When sprawling government bureaucracies seem unable to get their acts together and get things done right, our knee-jerk reaction as humans is to put the blame on their poor or dysfunctional central leadership. But should we really depend solely on a strong central control or hierarchy for our society to function properly? Or should we seriously take the cue from the behavior of ant colonies, which admirably get things done even when no one is in charge—and with no one ant directing another ant to do its job?
In her book
Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Princeton University Press, 184 pages), Stanford University biology professor Deborah M. Gordon makes a fascinating investigation of the role of interaction networks in regulating ant behavior and the relations among ant colonies. She demonstrates how ant behavior within and between colonies arises from local interactions of individuals, and how interaction networks develop as a colony grows older and larger. The more rapidly ants react to their encounters, she says, the more sensitively the entire colony responds to changing conditions.
In “Colonial Studies,” an article Gordon wrote for the September/October 2010 issue of the
Boston Review, she further elucidates her thesis about ant behavior. “Ant colonies, like genes, work without blueprints or programming,” she says. “No ant understands what needs to be done or what its actions mean for the welfare of the colony. An ant colony has no teams of workers dedicated to fighting or foraging. Although it is still commonly believed that each ant is assigned a task for life, ant biologists now know that ants move from one task to another.”
But Gordon is careful to qualify that although the behavior of ants provides humans with insights about the dynamics of networks, real ants don’t offer lessons in behavior. She explains: “Our stories about ants always have morals about how people ought to behave: soldiers should die for their country; we should conserve resources and plan for the future; a dutiful factory worker should cheerfully perform his or her appointed task. These morals come from stories about ants that are not true…There are no morals to be taken from the ants, but there is much to learn about systems without central control.”
Read Deborah Gordon’s “Colonial Studies” in the Boston Review now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Deborah M. Gordon is professor of biology at Stanford University. She has a PhD in zoology from Duke University, an MSc in Biology from Stanford University, and Bachelors from Oberlin College where she majored in French. Her fieldwork includes a long-term study of ant colonies in Arizona, and she is the author of numerous articles and papers as well as the widely reviewed book
Ants at Work.
RELATED READING:In “Ants and Us,” an article in the Autumn 2010 issue of
Intelligent Life Magazine,
The Economist’s Nairobi correspondent J.M. Ledgard goes to Harvard University to have a long, wide-ranging discussion on ants with E.O. Wilson, the world’s foremost authority on ants and ant behavior. Wilson keeps an office at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology as emeritus professor of entomology and honorary curator of the insect collection. “History is almost certainly colony against individual and colony against colony,” Wilson, who developed the discipline of sociobiology largely on the basis of his study of insects and of ants in particular, tells Ledgard. “If group selection is correct, what you would expect to find is an intense human desire to form groups that attack other groups; bands of brothers, teams.”
Read J.M. Ledgard’s “Ants and Us” in Intelligent Life Magazine now!
