「働かないアリに意義がある」

以前UPした物を英語で書いてみました。





I have read a book whose title is The Necessity of No Working Ants. The book has a subtitle which is 70% of ants are at rest and 10% of ants do not work throughout their lives. I had thought the title was so silly that I could feel dubious as to whether I should read it before I bought it. But I could not resist my feeling that I wanted to buy one while I saw it at bookstores several times. The content of the statement is a little bit difficult in spite of the foolish subtitle. The book is actually a biological essay. Now I think if the title was not such a book about biology would not attract me and I would not have bought it. It was pleasing for me to read it.





70% of ants in a colony are resting. The reason is not that they want to rest. The reason is their sensibility of working is different between each other.

In the case of the human society, there is a chain of command, like that the chief executives of companies or the leaders of organizations determine policies. Then societies can keep in good order. As regards ants, there is no leader which organizes a whole colony. There is a question as to how they keep a colony correctly without organized labor. The answer is these resting ants. If all ants in a colony work all at once, there are no ants which deal with contingencies, such as the case that an ant of the colony happens to find a big lump of sugar. In such a case, the resting ants start to respond to the situation. They feel like working at that time. In other words, ants which have keen sensibility for working get started firstly and then ants which have less sensibility follow them.

Ants choose this inefficient system to preserve the species. In fact, according to the study, when there are only ants which work hard, at first their colony can develop efficiently but then the colony is going to deteriorate gradually. One example is this; they have to cool down their eggs but also they have to stop it at the appropriate time. If they do not stop the cooling the circumstances become worse. They cannot retain their environment regularly. The colony requires some ants not to work hard. Ants are asked to work in the order of their sensibility for working. Therefore it is necessary to keep substandard members inside of the colony.



10% of ants in a colony do not work in their lifetime. The law that a group of the same blood relationship affects the social creature can explain why. Every creature acts for its benefit. In a word, they try to leave their DNAs as many as possible.

Only the action which yields many profits to one’s own is able to evolve; nevertheless, ants chose the way to build a colony even if they have to abandon their own benefit while they work for a colony benefit. The reason is the benefit of the colony connects directly with themselves or their descendants which inherit their DNAs.

Then there appear cheating ants which greedily gain only their profits without sharing social costs of the colony when the system that individuals devote to the society by sacrificing themselves is established and becomes ordinary. Free riders can depend on such society. This is the 10% ants.



I write at the beginning that the primary task for the evolution of creature is to leave a copy of one’s genes as many as possible. Now it is proven that worker ants of some species are nonsexual in reproduction. A whole of the colony could inherit one kind of genes’ pattern because of parthenogenesis but the queen ant is sexual reproduction. It means that the queen ant must lose a half of its genes regarding its descendants. Why does she do this?

The fact that a whole colony succeeds to one kind of the genes means they have the same nature. If pandemic breaks out, homogeneous individuals die out simultaneously. What is more, I have pointed out that the disparity of each ant reaction for incitement to work is needed to maintain a colony. The same genes bring the same response. Therefore a colony demands appropriate heterogeneity.





It is true that the human society and the ant colony should not be put in the same category. But regarding the recent globalized world, it has been revealing its vulnerablility while the world unifies. The economic globalism makes each economic bloc unite. If it is not united, when one economic bloc starts to decline, only that bloc is broke or can recover its condition thanks to other economic bloc. There is an example that Greek economic status once declined. At that time, Greek currency was cheaper but people from other wealthy countries, like Germany, travelled in Greece owing to that and Greek economy could improve. Now Greece is a member of the EU and they have accepted the introduction of the euro. Then, if the same thing occurred in Greece, its economical declining would have repercussions in other EU members.

And furthermore, when selfish cheaters, who greedily gain only their profits without sharing social costs, are thriving in some society, they continue to thrive and diminish it until the society becomes extinct. If the world became one unit due to globalization, there would be no borderline to stop cheaters and the whole world would be destroyed. In fact, hedge funds that do not produce things and do not relate to the distribution have weakened the economic base of the whole world economy.



Creatures have evolved in the cause of increasing their adaptability from day to day. This is the design of creatures’ existence. Lastly, I would like to introduce a sentence in the book which I was very interested in.



“Evolution will finish when the perfect adaptation comes into being.”



Creatures on the earth started from just one chance of the birth of life. The evidence is that every creature is made of the same substances. This one life ramified into several million species by encountering lots of kinds of environments. In other words, creatures have been improving in their best adaptation to any conditions. Consequently, if the strongest creature, which was able to adjust to any surroundings, came to exist it would not need the improvement anymore, so the evolution itself would draw to the end.

Human beings have made effort to control natural environments. As to that, they have developed artificial apparatuses to deal with any situations. The adaptability has been increasing. Concerning leaving their genes to future generations, humans have already started the way of unnatural fertilization, such as a test-tube baby and a surrogate mother. And also they are going to ultimately clone themselves.

The writer says in this book that the strongest creature like “God” could not be able to appear biologically, however, the idea of “the strongest creature” attracts me. Humans would not become “God” but they might have a chance to become “Evil God”. I would like to see where human beings will reach.