# Full Text: Of Ants & Aging

> Extracted from `2023_AntsAging.pdf`

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Of Ants & Aging 
April 22, 2023
Daniel A. Friedman
Birth
Health
Death
?
Death Be 
Not Proud!

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curing-aging.com/ 
Epistemic status & context
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I am aiming to present some rapid connected reflections on Ants & Aging, which when interpreted from the expert 
perspectives at this conference, might be useful – though I am not an expert or currently working in aging research. 
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In terms of genre, what is presented here is meant more as whimsical and promptive, rather than exhaustive.
Topics Today (Questions that were listed on the conference website)
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Is aging the result of a passive accumulation of damage or an active self-destruction program? That is, do we age 
for the same reason cars wear out, or for the same reason we go through puberty?
○
WHY does aging happen in Ants & Humans?
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Do all mammals age by the same mechanisms?
○
What are similarities & differences in “why aging happens” across even broader phylogenetic scope? 
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Does the biological clock that governs the timing of wisdom teeth budding affect the rate of aging?
○
I don’t know. 
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What progress has been made in reversing aging?
○
I don’t know about progress in reversing aging in humans.
○
Today we can ask about what type or extent of “progress has been made in reversing aging” in ants.

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Roadmap
●Motivations & Definitions
○What are Ants & Aging, and why study them?
●Why does biological Aging occur?
○Using Tinbergen’s 4 Questions to ask Why aging happens
●Discussions
○Maps, Territories, and Decisions. 
●Questions & Antswer

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Motivations & 
Definitions

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NM, USA
Question: 
What is in common among 
these three organisms?.
Red Harvester Ants
Pogonomyrmex barbatus
Antswer: 
Totally fit 6-foot guys 
who are about 27 
years old (!!!)

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30+ year field study of Red Harvester Ants 
by Professor Deborah Gordon at Stanford
Red and Blue are inferred parentage relationships at the field site 
Colonies of P. barbatus have a single long-lived queen
Queen stores sperm from single mating & lay eggs life-long
Sterile nestmates (workers) turn over annually or faster
Queens can 
live 25+ years
…. How???
Probability of leaving 
child colonies is ~flat 
Ingram et al. 2013

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Definitions
Ants
●
Diverse and global group of with ~15,000 known species
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Nestmate
○
6-legged insect body (might be sterile as in “worker” or reproductive as in “queen” or “male”). 
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Colony
○
Aggregate of nestmates; how ants live in all cases (obligate eusociality)  
Age ≠ Aging
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Age
○
An amount of time (chronos): the clock time elapsed during the lifespan of an individual 
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Aging
○
A process and embodied outcome occurring through time (kairos), associated with a variety of specific phenotypes in a 
species-specific fashion, such that “more aged” is associated with increased risk of various specific diseases and/or 
thermodynamic dissolution (death). This definition of “aging” is clearly distinct from age, and in no ways is prescriptive 
or normative.
■
Is ageing a disease?, The Lancet Healthy Longevity, July 2022
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But what, on the face of it, looks like an academic dispute around linguistic precision masks a much greater inherent ideological conflict 
between longevity science and geriatric medicine, which are uneasy bedfellows in the emerging discipline of so-called longevity medicine. 
The conflict is centred around one crucial question: can ageing be regarded as a disease?
■
Hayflick 2007 “Biological aging is no longer an unsolved problem”

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FIGURE 2. Arbitrary cognitive “Individuals” can be 
classified according to their computational boundary. 
(A) Each living system has a delimited “area of concern” – a region 
of space-time, with the organism at its center, within which its 
cognitive apparatus functions to take measurements and act. …….
(B) The size and shape of this cognitive boundary defines the 
sophistication of the agent and determines the scale of its goal 
directedness……
(C) In this scheme, Individuals can overlap – the same biophysical 
system can support a number of coexisting, coupled Selves with 
different cognitive borders. A coordinated swarm of animals, the 
individual animals themselves, their organs, their cells, and even 
the metabolic and transcriptional networks inside the cells each 
have their own cognitive horizon.
Levin 2019
What is Ant?
What is Human?
What is Aging?
Nestmate of Theseus? 
Colony of Theseus?

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Why does biological 
Aging occur?

