Ant Colony Quotes

It appears that nutrient exchange and helping neighbors in times of need is the rule, and this leads to the conclusion that forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.

The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters. What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.

The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality'. Your soul is still composed of many 'selves', just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line. It is the same with all creatures. How could a chicken that is artificially hatched in an incubator immediately look for the right food, if the experience of millions of years were not stored inside it? The existence of 'instinct' indicates the presence of our ancestors in our bodies and in our souls.

Nevertheless, an iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies.

God is a God of galaxies, of storms, of roaring seas and boiling thunder, but He is also the God of bread baking, of a child's smile, of dust motes in the sun. He is who He is, and always shall be. Look around you now. He is speaking always and everywhere. His personality can be seen and known and leaned upon. The sun is belching flares while mountains scrape our sky while ants are milking aphids on their colonial leaves and dolphins are laughing in the surf and wheat is rippling and wind is whipping and a boy is looking into the eyes of a girl and mortals are dying.

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters

Our human race is a colony of ants, Mr. Lawton, inhabiting an anthill at the edge of a limitless chasm called infinity.

i once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow s foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization

Imagine what humans could do, if we all worked together like an ant colony...minus the queen.

Is a mind a complicated kind of abstract pattern that develops in an underlying physical substrate, such as a vast network of nerve cells? If so, could something else be substituted for the nerve cells – something such as ants, giving rise to an ant colony that thinks as a whole and has an identity – that is to say, a self? Or could something else be substituted for the tiny nerve cells, such as millions of small computational units made of arrays of transistors, giving rise to an artificial neural network with a conscious mind? Or could software simulating such richly interconnected computational units be substituted, giving rise to a conventional computer (necessarily a far faster and more capacious one than we have ever seen) endowed with a mind and a soul and free will?

The classic example from biology is the huge, towerlike structure that is built by some ant and termite species. These structures only emerge when the ant colony reaches a certain size (more is different) and could never be predicted by studying the behavior of single insects in small colonies.

The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

One bee cannot build a hive; one ant cannot build a colony.

I guess every creature thinks itself the centre of the universe.' 'I don't. Because we're not. We are microcosms,' says the leopard. 'An ant colony contains the universe. Though it is not its centre.

What neuroscience has revealed is that there is no such control center in the brain. There are hubs in our brain networks whose activity is more influential than others; however, there is no one single hub that dictates action. Our brains are much more like an ant colony: billions of neurons collaborating to give rise to our selves without any external or internal agent. In other words you are an emergent self-organizing phenomenon.

Where there are no bees there is no honey. Where there are no flowers there is no perfume. Where there are no clouds there is no rain. Where there are no stars there is no light. Where there are no roses there are no thorns. Where there are no skies there are no stars. Where there are no storms there are no rainbows. Where there are no animals there are no forests. Where there are no plants there are no jungles. Where there are no seeds there are no harvests. Where there are no spiders there are no webs. Where there are no ants there are no colonies. Where there are no worms there are no fish. Where there are no mice there are no serpents. Where there are no carcasses there are no vultures. Where there are no stones there are no pebbles. Where there are no rocks there are no mountains. Where there are no deserts there are no oases. Where there are no stars there are no galaxies. Where there are no worlds there are no universes.

the mind is like an ant’s nest, individual neurons, like ant workers, weighing in on either side of any given issue until a tipping point is reached and the brain, or the colony, thinks, I have made a decision and here (post facto) are my rational reasons.

