It'll never work. Even if all Humans became the ideal race, it would revert eventually.

While it may be true that negative human emotions such as greed, hatred, etc. will never truly be destroyed, it is also true that today's society fuels these feelings far more than it should.  I still hope that a society like this or the United Federation of Planets will someday be possible.

My take on the article is that those base feelings are a direct result of scarcity. If this is true, then it is compatible with the view that we evolved in a scarce environment. Fierce competition resulted in predator and prey trying to outdo each other, which is one relevant example.

It's difficult to say what would happen if scarcity vanished (which it may do one day, such as when a molecular assembler is invented). Would the base instincts remain, or would they be so minimised as to be irrelevant? I'm an optimist, I think it would be the latter. As the article points out, crime and war usually result from some form of scarcity.

We'll never eliminate our problems but we may squash them into something small. Remember that already in the past century, the male violent death rate (measured as a percentage of the hugely bigger population) dropped sharply. Society has its moral problems, but we live like Kings and Queens compared with our grandparents, who were often too busy trying to warm the house to worry about whether there might be a federation one day.

...I think that goes back to nurture vs. nature 

And the people who want more, despite not needing it? You can have the best upbringing possible and still be an 'unpleasant' person (or worse).

Ahh, the selfish gene

Yeah I sent you the info maybe 15 minutes after you asked using Windows Live.... uh oh, lost in transmission 

So basically I believe it is a sub of the worker caste (namely a porter), whose role is to carry food and remove obstacles from the brood path etc. The soldiers can't carry anything due to their curved mandibles, the brood workers can't because they are too small, and since the worker caste is differentiated based on physical size, the smaller ones may fend off parasites while the larger carry the heavy load essentially.