> Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other.
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.
> 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.
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.
The emergent layers are organelles -> cell -> tissue -> organ -> organ system -> organism -> organization.
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.
I was going to say you can also look at a country like this, with roads as veins, military as white blood cells, scientists/universities for brains, etc.
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.
I'd say it's reproduction, it's just not voluntary reproduction. Every time a culture invades another, you can think of it as creating a new culture that has the "genes" of the previous two. Examples include the influence of the moors on Spain, the changes to the English language due to the Norman conquest, and the modern unique Afrikaner culture of South Africa.
In some ways that's what collonialism is. It doesn't happen as much these days but if/when we start colonizing other planets, that would be a form of countries (or unions) reproducing.
I'm not sure about ants, but with bees the males generally come from other colonies. A princess mating with males from the same colony may cause problems in the offspring.
"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]
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:
My goodness, would you look at that! Luckily the paperback is only 1% the price, so solid deal there!
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!):
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.
I recall termite colonies also have interesting an interesting behaviour that resembles an analogue for an organ that other animals are acquainted with: lungs.
>Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons.
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.
>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.
Or perhaps like a Fourier decomposition of a complex waveform. Whereby each ant essentially becomes a constituent "wave" in a complex signal.
That's my intuition for the brain, as well. Something to do with composition and relative independence, from which arise incredible complexity, "multi-dimensional" processing — it's a big, big graph.
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.
Yeah, me too. I followed him for almost a year but in the end I felt like he tried to make video too frequently and the information concentration is too low.
In large scale human projects someone, or at least a small group of leaders, will know almost every detail and delegate. Ant colonies have no clear leadership, just a pheromone voting and decision system.
My last job was probably more ant colony like than most. We had jobs, someone quoted them, someone measured them, someone put them in the schedule, several of us did the jobs, the finished jobs were delivered and installed. All without anyone really delegating. We just followed the schedule and the paperwork. Even the boss didn't always know the details of the schedule or what we did. It all flowed pretty smoothly most of the time. We all just kind of knew what to do. It kind of broke down a bit when things went wrong though, it was was hard to figure out sometimes where and when problems happened, and in that case someone usually made an authoritative decision, but it wasn't that often.
That works from what I've observed at my company for jobs on a timetable < 6 months, or a shutdown/repair industrial type job.
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.
This reminded me of a theory I've been developing, I don't know if others have had it or have it, however an emergent behaviour that I've had some inklings may be true for humans relating to how old the parents are when having children. If having children at an older age (whether older age of male, female, or both) it could mean that resources and society are more stable - and perhaps another factor that there's more time to spend with, raise the children - giving them more guidance and having more nuanced knowledge to pass down, and so evolution may have selected for successful births at an older age toward creating children with different characteristics, behaviour, abilities.
I don't have a source, but I recall seeing a pop-sci news story claiming that men who have children at an older age have sons with higher than average life expectancy. IIRC they controlled for lifespan of the father, but I don't remember any word about controlling for fertility/sperm-count of the father in later years.
I would think having kids younger, as long as the parents are not resource constrained - stable financially - would be more advantageous.
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.
I think many worker ants live two years or more, a queen can live 15-30 years, depending on species and luck.
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.