What's the evolutionary advantage of this?
>20% of your colony don't do anything and waste resources
What's the evolutionary advantage of this?
Anthony Harris
Daniel Martin
They're on standby in case of an attack?
Camden Bell
nah
they're just neets
Brayden Perry
>have to stay with your mom forever and she'll outlive you too
It's enough to make anyone a nihilist.
Brody Hall
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.
Brandon Murphy
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
Carson Murphy
A terrible backup considering they don't magically start working once you remove the worker ants.
Camden Gomez
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.
Aiden Reed
Why do people accept evolution and genetics when it comes to animals and insects, but not for humans?
Adam Mitchell
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.