They kept changing things to suit themselves:
Specialized castes are seen as phenotypic innovations necessary for ecological and evolutionary success in social insects. Nevertheless, how castes evolve adaptively as a lineage fills ecological space has remained unaddressed. Recent work with turtle ants has established that head shape and size in the iconic soldier caste, specialized for nest entrance defense, determine two key aspects of nesting ecology. Here species-level comparative analyses reveal that the evolution of head shape and size is extensively reversible, repeatable, and decoupled within the soldier caste and relative to the queen caste, underpinning the lineage’s diverse nesting ecology. These findings reshape our understanding of caste evolution, rejecting a stable, directional process in favor of a dynamic process of adaptive fitting between phenotype and environment.
Scott Powell, Shauna L. Price, and Daniel J. C. Kronauer, Edited by Jonathan B. Losos, “Trait evolution is reversible, repeatable, and decoupled in the soldier caste of turtle ants” at PNAS first published March 9, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1913750117 (open access)
It must be difficult to derive lectern-splintering theories when life forms simply adapt to whatever works, with nothing defined.
Hat tip: Pos-darwinista