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By Root 499 0

can be discord, most commonly over reproductive rights.29 Typically the largest mature colonies show the least obvious internal friction and the most violence toward outsiders; consider the Argentine ant supercolonies, with their disciplined yet expendable armies of billions. The situation is reversed in small societies. A hundred or so species, most of them belonging to the ponerine group, have a fluid division of labor, even in sex, with multiple queens that are not clearly distinguishable from workers, or workers that can act as queens.30 These societies don’t exactly have traitors, but they do experience domestic strife. The Diacamma ants, for example, have no distinct queen. A mated worker gnaws off tiny growths on the backs of her nestmates, a mutilation that demotes these “marked for life” individuals into non-egg-laying foragers, whose ovaries shrink. Fights ensue following the death of this gamergate “queen” until a new one emerges.31

In some ponerine species, those individuals most physiologically ready to be queen can take over the queen’s role when she dies; with this comes the danger of being mistaken for a potential competitor to the queen while she is still alive, and being harried or killed. The colonies of such species are virtual police states, in which ants root out nestmates with the potential to become egg layers.32 This type of persecution is rare when workers and queens are so different in their morphologies that the queens can monopolize reproduction. Marauder ant workers, for example, lack ovaries altogether and therefore have no prospects for procreation. Differentiation of this kind accelerates the continued evolution of differences between workers and queens, resulting in adaptations that streamline efficiency within the workforce. In some species this has allowed for colony growth into the many thousands and beyond, as has been the case for the central characters of this book. But even species with a distinct queen caste aren’t immune from conflict: when a colony has multiple queens, they may fight each other or (as we saw in the Argentine ant) be culled by workers.

Comparing ant colonies with human societies, organisms, and minds may give us insights into the question of conflict among ants. It turns out that resolving discord is a feature of biology at every level. Our own bodies are sites of strife, much of it imperceptible to us. “The unity of the organism is an approximation,” write evolutionary biologists Austin Burt and Robert Trivers.

The genes in an organism sometimes “disagree” over what should happen. That is, they appear to have opposing effects. In animals, for example, some genes may want (or act as if they want) a male to produce lots of healthy sperm, but other genes in the same male want half the sperm to be defective. Some genes in a female want her to nourish all her embryos; others want her to abort half of them. Some genes in a fetus want it to grow quickly, others slowly, and yet others at an intermediate level. Some genes want it to become a male, others a female.33

Often conflict can be a useful tool. Neurobiologists find that even our thoughts emerge from a cacophony of competing mental elements.34 The vigilance of ponerine workers against upstarts, for example, resembles the way humans have wielded power through political oversight. Citizens in a democracy may vehemently express opinions over a controversial issue yet reach a collective decision by casting votes; as we’ve seen, worker ants use a voting system called quorum sensing to reach a decision about where to nest.

Nevertheless, whereas ponerines like Diacamma can be abundant and successful, the nestmates of most ant species lead less contentious lives. We do not yet know if equanimity is essential for ants to develop large-scale societies. Instead, it may be that a worker is so unlikely to profit from conflict in a large society that social discord all but disappears, bred out over time from the choices that individuals can make. After all, when the worker is just one among thousands, what are the chances