Ants

Sure - all my speculation is wild.

The colony could qualify on the basis that individual units have specific and wildly varying functions (eg worker vs queen as compared to kidney vs eye in traditional sense of organism) and also on the grounds that if you removed one type of 'cell' (which is what ants become in this model) the entire organism fails - ie all the parts have to work together for the whole to exist.

Of course it boils down to your definition of organism - I'm reasonably sure it would be difficult to come up with one that would include everything we would consider a single entity life form but exclude everything that isn't. The standard examples that usually come up in this discussion are the Portugese Man-O-War (blue bottle to orstralians - a composite organism) and crystals (have the ability to reproduce to the 'parents' pattern)

Re: Ants
binnyboy
And what about the perspective of the banded ant-eater

Hey yeah val. That would make the ant eater a parasite rather than a carnivore/insectivore. Man, he won't be able to show his face in upper class establishments after that.

Hingehead wrote:


Can this apply elsewhere as well? If the colony is the universe, all life in it is actually one by the definition above. Mutual dependence binds us all together, regardless of any classifications.

If you want, Cyracuz. The definer makes the rules.

However if you accept my vague definition, then probably not. A whole stack of life forms have been extinguished from the Earth's ecology (read: organism) and the rest have just soldiered on.

It's not hard to imagine a planet pumping with life being ashed by a sun going super nova. And the only affect we feel is a bright star in the night sky that three dudes follow around with heavy metal, aromatic gum resin and perfume. Apologies to Arthur C. Clarke.

I thought of that. Species vanish all the time, and new ones are born every day. But it doesn't really change anything. When a species dies the rest of the ecosystem adapts to life without it. There may be large changes, but life goes on. We are proof of that. But I agree that this is wild, wild speculation. But that doesn't mean its all wrong

If individual Ants can have the same type of life as cells in the human body - it is a possibility. Ants have one goal - to keep the hive healthy and the queen alive. Our cells, alive individually, have one goal as well, to keep the whole alive.

Both do this in various ways. Some sacrifice thier lives for the greater good. Some go about healing other cells. But all of them are individual lives (cells when removed fromt the whole) that when collected keep the collective alive.

Thoughts?

TTF

I think ants are a higher form of life

Higher in what sense, you've gotta expl.. WHATEVER... THEYRE HIGHER!

I think viewed in this sense, a single person cannot be considered alive, but rather a couple must be the lowest division of human life. Cuz one person is just as doomed as one ant.

A colony is one reproductive unit, sterile workers are considered an extention of the queen they nurture. Sort of like limbs.

it gets kind of complicated... the queen isnt born a queen... she specializes into that based on what she eats as a helpless nymph or something like that I think. (if anybody knows please jump in)

So she is dependent on the colony she comes from to empower her to reach queendom, where she can reproduce. So maybe you're right, but the least we can say is it's more complicated than that.

Not sure that goes for both termites and ants, though I know it's true for one of the two. Sure we can say it's more complicated, but I'm confident that this was what the TV people meant.

I wanted to take issue, in the nicest possible way, with TTF's statement about ants and cells having one goal (keep the queen/whole alive, respectively).

I think we give them too much credit to say that have any goal, they don't have any sense of the wider organism. They're little packets of preprogrammed behaviours and tropisms.

They do what they do because that's the way they're built. And because they way they're built promotes the colony's survival the genome of the colony is transported through time.

Maybe there was a colony once where the workers took ecstasy and went to raves all the time, but it didn't sustain the genome through time so we don't get to see this colony today.

I've seen this referred to as the Danish Grandmother theory somewhere, where a guy was saying what an incredible string of coincedences led to his existence. To paraphrase: His Danish grandmother's family emigrated to Australia when she was a baby. She survived the trip and all manner hardships.

She grew up to marry a Scottish seaman and they moved across the country had a single child. That child grew up and as an adult did aid work in India and met a lovely man from Ireland.

They married and their first born was the guy writing about the Danish grandmother theory. He was pondering that incredible chain of events that led to his existence - surely there must be some sort of divine influence behind it? Fate perhaps? And everyone alive had some twisted set of circumstances that led to their existence.

Of course it's foolish vanity - you're here as a result of those events, you are not the cause of those events.

If his grandmother had emigrated to South Africa, then some other guy would be writing the essay.

Yes. The individual maintains the whole, but is also maintained by it. I just thought of mental illnesses. They occur whenever someone is sufficiently detatched from society to forget the "rules" that govern us subconciously. The ego becomes inflated and a new self-centering arises that is inevitably cause for the illness.

Cyra, I think that's pretty debatable definition of mental illness. Especially when societies define sanity differently.

Our schizophrenic is some culture's shaman. Our megalomaniac is another country's great leader.

We all forget the 'rules' as we see fit. Otherwise there would be no crime (again a thing defined by a society).

I think Binny said something about an individual being just as doomed as an ant. Well I'd say a society is just as doomed as an ant. All is finite.

Hingehead. I think the entire contents of my mind is debatable . Happens to be my opinion that the world is ill. All the people we say have mental illnesses are in reality only feeling a healthy reaction to this sick sick world. Sanity is the only true madness.