HOME / books: Reading between the lines.

Of Ants and MenCompare the two civilizations, and who wins?

By Christine KenneallyPosted Monday, Dec. 1, 2008, at 10:44 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

In The Children of Men, P.D. James vividly imagined a world that was suddenly struck by infertility. Men and women are still able to go through the motions of reproduction, but babies do not result. It's a straightforward end-of-the-world problem, and even though many scientists are now actively engaged in finessing human cloning, we aren't there yet. Until then, global infertility would mean curtains for us. Ants might struggle on a little longer. When a virgin queen leafcutter ant leaves her birth colony, she has an afternoon's dalliance with a number of males and then goes on to found a civilization of her own. Even though the odds are against her success (in one study, 12 of 13,300 new colonies made it to the three-month-mark), she may go on to produce hundreds of millions of offspring. All of this follows from her one big day out. Ant queens hang onto millions of male sperm cells and can use them for up to 10 years, long after the father has died. So even if sex no longer produced offspring, any one ant civilization might continue to thrive. Ants win again, at least for the short term.

The ant queen is queen of reproduction only. Once she gets her society going, she doesn't in any sense rule over her subjects. In fact, though it looks highly stratified (think class-obsessed Victorian England or the Indian caste system) as well as highly productive, no one is in charge of leafcutter civilization. After joining a caste, each ant follows a simple set of algorithms in order to make decisions. Their concern is always what is in front of them—the piece of food, the foreign ant, the wilting fungus, the enticing pheromone cloud. Out of the accumulation of all these tiny decisions emerges "megalopolis" architecture and industry. Ants excavate tons of dirt, going meters underground to create thousands of compartments. In many compartments, they tend fungus gardens, protecting their crop against disease and theft as carefully as any human farmer. Near their nests, they herd sap-feeding insects like cattle and harvest their sugar-rich droppings. No one ant plans this—or even thinks about it. Instead, the accumulation of their many small, quick decisions builds what Holldobler and Wilson call a superorganism, a smart animal made up of many differently smart animals. So real is the super-ant that it's subject to its own kind of evolutionary pressure, distinct from the pressure on any one ant.

Humans form superorganisms, too. Many enjoyable discoveries in cognitive science over the past few decades concern the way that a larger human intelligence can arise from the actions of many people. We know now that many individual decisions are made unconsciously, that even crowds make decisions, and that other weird phenomena exist in the collective mind like a language that is contained by a population of speakers, not the mind of any one speaker. Many evolutionary theorists also argue that human groups are subject to their own form of natural selection. But we are not the Borg—or ants, for that matter. Indeed, it is more or less the same thing to say that humans are individuals, humans can learn, and humans have minds. To be fair to ants, Holldobler and Wilson say ants possess primitive minds, making decisions about what to do next based on their experiences of what has happened before. Humans, however, extend the benefit of experience not just over their entire lifetimes but also back through the lifetimes of many human societies. Humans build knowledge outside the genome and learn in real time, which is why in the face of a global plague, humans might do better than ants.

If there is an avian-flu outbreak or an equivalent insect epidemic, like the one that's currently wiping out North America's honeybee population, humans will find ways to amplify their immunity rapidly. Assuming that after the initial hit, a decent portion of survivors are doctors, biologists, and engineers (and it's not all poets and bankers), we'll have the predictive and planning tools of epidemiology and other public-health aids as well as the lessons of medicine at our disposal. We may communicate remotely to keep infected people in quarantine, and we'll find some way to dispose of the ones who didn't make it. The problem for ants is that when civilization is hard-wired, civilians aren't very nimble—even if their civilization is particularly industrious and sophisticated. In contrast, humans are cognitive scavengers, pulling together ideas from other places and other times and even using other animals, like ants, to test their theories and design their responses. For once, ants lose and humans win.

Of course, life doesn't care which of us wins, as long as some of us do. While humans and ants are fundamentally different kinds of biological machines, both are designed to solve the same problem: staying alive. But a problem remains. It's been said that modern human civilization is itself an extinction event, causing up to 30 percent of all species to disappear by the middle of this century. If we ourselves go extinct, a huge burst in biodiversity will result. In contrast, if ants vanished, the effect on the biosphere would be catastrophic. Many plant species would die, as would entire habitats, like all of the rainforests. In short order, all the animals that depend on all of those plants would disappear, too. Ants may well be the most important animals on Earth. Which means that if the ants lose, we all lose.