Indeed. I've long thought that an ant colony should be seen as a single individual, rather than a group. One part which can procreate, like the reproductive system. Another which can fight off invaders, like white blood cells, or perhaps muscles. The anthill, in turn, is like a body; constructed by the cells and neurons, and protecting the system as a whole.
Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and a collection of consciousness is the noosphere. Even though each of your organs make their own decisions and contribute individually to your "consciousness", you still consider the entire thing your "self". Your decisions are made based on analyzing multiple conflicting distributed signals given off by your organs.
Organizations are no different, assuming identity, autonomy, and motivation.
But my theory falls apart with the reproduction system. We don't really reproduce other 'countries'. While with ant colonies, a single entity produces all the "cells", and also all the "embryos" to start their own ant colonies.
In that sense an ant colony uses asexual reproduction if looked at as a whole.
Thanks for the new insights! :)
Sure we do. The UK has a whole lot of offspring, for instance.
Partly reproduction, partly conquering. As usual the place is not empty.
Countries definitely do reproduce, usually on a longer cycle than that of the humans that make them up.
Oh, we still lay the eggs of new countries in the corpses of ones we kill.
It is a fascinating book, and I can recommend reading it, though having been published in 1925, it is possible some of the information is out-of-date.
https://www.amazon.com/Soul-White-Ant-Complete-Unabridged/dp...
"White Ant" actually refers to termites, though the same principles apply. The book was originally published in Afrikaans. According to Wikipedia:
> [The book] was plagiarised by Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, who published La Vie des Termites (translated into English as The Life of Termites or The Life of White Ants), an entomological book,[3] in what has been called "a classic example of academic plagiarism" by University of London's professor of biology, David Bignell.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais#Theft_of_hi...
Following reference [4] led to this page which I unfortunately don't have the time to read in its entirety right now, but from a skim seems to have some interesting further information on termites:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070915005006/http://www.biolog...
I thought it's a data entry error, but no, it looks like that's the legitimate price range for the NEW hardcovers (the actual listed ones are even more!):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0007JVUSK/ref=dp_ol...
It's either a ripoff, or some sort of collector's edition original versions. Though if it were the latter, I'd have expected it to be advertised as such.
The great E.O. Wilson has had similar ruminations: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/books/review/Jones-t.html
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/09/how-termites-...
I think this is the main argument for looking at a colony as a distributed individual organism.
The same can be said of human organizations, too. Organizations have distinct behaviors ("company culture" comes to mind) which can be totally out of the control of individuals, if the org is big/complex enough.
God I love ants so much. Such a philosophically interesting creature.
Or perhaps like a Fourier decomposition of a complex waveform. Whereby each ant essentially becomes a constituent "wave" in a complex signal.
You might have to consider several such "waves" in ant colonies — maybe one electrically defined for a certain type of information; another chemically defined for another domain; etc.
But yes, he does great work...
The group knows how to build the structure even if no one individual can explain every detail.
And to an observer they'd see humans arrive each morning, spread out to accomplish tasks and then return to their cars.
Once you start getting into 5 phase, 2.5 year long projects it helps having a dedicated PM overseeing every detail and coordinating between the engineer/owners/superintendents.
Heaven forbid you get into a government contract where now you have 10x the paperwork/submittals and RFI's compared to a private job, which it really does help to have one person pretty much memorize the spec book and know where to find everything when needed.
The parents would be around and healthy to help their kids emotionally and/or financially through their young adult years and the kids would be less likely to have to take care of their parents while trying to get their own life off the ground.
The difference in the contact between ants and between neurons is that it's not the same ants that contact each other.
A larger pool of workers also means the colony is less likely to suffer catastrophic setbacks. For example when they send a good portion of the pool to a promising food source and then those get washed away, fall prey or whatever.
Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the sum of oscillations of signals.
> Every morning, the shape of the colony’s foraging area changes, like an amoeba that expands and contracts.
Sounds like an emergent macroscopic "heartbeat" of the colony.
> In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic.
It makes sense that small perturbations would temporarily morph the heartbeat, but would probably snap back into the default oscillation pretty quickly. It would be interesting to see if a small colony is equally resilient to small perturbations as a large colony is to large perturbations, keeping some adjusted ratio of the perturbationSize/colonySize constant.
> individual ants live at most a year.
This comes as a surprise to me.