. Of course what we see as useful often isn't.

like that's the same reason why bacteria favor rapid metabolism over efficient metabolism, when introduced to a virgin space like a newly dead animal or a dropped icecream, the bacteria who replicate the fastest dominate the slower bacteria, even if the slower bacteria is less wasteful. I think this should apply to traits like camouflage in new environments (industrial soot etc)as well.

>by useful I mean it actually results in higher reproductive success, useful in evolutionary terms.
Then it's tautological, isn't it?

A bit lol, but that's how function works in an evolutionary sense. But I did some computational modelling (not bragging, it was pretty basic) for a uni course where you could easily see how rapidly the old population was replaced with the new mutant, you don't really consider how rapidly such a replacement can happen.

But the original claim was
>Biological evolution hardly ever involves optimisation.
And your skepticism prompted
>I thought organisms with a unilaterally useful trait very rapidly outcompeted and replaced their inferior comrades?
Now I ask you what you mean by "useful" and you give the tautology.

When you are working on a genetic algorithm you're choosing the selection pressure and that selection pressure may conform to your sense of efficiency, but this is not a feature of evolution, it's a feature of your selection pressure. To be sure efficiency can be a selective pressure on an organism, for instance in times of extreme scarcity (relative to the expected lifetime of the organisms).

why do you hate your mother?

the benefit of a tool you build working 80% of the time outweighs having no tool that works 0% of the time.

pareto principle is found in many things.

dude every single ant in a colony is a clone.

I just checked, and that's not the case. It's that they all share the same mother, but the fathers can differ, leading to severely reduced genetic variance, but not to the level of cloning.

Maybe my sources are wrong though- I'm not an entomologist. Though entomology looks super fun!

Just looked it up too and you're right, there is very slight differences. Well, ignore my post everyone

>homophobia
no one is afraid of the gays.

Because telling them they should work would be racist, and even if they wanted to work they couldnt find a job because if racism and opression

>homophobia
Why the faggot?

>20% of your colony don't do anything and waste resources

What's the evolutionary advantage of niggers in the US?

juden perfect pet

I bet the lazy ones make up the hivemind and control all the others with magnetic waves and shiet. They don't work, because they can't concentrate on two things at once.

They are mangement, you fucking student losers!

Thanks user, that was a good explanation

smells like proto-racist bullshit
bruh evolution takes forever
learn science

They are all shitposting in the ant pheromone equivalent of Veeky Forums.

>tfw not a drone.
>tfw no penis
>tfw no qt ant trap gf
>tfw dead best friend dead because of shoe.
>tfw

>humans are mechanistically different
>smells like proto-racist bullshit
kek

Muh feelings, essentially.

Came here to post this, way late. Inan emergency (flood, etc. as well as an attack) having a full complement of workers to cope might be worthwhile.

They're basically sperm, haploid. They leave the ant hill and find a queen. It gets more odd in that worker ants are more related to each other than they are to the queen.

We did it.

20% of a million is more than 20% of 800,000, so no matter which individuals you lose, you still have more ants after a disaster. Ants that have no work to do are better if they rmain idle, if they bustle around and look busy to fool the Veeky Forumsemtisits into thinking they are hard at work, they waste energy/food.

all ants are are female
fuck women

>after they remove 6 ants
20% of a colony makes 6 individuals irrelevant.

why not??

thank you very much!

it has nothing to do with natural advantage, it's just the way life is

% of your colony don't do anything and waste resources

Those are the "welfare" ants. The liberal progressive feminist ants won't let the colony get rid of them.