11-02-2017, 12:00 AM
Oh.
I read a science fiction book once where a line of humanity had split off, and lived underground in a eusocial hive society like termites or naked mole rats.
The mechanism that let them do this, by the way, is that certain women developed some kind of adaptation that let them KEEP a man's semen alive inside their own bodies for the rest of their entire lives, so it was all very simple and they could mate ONCE and then turn out hive-human babies every 9 months (or much less) like clockwork, with no other assistance. But I digress... They were hive people. A whole society of hive people, that looked like people, but were not exactly people.
But ON TOP OF THAT, weird as that is, the REALLY weird thing is a second evolution that happened where it turned out PRETENDING to be part of the hive, and just blending in and doing what everyone else looked like they were doing, was a lot easier and actually took a lot less energy than actually BEING part of the hive.
So then, they were still organized like a hive, but in reality they were all just faking it. But if you saw it from the outside nothing was different.
I read a science fiction book once where a line of humanity had split off, and lived underground in a eusocial hive society like termites or naked mole rats.
The mechanism that let them do this, by the way, is that certain women developed some kind of adaptation that let them KEEP a man's semen alive inside their own bodies for the rest of their entire lives, so it was all very simple and they could mate ONCE and then turn out hive-human babies every 9 months (or much less) like clockwork, with no other assistance. But I digress... They were hive people. A whole society of hive people, that looked like people, but were not exactly people.
But ON TOP OF THAT, weird as that is, the REALLY weird thing is a second evolution that happened where it turned out PRETENDING to be part of the hive, and just blending in and doing what everyone else looked like they were doing, was a lot easier and actually took a lot less energy than actually BEING part of the hive.
So then, they were still organized like a hive, but in reality they were all just faking it. But if you saw it from the outside nothing was different.