The paper Prey specialization and chemical mimicry between Formica archboldi and Odontomachus ants [1]
> Beyond providing natural history insights into the relationship between these species, this study expands our knowledge of an important insect chemical phenotype. The intraspecific variability in F. archboldi cuticular hydrocarbon profiles is among the greatest reported for social insects and provides a unique case of how non-parasitic species can generate parasite-like chemical-mimic phenotypes.
Formica archboldi (headhunter) ants [2]:
> ...are known for their abnormal behavior, which includes the collection and storage of Odontomachus (trap-jaw) ant skulls.
To me, it is very saddening (but still it is reality) that organisms have been forced to evolve with a "kill or be killed" biological wiring.
You'll see that on certain Galapagos islands, where no natural predators exist for the iguana, the iguana is completely docile to all other organisms around it. What's even cooler is that the iguana also only eats seaweed and algae, which means it does not need to kill other animals to survive. It has developed evolutionary adaptations to subsist on this diet as well, such as nasal glands that remove excess harmful salt from their bodies.
I am a firm believer that all of the war and crime you see in the world is driven by some biological wiring that most of us continental organism possess, from ants to humans.
If we had all evolved to be more like iguanas, I wonder if society would have made more (or less!) technological and societal progress, given that a lot of technological advancements come from the demands of war--
but war is not a necessary condition for technological advancement now is it?
Some of the best features of people are the result of competitive evolution -- it's not just our worst features that come from the struggle for survival.
The iguana's war on algae is definitely hell for the algae. Is not killing other animals such a great distinction, in the grand scheme of things?
If all the animals were vegetarian and weren't getting preyed on, most of them would die of starvation. (Most birds, rabbits, &c die early -- it's not like people where surviving to adulthood is the norm.) The animals that killed the other animals to have more vegetables to eat would have more offspring and be more likely to survive. Killing others not to eat them but to eat their stuff -- that's war.
The iguana situation is one where there's just not much evolutionary pressure. It doesn't generalize.
Maybe if we had evolved to be more like iguanas we wouldn't even have society at all. We would just sit on rocks, seeking to stay warm, never striving for more
It's not bad, it's just that if you were able to do this then you would not reproduce and would remove your contribution to the genetics (and to a lesser degree, memetics) of future generations.
Totally agree with this. The iguanas have evolved to be able to totally subsist with what is in front of them and not strive for more. Their Maslow checklist is 100% complete :)
I get what you are saying, but...What about the evolutionary advantage of another organism that strive for more?
The moment exists competition you are force to struggle to survive.
Maybe on an evolutionary meta-level striving for more is the equivalent of sitting on rocks and trying to stay warm - and we're stuck in this hyperactive local minimum one step from collective suicide because we're not smart enough to work that out.
Evolution is cruel beyond our comprehension and so it does not have mercy. Today they sit in the sun, their grandchildren can be cannibals eating each other. We have a say, for now.
> Iguanas are at the mercy of evolution. We aren't.
Not being at the mercy of evolution is an illusion caused by being at the mercy of both genetic and memetic evolution. If we do things that are at odds with either our biological and social adaptation, we tend to not replicate as much as otherwise.
For instance we can chose not to eat or have sex, but that just edits our patterns out of the population as it always has. We can change society such that acts that were adaptive are now maladaptive, but that just changes evolutionary pressures rather than eliminating them. Even as we master evolution it still masters us.
It's like the illusion in orbit that you have escaped gravity, but you're just falling continuously.
I do care whether I'm subjected to cultural pressures or to genetic pressures and I would rather not muddle my worldview by conflating them to a single category. Calling them collectively "evolution" is not a subtle mistake to make.
In fact placing together memetics and genetics in a single sentence doesn't even compile for me. It's like stamp-collecting and murder. Yes, my whole point is that we are operating on memetic engine and it works wonders.
I'll point out one thing "that just edits our patterns out of the population as it always has", just like not eating or not having sex: being infected by tuberculosis bacteria. By your reasoning developing a vaccine is just silly. Do we even want to rescue any Chopins or Orwells or Kafkas. Vaccine (which is effectively a meme) "just changes evolutionary pressures rather than eliminating them". If it happens, good, if it doesn't happen, no worries? That's the message?
Iguanas surely don't give a fuck about their Chopins.
> I do care whether I'm subjected to cultural pressures or to genetic pressures and I would rather not muddle my worldview by conflating them to a single category. Calling them collectively "evolution" is not a subtle mistake to make.
