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429 points sampo | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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corygarms ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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. cgio ◴[] No.45308108[source]
That’s interesting! What other crazy types of bargains have we seen before or could someone imagine?