I mean you are right. In a real sense any guess is just as likely to be true based on our knowlege.
So I looked it up. The last estimated common ancestor between us and ants was 510 million years ago. It was after the cambrain explosion so complex survival systems would likely have been well established in the population. However that is far enough back I wouldn't expext to see strongly analogous neuroanatomy.
As a datapoint. This one seems to indicate that consenus of ant neuroanatomy is that is is fully complex enough to contain a rich inner life. However the organization is alien enough that I couldn't speculate about the analogy of structures especially given the noted variability across a population. I am gonna say it would be surprising if ants didn't have complex metacognition as that seems a prerequisite for eusociality and their close relatives seem to posses that.
"This large body of knowledge on honeybee behavior has been complemented by the identification of many behaviorally relevant neurons. Integrating this information in a standardized 3D atlas provides an important tool to understand brain circuits (Brandt et al., 2005). This approach has further been pursued by Menzel, Rybak and colleagues who developed the “The honeybee standard brain” (HSB) database, an interactive tool to integrate morphologies and the reference atlas of neurons in the honeybee brain (Brandt et al., 2005; Rybak et al., 2010). The approach to develop a 3D standard brain has also been used for other insects"
That is just rad as shit and I am gonna read up on that.
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I mean you are right. In a real sense any guess is just as likely to be true based on our knowlege.
So I looked it up. The last estimated common ancestor between us and ants was 510 million years ago. It was after the cambrain explosion so complex survival systems would likely have been well established in the population. However that is far enough back I wouldn't expext to see strongly analogous neuroanatomy.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2014.00166/full
As a datapoint. This one seems to indicate that consenus of ant neuroanatomy is that is is fully complex enough to contain a rich inner life. However the organization is alien enough that I couldn't speculate about the analogy of structures especially given the noted variability across a population. I am gonna say it would be surprising if ants didn't have complex metacognition as that seems a prerequisite for eusociality and their close relatives seem to posses that.
"This large body of knowledge on honeybee behavior has been complemented by the identification of many behaviorally relevant neurons. Integrating this information in a standardized 3D atlas provides an important tool to understand brain circuits (Brandt et al., 2005). This approach has further been pursued by Menzel, Rybak and colleagues who developed the “The honeybee standard brain” (HSB) database, an interactive tool to integrate morphologies and the reference atlas of neurons in the honeybee brain (Brandt et al., 2005; Rybak et al., 2010). The approach to develop a 3D standard brain has also been used for other insects"
That is just rad as shit and I am gonna read up on that.
deleted by creator