In the Ants’ Footsteps

For those who rarely give ants a sec­ond thought, Tim Flan­nery offers imme­di­ate rel­e­vance for any­one inter­ested in the trends now shap­ing our own soci­eties. In his book review of Super­or­gan­ism, he points to the strik­ing par­al­lels between the progress of human evo­lu­tion and the progress of ants some ten mil­lion years earlier:

Begin­ning as sim­ple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cat­tle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of for­eign ants … leav­ing the upbring­ing of their young to oth­ers, and there are even ants that have dis­cov­ered agri­cul­ture .… One can hardly help but admire the intel­li­gence of the ant colony, yet theirs is an intel­li­gence of a very par­tic­u­lar kind. Noth­ing in the brain of a worker ant rep­re­sents a blue­print of the social order,Holl­dobler and Wil­son tell us, and there is no over­seer or brain caste that car­ries such a mas­ter plan in its head. Instead, the ants have dis­cov­ered how to cre­ate strength from weak­ness, by pool­ing their indi­vid­u­ally lim­ited capac­i­ties into a col­lec­tive decision-making sys­tem that bears an uncanny resem­blance to our own demo­c­ra­tic processes.