Ant has had it up to here with your academic controversies

If you read our story about the ant evolution debates then you will enjoy this LOLant made by biologist and insect blogger Alex Wild. (Thalex!)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: ants • evolution • inside joke • lol • nerdery • Science • social insects

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Brainspore

I keep trying to tell him that ants don’t actually have ears but he doesn’t want to hear that either.
- wysinwyg
  
  One of the commenters at myrmecos pointed out that ants hear through their legs so this ant is perversely using its head to cover its ears.
Shibi_SF

I DO enjoy this LOLant!
DewiMorgan

I don’t get the controversy, even after re-reading that thread.

It seems that there are three groups of people:

Some people are saying “our cells should be in competition, and you would have thought, according to theory, that our body would be all made of testicle/ovary, because why would you want to be a skin cell when they don’t get to pass on their genes?” Everyone ignores those people, because they are idiots.

Other people are saying “well, all the cells share the same genes, they’re kin, so it’s all the same in the end, innit?” And this is an obvious answer and explains most stuff, and everyone understands it’s a simplification and there are other factors involved.

Other people are saying “errr… lots of women are chimerae, the cells are often completely unrelated. Surely the cells are just banding together for the sake of the group, the body as a whole?” And lotsa people want to sign papers saying these people are wrong wrong wrong, but everyone’s a little hazy about why, or indeed whether they’re even saying anything the last lot wasn’t.

Only, instead of cells in a body, it’s ants on a colony.