But they absolutely are the same category. 100%, and always have been. Just look at how mating preference has affected many species, ex: the peacock. "Cultural" pressure preferred men with a colorful booty, and over time genetics conformed. The same is true if the "culture" prefers people who are soft spoken, adversarial, drawn to the color green, or have a funny left ear. If the culture means that people with a certain trait are more successful and thus more likely to reproduce over a sufficient period of time genetics will trend towards producing more individuals like that.
As for the rest of your comment, I keep reading it over and over and I can't figure out what your getting at. Developing a vaccine means more people in my group are likely to survive to reproduce, thus (given sufficient time) evolution will favor those species that can produce vaccines (or not be vulnerable to the disease in the first place).
Let's swap the vaccine example with something more showy.
You seem to be saying that Crocs users have a serious chance to die out in one or two thousand years (after all 30 or 60 generations are peanuts). I'm sure the effect is real. I'm not holding my breath though, because seemingly humans posses another mechanism which can mysteriously mask the trait of i-like-ugly-shoes within just one or two generations. (And with almost no one dying out?)
Just like it didn't take 30-60 generations for the trait of i-hate-suspicious-injections to die out.
I avoided the word "evolution" in hope of achieving understanding at least about the territory if not about the map.
You're assuming memetic information propagates in the same way as genetic information. Not eating or having sex has been used to great memetic success historically.
It’s a tortoise and hare race with genetic and memetic evolution. Recently, the sexual revolution (with contraceptives) has severely depressed population growth. In the long run, the tortoise will win out though. Genetic evolution will select for people resistant to these ideas. Communities with high fertility rates (such as some religious communities) will grow quickly and replace the contraceptive-using public.
Then where did all the contraceptive-using seculars come from? Hasn't our history already selected for religious communities with high birthrates?
Even if secular people went extinct today, there would be more 30 years from now. Religious communities can produce secular individuals, from which secular communities form that generate secular memes.
They operate on independent planes. Unless a sort of direct genetic disposition to specific ideas can be established, I believe the complexities of genetics and memetics allow for such a broad range of complex interaction that they cannot be correlated so easily.
Contraceptives came about within the blink of an eye, genetically-speaking. Until a few decades ago, they did not affect selection at all. The ancestors of contraceptive-users might have wanted contraceptives but they didn't exist and so they had no choice.
Now that contraceptives exist, people who choose them and deliberately avoid ever having children will select themselves out of the gene pool. The same goes for people born in religious communities who are skeptical of their religion. The people who remain in those communities will be the ones who have some sort of genetic predisposition to religious experiences. This is already a hypothesis (the God gene [1]).
How specific? Steroids can make people more aggressive and presumably more attracted to aggressive ideas. Adrenaline can do that in the short term. There are many such mood altering substances that DNA can code for. We know that they can be set to trigger by the environment, as in mood changes in the presence of a potential mate or predator.
It may be that as behavior driven by memes versus genes diverge enough, the population naturally falls. That could be the solution to the Fermi paradox, that sentient population growth is limited by the growth of their meme pools, as they diverge in purpose from their gene pools.
Is this necessarily the case? How can a species evolve without natural selection (the engine of evolution)? If you don't have natural selection acting as a 'fitness filter', how could a species change in any coherent way? It seems like genetic diversity would increase, but it's not clear to me that, when ~95.4% of a species survives to adulthood, there is any pressure that could push the whole species (or even a subset of it) in a given direction.[0]
Back when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia, in addition to fighting the Mugabe-lead rebels the Rhodesian military had to routinely step in to stop rival tribes from slaughtering each other. The default state of humanity is tribal warfare, not some beautiful Eden-esque utopia. "Colonialism" wasn't the cause, this is just humanity.
I don't know why people are so keen to deny this. Nature is brutal and yet still beautiful, and I don't see why humanity should consider itself to be special in that regard.
Note that pretty much all of the North American megafauna were wiped out within a few thousand years of the arrival of the proto-Native Americans.
The only exceptions were species that were total badasses (bears, pumas), extremely prolific (deer), or a combination of badass and prolific (wolves, bison).
Also note that the pre-Contact Aztecs weren't exactly nice people. I believe it was Neal Stephenson who observed that one measure of how much the Aztecs sucked was that when the Spanish Inquisition took over, things actually became more humane.
You may be right, but s/prolific/tasty/ mostly works as well.
Species can survive humans if (1) the humans can't wipe them out (badass, prolific) or (2) humans don't want to wipe them out (tasty/useful, invisible, cute).
> The default state of humanity is tribal warfare, not some beautiful Eden-esque utopia. "Colonialism" wasn't the cause, this is just humanity.
