Nooooo don’t anthropomorphise eusocial colonies as collective organisms yr so sexy haha
It is indeed true that eusocial insects for the most part do not reproduce but it is not at all clear why we should think this somehow does not mean they are living bad lives: reproductive levels are generally suppressed in eusocial colonies through pheromonally regulated *starvation, mechanical trauma, and permanent lack of sexual development*. The reproductive rates we would antecedently expect of social insects simply on the basis of selective fitness are in general much higher than those in fact exhibited; helping to optimise queen reproduction is thus frequently a secondary strategy only pursued once the preferred, more inclusively fit strategy of actually screwing and breeding oneself is forestalled. I have a post somewhere back in the annals of my blog about this but from all we can tell eusocial insects for the most part live quite bad lives—and for exactly the reasons you give for non social insects in the first place! People drastically overestimate the difference in kind of selective pressures on non social and social insects (and other eusocial animals! a hand over our hearts for the indignities faced by our mole rat sisters)
There's some decent evidence that eusocial queens are actually brainwashing or intimidating workers into serving them, rather than those workers being more reproductively successful if they serve the queen, which I think might at least partially torpedo this post.
> Second, the vast majority of animals are not reproductively successful. This is a vast overgeneralization with many exceptions, but in general, in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, you can expect animals to have evolved to be happy when they have experiences positively correlated with reproductive success and unhappy when they have experiences negatively correlated with it. Therefore, we can guess that the average wild animal probably experiences more negative experiences (hunger, fear, exposure to heat or cold, disease) and fewer positive experiences (sex, being adequately fed).
I'm not sure I buy this reasoning, and in particular the "therefore" step. Animals could still get many correlates of reproductive success even if they don't reproduce.
So I would have:
- In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, you can expect animals to have evolved to be happy when they have experiences positively correlated with reproductive success and unhappy when they have experiences negatively correlated with it
- Even if an animal doesn't attain reproductive success, they would still attain correlates of success (being alive, eating, breathing).
- Therefore the sign of average experience is unclear.
For consistency, then, only reproduction that results in a new colony should count towards the colony's wellbeing.
I don't think social insects are any different from the rest. The arguments you apply to the queen and her workers, are probably also applicable to the wolf brain / wolf balls and the rest of the wolf.
This isn't quite answering your main thrust, so much as going on a tangent based on the early paragraphs, but… I really have to say that I am very very creeped out by arguments about animal welfare that don't take into account a question along the lines of "if we had a magic wand to boost this animal's intelligence enough for it to understand the question, would it plausibly agree with our conclusions".
I think that most wild animals would react to any claim by humans that their lives were collectively "not worth living" in a similar way to how humanity would react if some higher-dimensional starfish aliens announced that by their idea of ethics human lives were, in aggregate, not worth living, and therefore they had humanely decided to euthanise us as a species. i.e. with a resounding "what is wrong with you, get away from me". (It seems obvious to me that even humans who might individually feel neutral-to-negative about their specific individual existence are, in the main, not going to support generalising from "I personally would probably rather not have been born" to "and therefore, assuming significant amounts of people feel the way I do, I would rather humanity as a whole never existed".)
Thus the question seems, for me, not to be whether maggots are "happy" as we'd understand it, but whether we have any cause to think that individual maggots would rather not exist, and, moreover, whether any individual maggots would be in favour of *no* maggots existing.
Nooooo don’t anthropomorphise eusocial colonies as collective organisms yr so sexy haha
It is indeed true that eusocial insects for the most part do not reproduce but it is not at all clear why we should think this somehow does not mean they are living bad lives: reproductive levels are generally suppressed in eusocial colonies through pheromonally regulated *starvation, mechanical trauma, and permanent lack of sexual development*. The reproductive rates we would antecedently expect of social insects simply on the basis of selective fitness are in general much higher than those in fact exhibited; helping to optimise queen reproduction is thus frequently a secondary strategy only pursued once the preferred, more inclusively fit strategy of actually screwing and breeding oneself is forestalled. I have a post somewhere back in the annals of my blog about this but from all we can tell eusocial insects for the most part live quite bad lives—and for exactly the reasons you give for non social insects in the first place! People drastically overestimate the difference in kind of selective pressures on non social and social insects (and other eusocial animals! a hand over our hearts for the indignities faced by our mole rat sisters)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.es.15.110184.001121
There's some decent evidence that eusocial queens are actually brainwashing or intimidating workers into serving them, rather than those workers being more reproductively successful if they serve the queen, which I think might at least partially torpedo this post.
> Second, the vast majority of animals are not reproductively successful. This is a vast overgeneralization with many exceptions, but in general, in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, you can expect animals to have evolved to be happy when they have experiences positively correlated with reproductive success and unhappy when they have experiences negatively correlated with it. Therefore, we can guess that the average wild animal probably experiences more negative experiences (hunger, fear, exposure to heat or cold, disease) and fewer positive experiences (sex, being adequately fed).
I'm not sure I buy this reasoning, and in particular the "therefore" step. Animals could still get many correlates of reproductive success even if they don't reproduce.
So I would have:
- In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, you can expect animals to have evolved to be happy when they have experiences positively correlated with reproductive success and unhappy when they have experiences negatively correlated with it
- Even if an animal doesn't attain reproductive success, they would still attain correlates of success (being alive, eating, breathing).
- Therefore the sign of average experience is unclear.
> Only the queen (usually) reproduces.
For consistency, then, only reproduction that results in a new colony should count towards the colony's wellbeing.
I don't think social insects are any different from the rest. The arguments you apply to the queen and her workers, are probably also applicable to the wolf brain / wolf balls and the rest of the wolf.
This isn't quite answering your main thrust, so much as going on a tangent based on the early paragraphs, but… I really have to say that I am very very creeped out by arguments about animal welfare that don't take into account a question along the lines of "if we had a magic wand to boost this animal's intelligence enough for it to understand the question, would it plausibly agree with our conclusions".
I think that most wild animals would react to any claim by humans that their lives were collectively "not worth living" in a similar way to how humanity would react if some higher-dimensional starfish aliens announced that by their idea of ethics human lives were, in aggregate, not worth living, and therefore they had humanely decided to euthanise us as a species. i.e. with a resounding "what is wrong with you, get away from me". (It seems obvious to me that even humans who might individually feel neutral-to-negative about their specific individual existence are, in the main, not going to support generalising from "I personally would probably rather not have been born" to "and therefore, assuming significant amounts of people feel the way I do, I would rather humanity as a whole never existed".)
Thus the question seems, for me, not to be whether maggots are "happy" as we'd understand it, but whether we have any cause to think that individual maggots would rather not exist, and, moreover, whether any individual maggots would be in favour of *no* maggots existing.