Copyright 1994 by Robert Wright. We all like to think of ourselves as selfless. And, on occasion, we are. But we are pigs compared to the social insects.
Bees die for their fellow bees, disemboweling themselves upon stinging an intruder.
Some ants, also in defense of the colony, detonate themselves. Other ants spend their lives as doors, keeping out insects that lack security clearance, or as food sacks, hanging bloated from the ceiling in case of scarcity. These pieces of furniture have no offspring. Darwin spent more than a decade wondering how natural selection could have produced whole castes of ants that create no descendants. As he did so, he was creating plenty of descendants himself.