Colonialism isn't the cause, but colonialism, powered by weapons and transportation technology and the concept of manifest destiny, massively increased the scope and scale of human exploitation of other humans.
This is an animated map of who owned what parts of Europe over the past 1000 years. Do you consider 'colonialism' to be different to any other form of human expansion done since time began?
> This is an animated map of who owned what parts of Europe over the past 1000 years.
Who said colonialism didn't happen in Europe? Scotland and Ireland were arguably where the English prototyped their methods of subjugating countries.
> Do you consider 'colonialism' to be different to any other form of human expansion done since time began?
Yes. Colonialism as a systematic state supported effort to subjugate other nations and overtake their resources is very different than migration, for example.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
If you know more than another commenter, that's great, but in that case share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. Responding to bad information with good information improves this place; just putting others down makes it worse.
I think I also prefer the docile society of technological backwardness, sitting on rocks in the warm equatorial sun and eating algae, none the wiser to the possibilities sitting around me involving smelting and electricity :)
But the comment above us is probably right, it would seem that the iguanas have been "doing nothing" for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Meanwhile humans have "accomplished a lot" in the past 10,000 years lets say, at the expense of many many many other things.
Or another outcome could have been: all the seaweed and plants get eaten up, don’t regrow in time and we would have just vanished. Not sure how the seaweed would have felt about that either.
Some organism would have realized that hunting down other stuff is easier and more nutritious than chewing on seaweed.
Not following. Iguanas did evolve. We also evolved. Those that evolved to be 'more like iguanas' actually happened - we call them 'iguanas' and they are lizards. Not doing too well.
The fact is a certain brainy old-world ape has taken over the biosphere. Because evolution gave them the biological tools to do so. That's what evolution does.
We'd have to propose something different from evolution, to get a different result.
You might have a point about war and in general consumption being a 'wired-in' behaviour. Then again assuming we have something like intelligence and free will, we should be able to choose to override some primitive behaviour.
A billion years of instinct must lead to uncertainty and mixed feelings. We great apes are a strange apparition in the cosmos, capable of glimpsing the absurdity of our own existence.
"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
Domesticated animals are far less aggressive than the wild types.
However, I believe Homo sapiens is already pretty domesticated. (neotenate, potentially herbivorous, able to breed in captivity, pleasant disposition, not prone to panic, willing to live in large hierarchically dominated herds)
> Domesticated animals are far less aggressive than the wild types.
Dogs are far, far more aggressive than their wild counterparts. Their wild counterparts, in general, are not territorial against non-canids, and pretty much only attack if they are hungry.
No. Cats, sure, they are inherently risk-averse. Dogs -- I disagree. Dogs are extremely aggressive to any human that isn't approved by their owner. There are nearly 5 MILLION dog attacks per year in the US alone, some 30-40 of which are fatal, which is several orders of magnitude higher than any wildlife attacks even if you account for the density difference. You can count the yearly wolf attacks in North America on one hand. Wolf-human interactions are incredibly rare.
Wolves have evolved to optimize for their own survival, and although they are powerful predators, they are risk averse as well, and will not go after prey that they are unsure of -- you would be too if you had to use your strength to kill for every single meal or starve to death if injured.
Dogs have been bred to fearlessly protect and attack the owner at all costs, including putting their own survival on the line, which is very much NOT how wolves think.
I'd much rather be in wolf or coyote territory than a place with stray dogs.
I wonder if we have a westworld file on us out there with all of our stats. It would be interesting to a degree what type of familial influence has on those stats (environment, socioeconomic circumstances ect).
Society's fundamental value is channeling the unpleasant aspects of our nature to create a net benefit for all. It is folly to fight the natural drive to compete. Instead focus on systems that channel that drive into innovation and production. There will always be haves and have-nots as long as there is evolutionary selection.
My favorite metaphor is to think of humanity as gasoline. Left alone it explodes, but put in an engine it does useful work. Society and its laws are the engine that channels destructive force into useful output.
> the iguana is completely docile to all other organisms around it. What's even cooler is that the iguana also only eats seaweed and algae
Seaweed and algae are organisms as well. Plants don't want to be killed and eaten no more than animals do. I think Attenborough or BBC's documentary on plants showed the lengths plants go through to avoid being eaten and communicating danger to other plants.
> I am a firm believer that all of the war and crime you see in the world is driven by some biological wiring that most of us continental organism possess, from ants to humans.
It's not just continental, it happens in the oceans as well. It's not just animals, microbes/bacteria/etc also kill and eat. It's even happening all over your body right now. It's been happening millions of years before the dinosaurs.
