"A colony of insects such as ants, comprising many thousands of individuals, acts as a single organism. This may sound like a facile concept, but it is actually a precise one, and one that provides real insight into how such a society functions.But more important, the idea and the species it describes serve as the test case in the latest round of a long fight in evolutionary theory over the origins of altruism, one that dates back to Darwin.
We will be able to lay the genomes of eusocial species over top of one another, from the primitive to the advanced, and what we see will be a projection of the 100 million years it takes to get from wood roach to leaf-cutter ant."
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