This question is just as annoying if you ask it about "ants" as if a category as wild and diverse as ants could be analyzed in this way.

But, I see some parallels in the reasons why it's confounding.

@futurebird As a species, we mostly have advantages through tool making and use, so one could say we're generalists that are highly adapted to specialize.

But being so adapted to tool making and use would mean we're a specialist, specifically one that can generalise well.

I'm not even going to look for other ways to respond to this now.

@futurebird
as a species, generalist. But peculiarly, it arises I think from rapidly changing environments, each in turn applying pressure to specialize: the specialization often needed to happen in time frames that evolution couldn't address, so the repetition of the meta-pattern over time drove us toward the ABILITY to specialize.

As inidividuals we also face pressure to specialize, & forget our innate talent for general application.

@futurebird Put another way: The ability to specialize is a general ability.

@FeralRobots @futurebird

I voted for "specialists"

Humans specialize in pretty much three things
- pursuit-to-exhaustion predation
- eating pretty much anything
- pack-level problem-solving with story-telling

All three of those specialist skills are responsible for the (generalist) widespread expansion of humans into almost every biome available

@jens @futurebird I'd argue that our special ability is our ability to communicate and coordinate as a group which prevents wheel reinvention. This dovetails with the oxygen comment: An individual human can't survive the challenger deep, but human society can get someone there. The people in the sub don't have to be the same people that know about turning screws or measuring crush depths or wiring switches or debugging sonar.

@EMR @futurebird IMHO other animals communicate and coordinate just fine.

What's special about us is written language, which is tool use. That preserves and distributes knowledge better.

But word of mouth? Hmm. I'm less convinced.

@jens @futurebird human societies with no or little written language are still able to deal with any environment (and indeed, had most of the globe in-hand before recorded history began.) It's certainly nice but not essential.

@futurebird I answered "generalist" because humans as a species live in a wide variety of environments, consume a wide variety of foods, and have done so since the era of stone tools. As individuals, humans are probably more prone to specialization, because we live in large groups, in which different humans have different roles.

@futurebird I find myself conflicted about the comparison to ants. On one level, there's a serious problem in that there are many (22?) thousands of species of ants, some of which are probably generalists, but I guess maybe the specialists make up the majority of species. On another level, ants, somewhat like humans, are social organisms (but eusocial), and different ants in a colony take up specialist roles within it, etc.

@trochee @FeralRobots

It's bigger than "pack-level" humans can co-ordinate thousands of people and people don't always need to know each other to cooperate.

Ask me why I notice that in particular.

@EMR @jens

Writing is a powerful tool, but so is domesticating crops and I find the two kind of hard to separate in impact.

But domestication is just another form of mass modular cooperation.

@llewelly

What's similar is the ability to coordinate thousands of individuals. But many things are very very different.

But, I think that "mass coordination" is a big point of success either way.

@futurebird oh, great point. But in humans, mass coordination seems to be a relatively recent thing; from my (amatuer) understanding of anthropology, for most of human history, probably all humans lived in smaller groups, maybe a few dozen to a few hundred at most. Groups of thousands practically didn't exist until 6000 years ago. Even then, they remained a minority of humans until about 1000 years ago. Ants, on the other hand, depending on linage, have had mass coordination much longer.

@llewelly

Well the way that I look at it humans were just another languishing primate with fewer than a million individuals until the mass cooperation got going.

It's what I see as the source of all the madness and wonder.

@futurebird true. If aliens had investigated earth prior to about 6000 years ago, and been asked which mammals were the best mass coordinators, they surely would not have picked humans. Even 2000 years ago, maybe not. (Had to limit it to mammals, because there are a lot of invertebrates that occur in large numbers, but how coordinated? Few compare with ants. )

@futurebird I'm not sure I even see the argument for specialists. Please explain, if you feel like it.

@gleick

Without a network of technology, people and other kinds of support individual people are kind of ineffective and could die easily.