> If we had all evolved to be more like iguanas, I wonder if society would have made more (or less!) technological and societal progress, given that a lot of technological advancements come from the demands of war--
Probably less. The only reason galapagos iguanas exist is because they are isolated from competition and are adapted to a specific environment. Humans are more general while the galapagos iguana is specialized. It's like the difference between a computer and a calculator.
Almost all organisms evolved to kill or be killed.
The entire universe is chaos and continual destruction and creation.
By ignoring the innate human nature to struggle and fight you are not removing it or making it go away. You are merely making it more likely that your society will inevitably fall to another that is more aggressive, assertive, or war like. In all of history decedent societies continually fall to more barbaric and less advanced societies.
>What's even cooler is that the iguana also only eats seaweed and algae, which means it does not need to kill other animals to survive.
It still needs to kill other organisms to eat. The only organisms that don't kill something else to gain energy are photosynthesizers and decomposers like fungi that consume dead organic matter.
Well, good, evil and sad are human concepts that probably do not apply to the mental life of ants. We tend to ascribe deeper meaning to things, even when that is not reasonable.
In some sects, I would imagine that sadness is seen as a bug and not a feature-- "why feel bad that you killed something to survive? you should be proud!" is a theme common in our human history.
> I am a firm believer that all of the war and crime you see in the world is driven by some biological wiring that most of us continental organism possess, from ants to humans.
That is a very fatalist view that denies humans the agency we clearly have. We are obviously capable of devising social norms that go against our "biological wiring", whatever that even is. A simple proof is how varied social norms can be -- with respect to things like marriage/family, work, death, religion, etc. -- across different cultures in space and time.
We have the power, collectively, to end the horrible practices that lead to war, exploitation, imprisonment/torture, climate change, and whatever else. These are not an inevitability. The idea that it is inevitable is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy that allows it to continue without any challenge.
We have shown in many ways that we have risen above the determinism of many biological processes. We should realise that things can be different and change ourselves to be a part of that difference.
It's a very interesting notion to me.. I spend my days thinking about the predatory environment of jobs in our 'modern' culture. I also believe that with a different seed, we could all have evolved job cultures very very much more iguanian.
I really like the way you think! The open source movement is really getting closer and closer to this organizational structure.
When you stop thinking about "how do I sell this software to other people so I can buy the things I need", and instead move to a model of everybody building software that can help humans obtain the things they need, I think the world changes.
It's important to separate what we feel is productive work, from what will actually produce the most work on aggregate across society.
I think we can build a world where those who feel they need downward or lateral pressure to get things done can have this, but not at the expense of everyone else.
Long live indeed, since iguanas are considered vulnerable to extinction. In fact, they already went extinct once on Santiago Island (one of the largest of the Galapagos) - they've been reintroduced by humans as part of a restoration program. This shows limitations of their strategy.
If we were all galapagos iguanas, well, then one of us iguanas will find a way to swim or otherwise get to a larger landmass. Or find a way to live in the ocean.
Then, one of us would find a way to breed faster. After all, there is infinite seaweed and algae available to me.
Eventually then, this adapted iguana will be so widespread, even if it remains docile and somehow does not evolve some territorial behaviour for mating purposes (unlikely), that, docile and all, it eats all the seaweed.
Some seaweed will likely mutate into something that is harder to eat for the iguana, or poisons them and iguanas learn not to eat that (why? Well, there are a ton of iguanas - whatever iguana just mutates their genes into recognizing the poisonous one by taste or smell and won't eat it, will survive where the ones without the mutation will start dying off in droves).
And now we have our war back.
It's just between iguanas and the seaweed, which is now in an arms race: The iguanas adapt to deal with the poison, the seaweed adapts to come up with new poisons or otherwise make themselves harder to eat. The rules have changed: There are so many iguanas, that if you are easy to eat by an iguana, you, as a seaweed, are just not going to survive, because there are so many.
Or, if the seaweed does not manage to be an equal aggressor in this fight, then something else happens: First massive, MASSIVE die-outs of iguanas due to starvation, and then eventually, aggressive behaviour between iguanas: If I manage to find a stretch of beach with a bunch of seaweed, and I just had some kids? Well, I can just stay docile. Or, I adapt to be aggressive, I chase off other (docile) iguanas hungry and on the lookout for seaweed, and thus ensure that my children survive whilst theirs die of starvation.
War is inevitable, unless the system grows into 'acceptance', a self-balanced status quo where opportunities to expand exist but for whatever reason a part of the ecosystem just decides not to do this. For example, what if the iguana's somehow have a break built in and do not adapt. It's that or find a lifeform that requires literally zero resources.
