One More Reason Why I’m Glad I’m Not An Ant

by

by hilzoy

"Some ant species do not have queen ants in the strict sense. Instead, worker ants (which are all female) that have mated with a male ant become the dominant reproductive individuals. These are the gamergates, or "married workers," and their sex life can be brutal. In one species the gamergates venture outside of the nest to attract a male, engage him in copulation, then carry him into the nest before snipping off his genitals and throwing away the rest of his body. The severed genitals continue to inseminate the gamergate for up to an hour, after which they too are discarded."

I really wonder whether the argument from design would have survived a close acquaintance with the habits of insects around the world. This arrangement, at least, does not make the idea of a benevolent deity leap to mind.

18 thoughts on “One More Reason Why I’m Glad I’m Not An Ant”

  1. I don’t think that a benevolent deity would have designed a cafish that lives in the urinary tracts of host species, either.

  2. Well, wonkie, we can always fall back on Bertrand Russell’s theory that our world was actually created by the devil, at a moment when god wasn’t paying attention 🙂
    –TP

  3. This arrangement, at least, does not make the idea of a benevolent deity leap to mind.
    Benevolence aside, She has definite views on casual sex.

  4. a cafish that lives in the urinary tracts of host species
    Bio-nitpick: it doesn’t live in urinary tracts, it mistakes them for gill openings. Still, not too nice a way to make a living.

  5. This arrangement, at least, does not make the idea of a benevolent deity leap to mind.
    Well, at least it helps explain the human impulse to stomp an anthill occasionally.

  6. i don’t see why this is a problem for the argument from design.
    no proponent of traditional christianity has ever flinched at horrible consequences being inflicted on those who have sex. after all, the punishment of sins makes the world better, not worse.
    it is not suffering that is an affront to theism; it is sex without suffering that is intolerable.
    what is really anathema and blasphemy is to suggest that the gods might tolerate our having sex without immediate pregnancy, or venereal disease, or aids, or rape.
    but is the death of the ant consistent with a well-designed theistic world?
    yes, of course: in a godly world, every act of sex should be followed by swift and grotesque punishment, especially one involving mutilation of the peccant part.
    (granted, it is a slight flaw that it’s the male ant who suffers; traditionalists far prefer that the suffering should be visited on the female of the species.)

  7. Joking aside, the response traditionally offered by ID-proponent Christians is that these grisly parts of Creation (like, say, death itself) are the result of sin entering the world, not part of God’s actual design.
    Translation: There is a secret un-knowable actual design that existed before things like death, or disease, or say carnivores. The design we see now, no matter how intricate and carefully balanced, is actually the broken one that God didn’t design.

  10. but you gotta love hilzoy, bless her heart, who read that little cock and ball torture and reflected on the nature of god.
    It’s okay, hilzoy, none of us humans orgasm without at least physically suffering.
    as Kid points out so well, the question is what we do after that.

  11. Those who believe in “Intelligent Design” (sic) reveal either a profound ignorance of biology or total disdain for the designer.

  16. then carry him into the nest before snipping off his genitals and throwing away the rest of his body. The severed genitals continue to inseminate the gamergate for up to an hour, after which they too are discarded
    That’s the last time I date an ant.
    none of us humans orgasm without at least physically suffering.
    Dude, I think you’re doing it wrong.

  17. Dude, I think you’re doing it wrong.
    lol. okay, I admit that for me the prospect of getting my genitals ripped-off by a female in heat would not be the worst way to go, especially if other people write about it from now until.

  18. Two comments:
    1) As I understand it, proponents of intelligent design base their argument primarily on a concept they call “irreducible complexity”. Roughly stated, this proposes that if a structure in the body requires more than a certain number of changes in the genome before it provides an evolutionary advantage, then the chances that evolution will produce that structure diminish considerably. Intelligent design does not necessarily postulate a benevolent designer, as we would understand the term.
    2) Rupert Ross’s Dancing with a Ghost (a book I cannot recommend enough) discusses the First Nations way of perceiving the world, and speaks of animal spirits as inhering in the species to a greater extent than in individuals. In simple terms, this means the spirit expressed by the insect we call an ant continues despite the deaths of individuals. What we know about modern information theory bears this out; DNA, that incredibly efficient storage medium, contains about as much information as the human brain, making it possible for relatively simple organisms to evolve extremely sophisticated behaviour. As Uche Ogbuji remarked at a seminar I had the good luck to attend, encoding behavioural information in DNA has huge advantages and just one major drawback: to incorporate new information, or to learn anything, the individual organism has to die. In that sense, the intelligence, adaptation, and nature of the species resides not in individuals but in the long-lived genome. All of this suggests to me that the behaviour Hilzoy describes does not offend the spirit of the ant the same way it might offend my spirit if someone ripped off my genitals and continued to copulate with them while discarding or devouring the remained of my lifeless body.

Comments are closed.