The hills below crouched on all fours under the weight of the rainforest where liana grew and soldier ants marched in formation. Straight ahead they marched, shamelessly single-minded, for soldier ants have no time for dreaming. Almost all of them are women and there is so much to do - the work is literally endless. So many to be born and fed, then found and buried. There is no time for dreaming. The life of their world requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete there is little need for males and they are seldom produced. When they are needed, it is deliberately done by the queen who surmises, by some four-million-year-old magic she is heiress to, that it is time. So she urges a sperm from the private womb where they were placed when she had her one, first and last copulation. Once in life, this little Amazon trembled in the air waiting for a male to mount her. And when he did, when he joined a cloud of others one evening just before a summer storm, joined colonies from all over the world gathered fro the marriage flight, he knew at last what his wings were for. Frenzied, he flied into the humming cloud to fight gravity and time in order to do, just once, the single thing he was born for. Then he drops dead, having emptied his sperm into his lady-love. Sperm which she keeps in a special place to use at her own discretion when there is need for another dark and singing cloud of ant folk mating in the air. Once the lady has collected the sperm, she too falls to the ground, but unless she breaks her back or neck or is eaten by one of a thousand things, she staggers to her legs and looks for a stone to rub on, cracking and shedding the wings she will never need again. Then she begins her journey searching for a suitable place to build her kingdom. She crawls into the hollow of a tree, examines its walls and corners. She seals herself off from all society and eats her own wing muscles until she bears her eggs. When the first larvae appear, there is nothing to feed them, so she gives them their unhatched sisters until they are old enough and strong enough to hunt and bring their prey back to the kingdom. That is all. Bearing, hunting, eating, fighting, burying. No time for dreaming, although sometimes, late in life, somewhere between the thirtieth and fortieth generation she might get wind of a summer storm one day. The scent of it will invade her palace and she will recall the rush of wind on her belly - the stretch of fresh wings, the blinding anticipation and herself, there, airborne, suspended, open, trusting, frightened, determined, vulnerable - girlish, even, for and entire second and then another and another. She may lift her head then, and point her wands toward the place where the summer storm is entering her palace and in the weariness that ruling queens alone know, she may wonder whether his death was sudden. Or did he languish? And if so, if there was a bit of time left, did he think how mean the world was, or did he fill that space of time thinking of her? But soldier ants do not have time for dreaming. They are women and have much to do. Still it would be hard. So very hard to forget the man who fucked like a star.

But when we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and immense number of the delving insects prove that despite the destruction of the heap, something indestructible, which though intangible is the real strength of the colony, still exists; and similarly, though in Moscow in the month of October there was no government and no churches, shrines, riches, or houses—it was still the Moscow it had been in August. All was destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and indestructible.

But what if we are more indomitable than we realize? What if we’re not so fragile after all? There are colonies of ants that most humans are wise enough to steer around.

Brand-new day, got a brand-new grin Got a colony of ants underneath my skin My bones decay, now I'm gelatin I swear I'm better, swear I'm better, Miss Parasite Possessor

Lord, how come she asking me this now? A colony of ants starts crawling all over my scalp, but I’m too afraid to attack them in case she interprets my discomfort. This is too much. Anything is a big word that can accommodate all things, and everything, and something that, yes, she needs to know eventually, but it ain’t easy giving voice to the love that brings shame.

Riddle raised a dark brow. “A muggle reference?” “My father is obsessed.” [said Ron Weasley.] “With muggles or their things?” “Muggles. What they do and how they manage it and how they react to different obstacles. He thinks they’re fascinating.” “Ah. Like a scientist might think an ant colony is very interesting to study.” “Yeah.” “Your father,” said Riddle, “is far creepier than I.

Do you think life is nothing but a fragile, thin, soft shell clinging to the surface of this planet?” “Isn’t it?” “Only if you neglect the power of time. If a colony of ants continue to move clods the size of grains of rice, they could remove all of Mount Tai in a billion years. As long as you give it enough time, life is stronger than metal and stone, more powerful than typhoons and volcanoes.

Is a mind a complicated kind of abstract pattern that develops in an underlying physical substrate, such as a vast network of nerve cells? If so, could something else be substituted for the nerve cells – something such as ants, giving rise to an ant colony that thinks as a whole and has an identity – that is to say, a self? Or could something else be substituted for the tiny nerve cells, such as millions of small computational units made of arrays of transistors, giving rise to an artificial neural network with a conscious mind? Or could software simulating such richly interconnected computational units be substituted, giving rise to a conventional computer (necessarily a far faster and more capacious one than we have ever seen) endowed with a mind and a soul and free will? In short, can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns

He’s’ – the first speaker waved his hands vaguely, trying to get across the point that someone was a hamper of food, several folding chairs, a tablecloth, an assortment of cooking gear and an entire colony of ants short of a picnic – ‘mental.

Perhaps we should rejoice that people’s emotions aren’t designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one’s group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That’s why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group’s, the outcomes are some of the history’s worst atrocities.

Now you must leave the safety of the ant colony and the hive. You are to become a loner, an outcast, cut off from the very thing that defines what many of us believe we are. What is the first question usually asked by strangers of each other? Right, it’s “What do you do?” In some cultures, the way of answering may be different; but it nearly always relates to work in the West: “I’m a teacher; I’m in banking; I’m a dairy farmer; I’m an HR administrator; I’m a sound engineer.” Our job defines us. But it cannot define you. Not anymore.