The problem is, given that this is an utopic view where life is great and nothing needs to change and there are no external pressures to adapt, why would you invent anything? Until some external force shows up and changes things, life will continue stable forever, with iguanas doing iguana things and seaweed doing seaweed things.
Heinlein's principle is that this can only hold if you are literally the only life in the entire universe (or all life is like this), because if not, one day one of the ecosystems that decided to 'war' and grow will obliterate you. They don't play by the same rules.
I'm going to leave aside your points about seaweed evolution and iguana evolution because they are definitely correct and would lead to the collapse of the system I described. Externalities are a real beast!
Hehe, well, if humans were able to survive off of sunlight alone, then the only reason to kill something would be "for fun", or in other words, the result of what we would call a mental illness.
I wonder if there has ever been an Galapagos iguana vs Galapagos iguana murder. I don't even think they possess the physical capability to murder each other, like, their mouths and hands don't generate enough energy to pierce skin or constrict blood flow or deliver blunt force trauma.
If iguanas were able to survive on sunlight alone, eventually they would hit carrying capacity of the place in which they live.
I think it's somewhat inevitable that in times of scarcity, the most aggressive (either psychologically or physically) members of a species are going wind up surviving and passing on the traits that helped them survive, for good or worse.
Were living with the reality of that, as much as I'd also like it to not be the case.
Reminds me of "Heart of Darkness". Marlow, an 1800s explorer, goes up the Congo, and at some point is corrupted by evil and loses his mind in the jungle. Becomes a demigod figure, served and worshiped by the local natives. He decorates his fence posts, with skulls, facing his hut. Usually they face out, to keep the evil out. But not with Marlow.
Well, the universe is unfair and doesnt give a damn about the concept of humanity. It feels like we are systematically forgetting about this fact. Dont get me wrong, I am happy that humans have amanged to establish at least a few rules of conduct which make it relatively nice to be amongst humans in certain countries. However, as said, we seem to forget that this is not the norm in the universe.
Reminds me of the gray kingbird, a very common bird here in the Carribean, which has no problem attacking much larger animals such as vultures or dogs whenever they go near its nest.
Luckily for us, it never attacks humans, and sings quite beautifully :)
Assyrians liked to pile heads ... very effective psychologically
I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I carried off prisoners, possessions, oxen, [and] cattle from them. I burnt many captives from them. I captured many troops alive: from some I cut off their arms [and] hands; from others I cut off their noses, ears, [and] extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living (and) one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city, I burnt their adolescent boys [and] girls. I razed, destroyed, burnt, [and] consumed the city.
Upon the capture of Jerusalem in the first crusade, they did not discriminate between Muslim and Jew:
“But now that our men had possession of the walls and towers, wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.”
now that the title has been changed from being about Ants decorating their nests with the heads of their enemies the above doesn't make much sense, and the edit window has changed.
At any rate I don't think human societies go after enemies bigger than themselves, that is a thing for individual humans to do.
There is so much science doesn't know, labeling it as decorating their homes is far fetched. There are 1000's of other reasons they could be doing this behavior that isn't anthropomorphism.
One possible explanation mentioned in the article is that "they're using the dead bodies of their prey to mask themselves in the scent of their local prey species". Seems a lot more likely than a tactic to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies...
It seems reasonable on the surface, but how long can these decaying heads maintain their scent? Unless they're constantly refreshing them with new ones, the scent would fade very quickly.
Now that you mention it, you're right: the title is anthropomorphizing in a baity way. That means it should be changed (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "*Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait").
I've changed it to use what appears to be representative language from the article body. If anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it again.
Ooh but we always war in nature, we can never change. Greed? thats just nature, f the weaklings who cant protect themselves. Whos fault is it they can protect themselves? /s
It sounds like we pick whatever is most convenient for us of the day. Everything disguised in 'its just nature'. We made change and we have left nature behind, we can continue in changing our uglier parts, but it sure as shit isn't convenient when most of our congress needs to be tried for war crimes, held responsible. That is too inconvenient, so let's all marvel at this study that says War War War!
> Beyond providing natural history insights into the relationship between these species, this study expands our knowledge of an important insect chemical phenotype. The intraspecific variability in F. archboldi cuticular hydrocarbon profiles is among the greatest reported for social insects and provides a unique case of how non-parasitic species can generate parasite-like chemical-mimic phenotypes.
Formica archboldi (headhunter) ants [2]:
> ...are known for their abnormal behavior, which includes the collection and storage of Odontomachus (trap-jaw) ant skulls.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00040-018-0675-y
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica_archboldi