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GPT4
DAF

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Kapheim 2018 
Why does Aging happen in humans and ants?
Aristotle’s Four Causes

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Example: Why is that house decayed?
How it came to be
It used to be in good 
condition, then decayed 
because over time the 
windows & walls broke.
SD-2.1
How the material is now
The house is in a decayed 
state because it has 
broken windows & walls
How it functions now
The house is decayed 
because leaks water from 
the roof and wind blows 
through the windows
How the instance came to 
be through deep time
Because generations of 
similar houses have been 
made before, out of materials 
that are planned to last 
decades not centuries
Next we will use Tinbergen’s 4 Questions to explore Aging.

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Ants
Human
Nestmate aging
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Temporal polyethism
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Giraldo & Traniello 2014 – “Worker 
senescence and the sociobiology of aging in ants” – 
“We present seven hypotheses concerning how 
selection could favor extended worker lifespan….”
Colony aging
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Some behavioral effects associated 
with colony age beyond worker age 
(Barton et al. 2002)
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Some Ant species have 
colonies that don’t age! 
Immortal colonies may have 
asexual reproduction, or 
intra-nest sexual reproduction
Aging is a lifelong process. 
Trajectories are complex:
●
Nguyen et al. 2021 “In this study we 
investigated the association between 
multimorbidity and different patterns of 
healthy ageing trajectories among 130880 
individuals in a global sample. 
Multimorbidity appeared to increase the 
likelihood of having poorer healthy ageing 
trajectories, but the extent to which healthy 
ageing trajectories were projected to decline 
depended on the specific patterns of 
multimorbidity.”
Various influence can shift the balance
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“Infection and inflammation in somatic 
maintenance, growth and longevity” Kopp 
& Medzhitov 2009 “infectious 
pathogens in a given niche…. shifts 
this balance in favor of somatic 
maintenance at the expense of 
reproduction and growth.”
Why does aging Develop? 
Rodrigues & Flatt 2016 
Where do 
mammals, and 
humans, fit on 
these scales?

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To explore the relation between reproduction and longevity, we compared gene expression during 
caste switching. Insulin expression is increased in the gamergate brain that correlates with increased 
lipid synthesis and production of vitellogenin in the fat body, both transported to the egg. This results 
from activation of the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) branch of the insulin signaling 
pathway. By contrast, the production in the gamergate developing ovary of anti-insulin Imp-L2 leads 
to decreased signaling of the AKT/forkhead box O (FOXO) branch in the fat body, which is consistent 
with their extended longevity.
Ants
Human
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Rodrigues & Flatt 2016 –“Remarkably, 
however, queens of highly eusocial social 
insects exhibit both enormous 
reproductive output and longevity, thus 
escaping the trade-off. Here we argue — 
based on recent evidence — that the 
proximate reason for why eusocial insects 
can decouple this trade-off is that they have 
evolved a different ‘wiring’ of the 
IIS-JH-Vg/YP circuit.”
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insulin-like/IGF-1 signaling (IIS).
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“Insulin and aging” (Kurauti et al. 
2021) Most of the age-related 
diseases have been associated 
with impairment of action of an 
important hormone, namely 
insulin…..improving insulin action 
may be an important strategy to 
have a healthier and longer life.
●
Akintola & van Heemst 2015 
“Insulin, Aging, and the Brain: 
Mechanisms and Implications”
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Sleep, Fasting, Exercise, 
Temperature variation, Cognitive 
Security Practices, Oxygen….
What is the embodied 
mechanism of aging? 
This is a large area, here we will just 
focus on Insulin signaling as an example
“Insulin signaling in the long-lived 
reproductive caste of ants”, Yan et al. 2022

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Ants
Human
●
“Tracing Slow Phenoptosis to the 
Prenatal Stage in Social 
Vertebrates”, Leake 2023
●
“Vladimir Skulachev’s coining of the term 
“phenoptosis” 25 years ago highlighted 
the theoretical possibility that aging is a 
programmed process to speed the exit of 
individuals posing some danger to their 
social group………This review will 
explain how accelerated biological aging 
equates to slow phenoptosis. Its 
occurrence even in the prenatal stage is 
theoretically supported by W. D. 
Hamilton’s proposal that offsprings 
detecting they have dangerous mutations
should then automatically speed their 
demise, in order to improve their inclusive
fitness by giving their parents the chance 
to produce other fitter siblings.”
●
Colony aging
○
Population-scale selection on 
generation time?
○
Constraints on sexual biology 
(e.g. sperm storage)
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Nestmates aging
○
Turnover of damaged 
nestmate bodies may be 
favorable (favoring aging 
processes at nestmate scale) 
What is the Utility of Aging? 
One answer in 
common might be 
– there simply is 
no utility. Life is an 
Order vs. Disorder 
tradeoff frontier, 
and there is no 
further specific 
Utility or meaning 
to Aging