In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn't a stage of development, but its consequence. Latin America's underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it. A system made impotent by its function of international servitude, and moribund since birth, has feet of clay. It pretends to be destiny and would like to be thought eternal. All memory is subversive, because it is different, and likewise any program for the future. The zombie is made to eat without salt: salt is dangerous, it could awaken him. The system has its paradigm in the immutable society of ants. For that reason it accords ill with the history of humankind, because that is always changing. And because in the history of humankind every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation.

The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality'. Your soul is still composed of many 'selves', just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line.

Aquella sociedad potosina, enferma de ostentación y despilfarro, sólo dejó a Bolivia la vaga memoria de sus esplendores, las ruinas de sus iglesias y palacios, y ocho millones de cadáveres de indios. Cualquiera de los diamantes incrustados en el escudo de un caballero rico valía más, al fin y al cabo, que lo que un indio podía ganar en toda su vida de mitayo, pero el caballero se fugó con los diamantes. Bolivia, hoy uno de los países más pobres del mundo, podría jactarse -si ello no resultara patéticamente inútil- de haber nutrido la riqueza de los países más ricos. En nuestros días, Potosí es una pobre ciudad de la pobre Bolivia: "La ciudad que más ha dado al mundo y la que menos tiene", como me dijo una vieja señora potosina, evuelta en un kilométrico chal de lana de alpaca, cuando conversamos ante al patio andaluz de su casa de dos siglos. Esta ciudad condenada a la nostalgia, atormentada por la miseria y el frío, es todavía una herida abierta del sistema colonial en América: una acusación. El mundo tendría que empezar por pedirle disculpas.

the biggest damage to the Baghdad Zoo had not been done in battle, fierce as it had been. It was the looters. They had killed or kidnapped anything edible and ransacked everything else. Even the lamp poles had been unbolted, tipped over, and their copper wiring wrenched out like multicolored spaghetti. As we drove past, we could see groups of looters still at it, scavenging like colonies of manic ants.

But despite the Secret Service–like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there’s nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. “Although queen is a term that reminds us of human political systems,” Gordon explains, “the queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by the workers. She does not decide which worker does what. In a harvester ant colony, many feet of intricate tunnels and chambers and thousands of ants separate the queen, surrounded by interior workers, from the ants working outside the nest and using only the chambers near the surface. It would be physically impossible for the queen to direct every worker’s decision about which task to perform and when.” The harvester ants that carry the queen off to her escape hatch do so not because they’ve been ordered to by their leader; they do it because the queen ant is responsible for giving birth to all the members of the colony, and so it’s in the colony’s best interest—and the colony’s gene pool—to keep the queen safe. Their genes instruct them to protect their mother, the same way their genes instruct them to forage for food. In other words, the matriarch doesn’t train her servants to protect her, evolution does. Popular culture trades in Stalinist ant stereotypes—witness the authoritarian colony regime in the animated film Antz—but in fact, colonies are the exact opposite of command economies. While they are capable of remarkably coordinated feats of task allocation, there are no Five-Year Plans in the ant kingdom. The colonies that Gordon studies display some of nature’s most mesmerizing decentralized behavior: intelligence and personality and learning that emerges from the bottom up.

Additionally, when scientists assume they have bypassed the hard problem by describing consciousness as an emergent property—that is, a complex phenomenon not predicted by the constituent parts—they are changing the subject. All emergent phenomena—like ant colonies, snowflakes, and waves—are still descriptions of matter and how it behaves as witnessed from the outside.6 What a collection of matter is like from the inside and whether or not there is an experience associated with it is something the term “emergence” doesn’t cover. Calling consciousness an emergent phenomenon doesn’t actually explain anything, because to the observer, matter is behaving as it always does. If some matter has experience and some doesn’t (and some emergent phenomena entail experience and some don’t), the concept of emergence as it is traditionally used in science simply doesn’t explain consciousness.

