Evolution, Ants, and Socialism
Drawing frequently from the scientific well of Making Things Up™, Darwin's acolytes have been making a passel of chin music about ants. Apparently, ants evolved from wasps. There is no evidence for this, only conjecture and fanatical devotion to evolution. That makes it all right.
The reason for the talk is because certain ants were found in amber. They are mostly indistinguishable from their modern counterparts all the way down to the communications equipment. Instead of invoking the cop-out of stasis, more stories are tacked on.
Ant in amber, WikiComm / Dlussky, Radchenko, & Dubovikoff, 2014 (CC BY 4.0) |
Here’s today’s Darwin tale: a fossil ant in amber has the same sensory organs as modern ants. It’s basically like a modern ant, except for minor features that might represent it as an extinct group of ants. (There are lots of species of ants, and lots of taxonomists who argue about how to arrange them.) It was likely entombed in tree sap a few thousand years ago. But lo, readers are told that this magic ant represents a major turning point in evolution, when wasps-evolving-into-ants discovered socialism. Believe it or not.
Read and be baffled by clicking on "Ant What She Used to Be."