There is a recent book on this topic by Deborah Gordon, who teaches at Stanford, called “Ants at Work”. I heard a discussion about the book on NPR in January, but have not yet read it. The main thrust of the book apparently agrees with the Mailbag answer–individual ants are mindless automata, essentially, but the group behavior can nevertheless be quite complex.
Just thought a reference to a popular book on the subject might be useful.
I read the question and wondered if the writer had read the science-fiction novel Phase IV, which was made into a mediocre movie, about a super-intelligent ant colony that takes over the people who are studying it.
I think I saw the movie Phase IV as a kid. I’ve had a phobia about arthropods ever since.
As for hive intelligence, [talking out of my hat]doesn’t it make sense that an individual human brain cell isn’t as intelligent as the whole? That the computational ability of your PC gets greater as it gets bigger? So too, the capacity and ability of an ant colony is higher than of an individual–but there may be a limit on what that enables ants to do. Besides, “intelligence” in the sense of computational and reactive ability is not the same as “mind” in the conscious, self-aware sense. One ant might be one “consciousness” within a larger “intelligent system”–which is NOT “conscious” as a system.[/talking out of my hat]
“One night your shoulders will ache/The next day when you wake/You’ll sprout wild wings and fly/Just like in Swan Lake”–the Church, “Swan Lake”
As challenging a subject as the dancing ants could be (no one has mentioned the Mexican hat dance or the Macarena yet, has that behaviour not been observed), I will attempt to forcibly wrench this discussion in another direction.
Sure, two people working together can accomplish things that one person couldn’t (e.g. lift an object too heavy for one person), but I think what the article is trying to say is that a group of ants would perform actions that a single ant never would, so I wonder what kind of action that would be. For example, a group of humans working together can build a cathedral, but a human working by herself can accomplish a similar task (build a place of worship), albeit on a smaller scale.
While its clear the ants won’t suddenly begin composing sonnets, mostly because they don’t need that kind of behaviour, what a whole hive can do is not simply an expansion of what one ant can do.
I think the key word here is emergent behaviour.
A whole bunch of units working in parallel can do some pretty complex stuff with very simple rules.
While a human can build a small place of worship, can a brain cell do a small amount of, say, speech? Certain properties only develop on higher levels.
I remember reading a neat little article on teams of robots simulating ants by moving “food” (a light source) to “home” (another light source). There was some neat video too. The point was is that the robots only had a couple of rules orienting themselves on the two light sources, and the overall effect was to push the food light towards the home light.
If anyone could find it, its sorta neat to watch.
I’ll see if I can get Doug to comment on this, but I think that one example is an fire-bucket brigade, where the ants pass some object down a line, from one to the other.
Okay, I can see ants doing the Achy Breaky a lot faster than passing little buckets of water. Do they sell them along with the miniature Western outfits?
One aspect of emergent behavior seems to be that the group “knows” how to do something the individual doesn’t. There are certainly parallels in human behavior: if you’ve ever watched a large building under construction, you’ve probably realized at some point that no one person knows how to build the building. The architect can design it, the steelworkers can rivet girders, the electicians know how to put in the wiring – but these people each know the rules for their own activity, and for certain interactions with other activities. Obviously these rules are a good deal more complex than those in use by ants, but it’s still the case that the collection of architects, foremen, and workers knows how to do something no individual knows.
Another analogy is a marching band - individual band mambers don’t actually NEED to know the pattern they’re forming - they can form it just being given simple instructions. With social insects, those instructions are built-in.
As for things they do that can’t be done by individuals, that covers MUCH of what they do, especially in terms of nest construction, so the architectural analogy is also a good one. Swarming, raiding, and such are behaviors which are group properties, but there’s also a class of things that depend on physical differences between individuals, called task specialization. Sometimes (as in honeybees) the differences are primarily internal - as a bee ages she performs different tasks - and in other cases, as in leafcutter ants, the differences are external, and certain individuals are physically only capable of performing one type of task - like leaf cutting vs. leaf carrying vs. nest cleaning vs. fungus-tending, etc. Such extreme specialization is relatively rare, but it does exist in intermediate stages in most ants and termites, which account for the bulk of social animal species on the planet.
[[Another analogy is a marching band - individual band members don’t actually NEED to know the pattern they’re forming - they can form it just being given simple instructions.]]
Okay, but even when the ants go marching one by one, the little one stops to suck his thumb. So individual ants do make individual decisions.
There’s a good point being made: We’re talking about SOCIAL animal species, both when we talk about hive insects and when we talk about ourselves. I believe it was Harlan Ellison who said that civilizations have a kind of life, larger than our own. And the cooperation of cells in an organism is somewhat like the cooperation of organisms in a society.
BUT, my cells are capable of doing things my mind knows nothing about; I don’t completely understand the Calvin-Benson cycle, or RNA synthesis.
And a leader of a society, even an autocratic one, doesn’t have to know everything his engineers, medical colleges, rocket scientists, cavalrymen, etc. know about their specific fields in order to direct the society. The information has to be there in order for the society, army, whatever, to work, but the “man in charge”, although he gives orders to the whole, can delegate some sciences to the specialists.
There very probably isn’t one mind for the whole society that “knows it all”, for men nor for ants.
So the “mind” of the hive–in analogy to my mind being the mind of my body–may only be the mind of the queen. Or there may be nothing emerging from an insect hive truly analogous to a self-aware psyche.
A new world order has been formed/between the cheque book and the dawn/A new renaissance man is born"
Jim Moginie/Peter Garrett/Martin Rotsey(Midnight Oil), “Renaissance Man”
There’s a good point being made: We’re talking about SOCIAL animal species, both when we talk about hive insects and when we talk about ourselves. I believe it was Harlan Ellison who said that civilizations have a kind of life, larger than our own. And the cooperation of cells in an organism is somewhat like the cooperation of organisms in a society.
BUT, my cells are capable of doing things my mind knows nothing about; I don’t completely understand the Calvin-Benson cycle, or RNA synthesis.
And a leader of a society, even an autocratic one, doesn’t have to know everything his engineers, medical colleges, rocket scientists, cavalrymen, etc. know about their specific fields in order to direct the society. The information has to be there in order for the society, army, whatever, to work, but the “man in charge”, although he gives orders to the whole, can delegate some sciences to the specialists.
There very probably isn’t one mind for the whole society that “knows it all”, for men nor for ants.
So the “mind” of the hive–in analogy to my mind being the mind of my body–may only be the mind of the queen. Of course, some of you may contest the idea that a human head of state is the “mind” of his state.
Or there may be nothing emerging from an insect hive’s collective organization truly analogous to the self-aware psyche evident in the individual human animal.
A new world order has been formed/between the cheque book and the dawn/A new renaissance man is born"
Jim Moginie/Peter Garrett/Martin Rotsey(Midnight Oil), “Renaissance Man”
erp. 'scuse me please
Those two posts are slightly different. I thought the 1st failed to go through–then I tweaked it before I resubmitted.
(& I could’ve just said, “Ant colonies probably don’t have any more of a hive mind than human societies!”!)
A new world order has been formed/between the cheque book and the dawn/A new renaissance man is born"
Jim Moginie/Peter Garrett/Martin Rotsey(Midnight Oil), “Renaissance Man”
