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.

Genetic variation from one generation to the next is incremental - not a matter of tearing it all up and try some something random, not brute force exploring our way through all combinations.

Evolution seems more like building a tree where mostly all you can do is ascend the tree and add finer detail, leaving the trunk and branches (our evolutionary history) in place. It seems unlikely that, say, vertebrates are in the future going to "undo" the major evolutionary developments of the past and lose their skeleton, body symmetry, number of limbs, lungs, alimentary canal, nervous system, brain, etc. We see things like these developing in the evolutionary tree and mostly staying in place once created. Sure some fins turned to limbs, some gills to ears, but once things like that happened they seem to stay in place.

I wonder what evolution would look like if we could see it sped up from the origin of life to billions of years into the future? A building up of complexity to begin with, but those major branches of the evolutionary tree remaining pretty stable it would seem. Continual ongoing change, but of smaller and smaller scope, perhaps - building on what came before.

In a billion years, the sun's intensity would have increased such that life and the Earth itself will look very different, assuming life can adapt to living on basically a different planet. There might not be oceans left by then.