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@golgaloth

The most common error I've seen in #scifi representations of social insects is a deep misunderstanding about the role of the queen and the nature of the "hive mind" (such as it is)

1. Queen ants are not rulers, they are more like ovaries. The colony is like a body every cell is important.
2. Ants are individuals and do whatever they want. It just so happens that what they want is for the colony to thrive, but they can get in 'arguments' about HOW to do that most efficiently.

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@futurebird @golgaloth Do keep in mind of course that ants aren't capable of "wanting" anything or reflecting on what they're doing. They're robots blindly carrying out a program created by a million iterations of selection. The question is whether an ant colony as a whole can have a distributed meta-consciousness. Now for organisms where individuals have larger brains (naked mole rats?) then you start blurring the lines between a hive and a society.