A newly formed planet appeared on the large screen. its surface was till red-hot, like a piece of charcoal fresh out of the furnace. Time passed at the rate of geological eras, and the planet gradually cooled. The color and patterns on the surface slowly shifted in a hypnotic manner. A few minutes later, an orange planet appeared on the screen, indicating the end of the simulation run. "The computations were done at the coarsest level; to do it with more precision would require over a month." Green Glasses moved the mouse and zoomed in on the surface of the planet. The view swept over a broad desert, over a cluster of strangely shaped, towering mountain peaks, over a circular depression like an impact crater. "What are we looking at?" Yang Dong asked. "Earth. Without life, this is what the surface of the planet would look like now." "But . . . where are the oceans?" "There are no oceans. No rivers either. The entire surface is dry." "Your'e saying that without life, liquid water would not exist on Earth?" "The reality would probably be even more shocking. Remember, this is only a coarse simulation, but at least you can see how much of an impact life had in the present state of the Earth." "But--" "Do you think life is nothing but a fragile, thin, soft shell clinging to the surface of this planet?" "Isn't it?" "Only if you neglect the power of time. If a colony of ants continue to move clods the size of grains of rice, they could remove all of Mount Tai in a billion years. As long as you give it enough time, life is stronger than metal and stone, more powerful than typhoons and volcanoes.

Que el matrimonio conceda la ciudadanía no es casual, sino la prueba de cuánto imbrican la heterosexualidad, el racismo y la exclusión de clase. Supone exigir, antes de que se te concedan derechos que deberían ser tuyos por el mero hecho de ser humana, un compromiso con un proyecto concreto de nación en el que las familias casadas producirán la siguiente generación de trabajadores y acumularán riqueza. Es la muestra de que el matrimonio, como el trabajo, puede ser también un chantaje. Y que el matrimonio es una herramienta de mantenimiento de orden colonial.

An expedition was organized at once, but despite the most scrupulous searching no one could find the Cape Arid colony. Subsequent searches came up equally empty-handed. Almost half a century later, when word got out that a team of American scientists was planning to search for the ant, almost certainly with the kind of high-tech gadgetry that would make the Australians look amateurish and underorganized, government scientists in Canberra decided to make one final, pre-emptive effort to find the ants alive. So a party of them set off in convoy across the country.

If bees make honey, you can create candy. If flowers make gardens, you can create perfumes. If plants make herbs, you can create medicine. If deserts make dunes, you can create oases. If seeds make trees, you can create forests. If clouds make rain, you can create lakes. If stars make light, you can create lamps. If stones make hills, you can create garrisons. If rocks make mountains, you can create towers. If spiders make webs, you can create fortresses. If ants make colonies, you can create houses. If bees make hives, you can create mansions. If termites make mounds, you can create palaces. If birds make nests, you can create castles.

There is genius in plants, look how they make herbs. There is genius in flowers, look how they make scents. There is genius in trees, look how they make fruits. There is genius in seeds, look how they make forests. There is genius in bees, look how they make honey. There is genius in birds, look how they make nests. There is genius in spiders, look how they make webs. There is genius in ants, look how they make colonies. There is genius in clouds, look how they make rain. There is genius in storms, look how they make rainbows. There is genius in stars, look how they make light. There is genius in galaxies, look how they make planets. There is genius in order, look how it makes structure. There is genius in space, look how it makes distance. There is genius in momentum, look how it makes force. There is genius in stillness, look how it makes silence. There is genius in time, look how it makes fate. There is genius in sound, look how it makes music. There is genius in movement, look how it makes energy. There is genius in nature, look how it makes life. There is genius in intelligence, look how it makes reason. There is genius in understanding, look how it makes insights. There is genius in intuition, look how they make choices. There is genius in wisdom, look how it makes judgments. There is genius in minds, look how they make thoughts. There is genius in hearts, look how they make desires. There is genius in souls, look how they make experiences. There is genius in cells, look how they make bodies. There is genius in children, look how they make tales. There is genius in youth, look how they make questions. There is genius in adults, look how they make answers. There is genius in elders, look how they make proverbs. There is genius in the past, look how it makes memories. There is genius in the present, look how it makes reality. There is genius in the future, look how it makes destinies. There is genius in life, look how it makes existence.

In the underland of the hardwood forests of Oregon’s Blue Mountains there exists a honey fungus, Armillaria solidipes, that is two and a half miles in extent at its widest point, and covers a total lateral area of almost four square miles. The blue whale is to this honey fungus as an ant is to us. It is a deeply mysterious organism: the largest in the world that we know of, and one of the oldest. The best guess that US Forest Service scientists have been able to offer for the honey fungus’s age is between 1,900 and 8,650 years old. The fungus expresses itself above ground as mushrooms with white-flecked stems rising to tawny, gill-frilled cups. Below ground, where its true extent lies, Armillaria solidipes moves as rhizomorphs resembling black bootlaces, out of which reach the hyphal fingers of its mycelium, spreading in search both of new hosts which they might kill, and the mycelia of other parts of the colony with which they might fuse.

