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

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.

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.

I still struggle with the brute force search a bit. Just naively a very small gene has 4^500 possible combinations.

The actual space is a lot smaller than it looks. Many amino acids have multiple codons that encode for them. You can also exclude cases where you have repeating stop codons (which detatch the RNA from the ribosome).

There's lots of processes that favor certain patterns over others, only considering the biochemistry of the cell, not even the fitness of the animal.

I've spent hours watching Drew Berry/WEHI movies and that whole process just seems like straight up alien technology. Blows me away to think about the scale that it's operating at within my body as I type this.