Natures wonders: exploding ant defenders (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, April 21, 2018, 10:15 (2406 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: To protect the nest a caste of ants explode to cover the invader with goo:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/ants-turn-into-suicide-bombers

DAVID’s comment: the only way this can have evolved naturally is by a chance genome change in the queen. Doesn't seem likely. dhw will ask why God would bother.

Thank you for yet another great example of ants' amazing inventiveness. We simply don’t know how such innovations originate, but perhaps it all ties in with the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, which here would mean that each innovation is the product of plural intelligences combining to produce a new idea. Possibly, though, the queen is the superintelligence that supplies the new ideas. I would only ask you why God would bother if you insisted that he must have preprogrammed or dabbled all this, and had done so as part of his great plan to produce the brain of Homo sapiens. If your God exists, I would see these wonders as the result of his giving organisms free rein to use their intelligence, thus producing marvel after marvel of ingenuity. Thank you again for all the research you do into these matters.