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Ants that seem to defy biology – They lay eggs that hatch into another species

(www.smithsonianmag.com)
415 points sampo | 4 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.609s | source
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corygarms ◴[19 Sep 25 15:17 UTC] No.45302603[source]▶
This is nuts. If I'm understanding correctly, the M. ibiricus queen mates with a M. structor male, uses his sperm to create sterile, hybrid female worker ants for her colony, then she (astonishingly) can also lay eggs that develop into fertile M. structor males, which means she has removed her genetic material from the egg and effectively cloned the male she previously mated with.
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alphazard ◴[19 Sep 25 15:56 UTC] No.45303102[source]▶
If you take the idea of genes as the target of evolution seriously, then every possible "bargain" between different genes that moves towards a pareto optimal for those genes, will eventually be discovered through the brute force search.
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1. IAmBroom ◴[19 Sep 25 17:12 UTC] No.45304037[source]▶
Assuming no extinction, climate change, nor heat death of the universe.

Evolution is not a particularly fast optimizer, on the scale of human perception.

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2. heavyset_go ◴[20 Sep 25 02:23 UTC] No.45309622[source]▶
Evolution as we know it works on Earth because it is a relatively protected and stable environment, giving genes the time they need to explore a space and adapt to the relatively slow and small changes on Earth.
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3. NonHyloMorph ◴[20 Sep 25 07:16 UTC] No.45311214[source]▶
Imho genes are not what if at all should be attributed aggncy here (that might, if at all, be the decentralised sympoietic process of ecosystems)

Just wanted to add this, i see where the formulation is useful as a figure of speech.

4. graemep ◴[20 Sep 25 10:20 UTC] No.45312023[source]▶
Climate change?

Climate change produces a changed environment. It actually drives more evolution to adapt to that changed environment.

Even very sudden changes such as some that caused mass extinctions, it just changed the direction of evolution. The only species that stopped evolving were those that went extinct. No more dinosaurs (bar birds) but lots more mammals.