“Social insects have three basic characteristics.” He ticked the points off on his fingers. “You get many individuals cooperating in caring for the young—not just parents, as among most mammals, say. Second, there is an overlap of generations. Children stay at home to live with their parents and grandparents. Third, you have a reproductive division of labor—”

“Neuters,” I said.

“Yes. Workers, who may remain sterile throughout their lives, serving the breeders . . .”

I started to get a sense of where he was going. I didn’t want to hear it. Dread gathered in the pit of my stomach. I pulled on the beer, drinking too fast. When I came back to George, he was talking about Darwin.

“. . . Darwin himself thought ants were a great challenge to his theory of evolution. How could sterile worker castes evolve if they leave no offspring? I mean, the whole point of life is to pass on your genes—isn’t it? How can that happen if you’re neuter? Well, in fact, natural selection works at the level of the gene, not the individual.

“If you’re a neuter, you give up your chance of having daughters, but by doing so you help Mom produce more sisters. Why do you do it? Because it’s in your genetic interests. Look, your sisters share half your genes, because you were born from the same parents. So your nieces are less closely related to you than your own daughters. But if, by remaining celibate, you can double the numbers of your nieces, you gain more in terms of genes passed on. In the long term you’ve won the genetic lottery.

“The numbers are different for ants. The way they pass on their genes is different from mammals—if you’re an ant your sister is actually closer to you genetically than your own daughter!—so they have a predisposition to this kind of group living, which is no doubt why it rose so early and so often among the insects. But the principle’s the same.

“George, an ant colony isn’t a dictatorship, or a communist utopia. It is a family. It’s a logical outcome of high population densities and a hostile external environment. Sometimes it pays to stay home with Mom, because it’s safer that way—but you need a social order to cope with the crowding. So you help Mom bring up your sisters. It’s harsh, but it’s a stable system; emergence makes the colony as a whole work, and there is a genetic payoff for everybody, and they all get along just fine . . . The biologists call this way of living ‘eusociality’—eu like in utopia, meaning ‘perfect.’ “

“A perfect family? Now that’s scary.”

“But it’s not like a human family. This genetic calculus doesn’t have much to do with traditional human morality . . . Not until now,” he said mysteriously. “And it’s not just ants.” He played his trump card. “Consider naked mole rats.”