Birds too never find out what they say. Like our small talk.
Understanding how ant colonies actually function means that we have to abandon explanations based on central control. This takes us into difficult and unfamiliar terrain. We are deeply attached to the idea that any system of interacting agents must be organized through hierarchy. Our metaphors for describing the behavior of such systems are permeated with notions of a chain of command. For example, we explain what our bodies do by talking about genes as “blueprints,” unvarying instructions passed from an architect to a builder. But we know that instructions from genes constantly change, as genes turn off and on in response to local interactions among cells.
Ant colonies, like genes, work without blueprints or programming. 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.
Colonies are regulated by networks of interaction. Ants respond only to their immediate surroundings and to their interactions with the other ants nearby. What matters is the rhythm of interactions, not their meaning. Ants respond to the pattern and rate of their encounters with each other, as well as to the smells they perceive in the world, such as the picnic sandwiches. (…)
A real ant colony is not a society of scheming, self-sacrificing individuals. It is more like an office that communicates by meaningless text messaging in which each worker’s task is determined by how many messages she just received. The colony has no central purpose. Each ant responds to the rate of her brief encounters with other ants and has no sense of the condition or the goals of the whole colony. Unlike the ants in Anthill, no ant really cares if the queen dies.
Ant colonies are not the only complex systems that function without central control. Brains, too, have no chain of command. (…) No one really knows how intelligence is distributed in the human brain. (…) The outstanding scientific questions about ants and brains are the same ones we have about many other biological systems that function without hierarchy, such as the immune system, the communities of bacteria in our bodies, and the patterns we see in the diversity of tropical forests. For all of these systems, we still don’t understand how the parts work together to produce the dynamics, the history, and the development of the whole system.
