> The ants carry out prophylactic amputations. This not only protects the colony from infection but also doubles the survival rate of the injured workers.
To keep everybody around you healthy makes the probability of caching a disease lower for yourself, too.
Grooming behaviour in primates helps in the same way. And it is so important that it is linked to all kinds of mental rewards.
To let disease run amok in your own neighborhood it would be very costly.
They can look altruistic at the individual level while still being completely aligned with self-preservation at the group level
Ants are also a special case because the vast majority of ants cannot reproduce. Only the queen and drones are reproductive agents, 99.9 percent of the colony are non reproductive, so their investment in the survival of the colony is total, they have no individual agenda.
As I understand it, the individual vs the group situation is complicated by their shared genetic pool.
I'd imagine it as having dozens of clones of myself, and one of them is tasked with reproducing for the rest of us. It sounds like a total lack of individualism, but if the offspring has my genes and is raised like me (potentially by me), how far is it from being my own ?
eusocial animals are really cool you can kinda treat the entire colony as a single organism. weirdly enough this isn't restricted to insects there are actually some eusocial mammals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality
the book coalescent by Stephen Baxter is an interesting take on what that might look like in humans as well if you're interested in the topic.
*gene level
Thank you for saying this. I've been saying this for years. No one listens.
may i ask in what context youve been saying this? I suspect it aint ant colonies...
When an ant colony has damaged ants or isn't making enough ants it's just better to mass import ants from another colony.
just say what youre trying to say
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Lots of people do lots of things that increase the downstream burden on the healthcare system, including being obese, sedentary, driving cars, having a poor diet, engaging in substance abuse, contact sports, skydiving, rock climbing, etc.
No, those three things are NOT the same.
Exactly zero of those things you list also spread disease throughout the population, and are aggressively anti-science. They only arguably affect the person themselves and the overall HC costs.
Moreover, for the active items you listed: driving, contact sports, skydiving, rock climbing, etc., nearly everyone doing them takes real precautions to minimize the health risks — their motivation is to continue doing the event, not to get injuries which would prevent them enjoying their activity.
In the passive harms you mentioned, the people are passive, not active. No one intentionally becomes obese or sedentary or ruins their diet; they simply fail to have the motivation or to learn the knowledge required to do better (or they have actual conditions that prevent them from doing so). There is nothing intentional about it.
In contrast, the anti-science anti-vaxxers willfully maintain and aggressively spread their ignorance and impose their ignorant bad decisions as costs on society and increased health risks for everyone.
The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of taking safety-measures to improve health and safety of their activities — instead, they actively evade free, safe, and effective health and public health measures.
The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of passively failing to maintain their health — instead they actively deny science, medicine, and public health issues, and actively evade recommendations or mandates.
As the study illustrated, they are literally more stupid and anti-society than ants. They freeload off the health care system and herd immunity built and maintained by their smarter peers.
Driving alone kills far more people every year than disease spread by anti-vaxxers. And injuries from driving are seen in emergency rooms every day.
I'm not defending anti-vaxxers. But they are not a big problem. And you can get vaccinated yourself and worry even less.