1 Life Misconstrued: 2 Ants Don’t Do Altruism: Why Behaviour Is Not a Semiotic Performance

The story of the fungus-infected ant pupa is everywhere in science journalism. Headlines trumpet “selfless pupae sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony” and researchers are quoted marvelling at chemical alarms and molecular red flags. On first reading, it seems a striking example of biological morality — tiny actors making heroic choices.

But the marvel evaporates the moment we cut through the metaphor.

Relational ontology begins by refusing the presupposition of autonomous individuals. In the context of the colony, the pupa is not a self with goals or intentions. It is a perspectival cut — a local instantiation of the colony’s broader relational potential. Its chemical emissions are not signals in a semiotic sense; they are value-laden perturbations. They modulate the conditions under which other colony members (workers) actualise behaviours that maintain the viability of the system as a whole.

Put plainly: the pupa does not “ask” to be killed. It does not “signal” anything. It does not “sacrifice” itself. These verbs, imported from human social and moral experience, are metaphoric overlays. The real dynamics are relational and non-symbolic:

• Perturbation: the fungus alters the local chemical and physiological conditions of the pupa.

• Constraint: these changes shift the field of potential actualisations available to neighbouring workers.

• Outcome: the workers’ behaviours are modulated by the altered local conditions, resulting in the removal of the infected node.

Nothing in this process requires meaning. Nothing in this process requires intention. What emerges is value in action — the system maintaining itself, regulating perturbations, and actualising patterns that preserve its collective viability.

The temptation to describe this as “altruism” comes from our own semiotic lens. We perceive intentionality, agency, moral choice, because that is how our semiotic systems construe action. But in the colony, there is no such construal: meaning is absent; only value is present.

This is the recurring error we began mapping in the first post: the ontology of convenience — metaphors chosen for their narrative appeal — collapses into the ontology of confusion. Anthropomorphic and moralised language obscures the actual relational dynamics that produce the phenomena.

By refusing the lure of moral drama, we can instead see the elegance of the colony as a distributed field of potential. Each pupa, each worker, each chemical emission is a locus where systemic constraints are actualised. What looks like self-sacrifice is actually a regulatory pattern in motion. What looks like communication is actually a shift in potential, a modulation of value, not the transmission of meaning.

Understanding this distinction — value without meaning — is crucial. It prevents us from over-interpreting biological systems and allows us to describe life as it is, not as we wish it to be.

In the next post, we will turn from ants to the brain, showing how the same category error manifests in neuroscience: astrocytes are not co-computers, and neurons do not encode information. Once again, metaphor threatens to obscure relational reality.