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Ants
Human
Shared evolutionary history – Complex area! 
Next slides will give a distillation of PaperStream #001.0 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le-c-kkJemA (1:19:25 video)
Of the many Evolutionary phenomena/perspectives to consider, here we will just 
discuss Kin Selection (KS) & Multi-Level Selection (MLS)
What is the evolutionary 
basis or account of aging?

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-c
rb
-c
r
b
“direct”
“indirect”
Kin Selection (KS)

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●
What biological cases does Figure 6 apply to? The key features are the presence of 
social interactions between individuals within groups, but the absence of a causal 
influence of group p-value, Pi, on either individual or group fitness. 
●
This means that the causal explanation of any individual’s fitness can be given in terms 
that refer only to individual-level properties, that is, pi and p’i . This will be true if there is 
no group-level functional organization, and the groups exhibit no emergent properties of 
their own, that is, the only group properties are aggregations of individual properties, 
such as Pi. Many mammalian social groups, for example, buffalo herds and baboon 
troops, arguably satisfy these conditions. 
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Extensive social interactions take place within such groups, but the groups are not 
functionally integrated in the way that eusocial insect colonies are, for example.

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“Individual fitness” 
has parent node 
“partner character” 
1.
Group fitness (W) is primary
2.
Group fitness (W) is caused by group P, 
and thus only indirectly on p and p’

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7 Conclusion 
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The opposition between the kin and multilevel selection approaches to social evolution has long polarized 
evolutionary biologists. 
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In recent discussions, theorists have increasingly come to regard the two approaches as equivalent, 
on the grounds that a correct expression for allele frequency change in structured populations can 
be written using either approach. 
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However, this establishes only that KS and MLS are formally equivalent, not that they 
constitute equally adequate causal descriptions of the evolutionary process. 
○
Connection with Active Inference, e.g. “How particular is the physics of the free energy principle?” Aguilera et al. 2022
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The bulk of this article has been concerned with fleshing out, in a precise way, the meaning of causal 
adequacy, and using it to determine when the KS and MLS decompositions of the total evolutionary change 
count as causally adequate. The theory presented here does not pretend to be complete. Even if the 
theory is broadly on the right lines, a number of important issues remain. 
○
One is to get clearer about the implicit metaphysical commitments involved in the multilevel causal graphs above, which contain 
both individual and group variables. 
○
Another is to address the epistemological problem of how we can tell which causal graph is correct in any given case. 
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Finally, further work to map actual empirical cases onto the abstract framework developed here would be useful; the cases discussed in the 
evolutionary transitions literature are an obvious starting point. These all represent potential avenues for future work. 
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[Lastly], the need for the above theory stems from a striking disjunction between the scientific explanations that evolutionary biologists aim 
to give, which are causal, and the formal models of the evolutionary process that they develop, in which causal concepts do not feature 
explicitly. This disjunction is not unique to evolutionary biology, less still to social evolution theory, but is a quite general problem; it stems 
from the fact that a mathematical framework adequate for describing causal relations has only been developed fairly recently (Pearl 
[2000]; Spirtes et al. [2001]). 
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Importing this framework into biology, and philosophy of biology, is an important task for the future. Pioneering first steps were taken by 
Shipley ([2000]), but much remains to be done.

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Discussion

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Person
Population
Colony
Nestmate
Organ
Society
Organ
Ants
Human
Map 1

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Person
Population
Colony
Nestmate
Organ
Society
Organ
Ants
Human
Map 2
1911
Gilbert et al. 2015
Huneman 2017
Linksvayer 2015
Friston et al. 2023

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Eusociality (from Greek εὖ eu "good" and social), 
the highest level of organization of sociality, is 
defined by the following characteristics…..

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Brouwer et al. 2020
What do we do? 
Why do we do it? 
Action 
Inference
What is Aging?
Why does Aging occur? 
Overlapping Contexts that 
lead up to the Pivotal 
cognitive moment.

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Thank you for the 
Anttention & I will 
look forward to 
continuing the 
Discussion


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*Extraction method: pymupdf*