Originally Posted by Ustwo

When I speak of evolution, I'm not talking about some politician raising the minimum wage and adding more taxes to some system. I'm talking about deep time, the hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of years that make all the living creatures what they are today and the relationships there in.

In those millions of years ants have developed a true socialist system as have some other insects like termites, bees, wasps, and most like other examples which don't come to mind right now.

These creatures have followed a path which allows them to survive and flourish, though interestingly I think I discovered why due to this thread and for that I'm grateful.

The reason ants and the like are socialist isn't because of the strength of a socialist system but the selfishness of the system. Evolution doesn't exist for species but for individual genes. In a 'socialist' ant system only the queen and drones breed (from other queens), all the genetic flow is through that queen. Really the system isn't socialist, its slavery, and the daughters work for the betterment of the queens genes and hers alone. What makes the system 'work' is that the daughters all share the same genes as the queen and drone, but they are denied the ability to mate, there genetic success is only in allowing their mother to breed.

I myself have made an offhand comment that socialism works for ants, in a dismissive way of course, but honestly I can say it doesn't. There is no 'common good' in ants, its truly a despotism, only one enforced not with guns and prisons but by their genes.

The one mammalian example I know of is the naked mole rat, but even there you have a 'queen' who does all the breeding.

The more I think on this subject the more I can say that 'socialism' evolves in nature not as an alternative to competitiveness, but as perhaps the ultimate form of selfishness in genetically enforced slavery. I'd like to think I'm the first to come to this conclusion but I doubt it, shame as it would make a nice paper.

Apes themselves, at any rate, are not socialist by any evolved nature. This is where I think socialism really misses the boat with humanity. Its nice to say how we should live as some collective unit, using our strengths together and covering each others weaknesses, but thats not what our NATURE tells us to do and when you set up a system like that nature wins.