Specialization is for insects
Over at the MST3K Info Club, the latest episode discussion is about the KTMA offering Phase IV. In a nutshell, it's about how an astronomical event endows an ant colony in the Arizona desert with sentience. During the back and forth, regular commenter Cornjob made this observation:
The heart of the confusion in this movie stems from looking at an insect colony/hive and musing about how wonderful a human society could be if it was modeled on an insect one. The mistake here is that an insect colony is not analogous to a human society, but a human body, with individual ants/bees/termites being analogous to individual cells.
The vast majority of ants are workers who lack reproductive organs and spend their entire lives doing simple repetitive tasks. Furthermore individual ants are even more expendable than individual skin or blood cells. An ant colony can survive the destruction of the majority of its workers much better than a human can withstand the loss of the majority of its tissue. Ants mourning the loss of their individual dead would be like every living cell in a human body pausing for a moment of silence whenever a skin cell died.
And individuals are free to pursue their own interests. Individual ants deciding they didn't want to spend their short existence reinforcing tunnel walls and becoming performance artists would undo the colony. Just as individual biological cells deciding they wanted to do their own thing would reduce a human being to a puddle of uncooperative one celled organisms.
And any human society based on an insect model would largely consist of expendable workers born to do one simple repetitive task and who lacked genitalia. The only community members with reproductive organs would be one gigantic immobile woman that excretes offspring all day long and her intimidated attendants. If this is utopia I'm going back to Thunderdome. So if anyone reading this is considering creating a human society modeled on an insect colony, don't.
The heart of the confusion in this movie stems from looking at an insect colony/hive and musing about how wonderful a human society could be if it was modeled on an insect one. The mistake here is that an insect colony is not analogous to a human society, but a human body, with individual ants/bees/termites being analogous to individual cells.
The vast majority of ants are workers who lack reproductive organs and spend their entire lives doing simple repetitive tasks. Furthermore individual ants are even more expendable than individual skin or blood cells. An ant colony can survive the destruction of the majority of its workers much better than a human can withstand the loss of the majority of its tissue. Ants mourning the loss of their individual dead would be like every living cell in a human body pausing for a moment of silence whenever a skin cell died.
And individuals are free to pursue their own interests. Individual ants deciding they didn't want to spend their short existence reinforcing tunnel walls and becoming performance artists would undo the colony. Just as individual biological cells deciding they wanted to do their own thing would reduce a human being to a puddle of uncooperative one celled organisms.
And any human society based on an insect model would largely consist of expendable workers born to do one simple repetitive task and who lacked genitalia. The only community members with reproductive organs would be one gigantic immobile woman that excretes offspring all day long and her intimidated attendants. If this is utopia I'm going back to Thunderdome. So if anyone reading this is considering creating a human society modeled on an insect colony, don't.