ONE OF THE peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on. Conquests and foundings were incidental to this search—which did not, and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in an orgy of goldseeking in the middle of the 19th century. Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken ant hill. In our own time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice.

Many kinds of animal behavior can be explained by genetic similarity theory. Animals have a preference for close kin, and study after study has shown that they have a remarkable ability to tell kin from strangers. Frogs lay eggs in bunches, but they can be separated and left to hatch individually. When tadpoles are then put into a tank, brothers and sisters somehow recognize each other and cluster together rather than mix with tadpoles from different mothers. Female Belding’s ground squirrels may mate with more than one male before they give birth, so a litter can be a mix of full siblings and half siblings. Like tadpoles, they can tell each other apart. Full siblings cooperate more with each other than with half-siblings, fight less, and are less likely to run each other out of the territory when they grow up. Even bees know who their relatives are. In one experiment, bees were bred for 14 different degrees of relatedness—sisters, cousins, second cousins, etc.—to bees in a particular hive. When the bees were then released near the hive, guard bees had to decide which ones to let in. They distinguished between degrees of kinship with almost perfect accuracy, letting in the closest relatives and chasing away more distant kin. The correlation between relatedness and likelihood of being admitted was a remarkable 0.93. Ants are famous for cooperation and willingness to sacrifice for the colony. This is due to a quirk in ant reproduction that means worker ants are 70 percent genetically identical to each other. But even among ants, there can be greater or less genetic diversity, and the most closely related groups of ants appear to cooperate best. Linepithema humile is a tiny ant that originated in Argentina but migrated to the United States. Many ants died during the trip, and the species lost much of its genetic diversity. This made the northern branch of Linepithema humile more cooperative than the one left in Argentina, where different colonies quarrel and compete with each other. This new level of cooperation has helped the invaders link nests into supercolonies and overwhelm local species of ants. American entomologists want to protect American ants by introducing genetic diversity so as to make the newcomers more quarrelsome. Even plants cooperate with close kin and compete with strangers. Normally, when two plants are put in the same pot, they grow bigger root systems, trying to crowd each other out and get the most nutrients. A wild flower called the Sea Rocket, which grows on beaches, does not do that if the two plants come from the same “mother” plant. They recognize each others’ root secretions and avoid wasteful competition.

Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.' The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development. [...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.

Marx viewed all of these concepts and institutions as obstacles standing in the way of his goal for humanity which was, as he saw it, a progressive march toward a one world ant colony where all people would become de-facto equal, where all of mankind would mechanically live and naturally produce that which was needed like worker bees. From each according to his ability to each according to his need was the famous maxim of his vision which he called Communism. Marx’s communism was supposed to be the final stage of a social evolutionary progress, a utopian social state in which the individual, in the interest of effecting total equality, would be subsumed and thus would surrender everything that had made him unequal so as to join the ant colony, the collective, and where the state, having accomplished its bloody job of changing human nature, would then, having served its purpose, just wither away.

As a subject of behavioral study, nest architecture offers an appealing feature that practically no other behavior offer; namely, the nest is a perfect record of the collective digging effort of a colony, and once cast, is ready to study. By studying a series of casts of increasing size it is possible to describe the nest's growth and ontogeny, infer its species-typical characteristics, and bracket the range of variation. By doing this under different environments and soil types, possibly with transplanted colonies, it is possible to tease out the variation that the environment imposes on the architecture. The current study is only a small, initial step toward creating a field of nest architecture studies, whose ultimate goal is an understanding of how the nest emerges from self-organizing behavior, what function it serves, how it varies within and between species, and how it evolves. In addition, these casts reveal something previously unseen. The study of nest architecture is thus a true exploration of a hidden world that hold unsuspected beauty, patter, and complexity.

Ants aren’t smart,” Gordon says. “Ant colonies are.” A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. …

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters. But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough. The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women.

Convergence is ubiquitous and not limited just to the external appearance or morphology of animals. It is also widely observed and documented in animal behavior and in plants, fungi, and even bacteria. Let’s start with behavior. What do you think these four species—a cobra, a stickleback fish, an octopus, and a spider—share? There is no convergence in body form here, unlike the Caribbean anoles. But a behavior has converged among them that has led to the success of each of their species: the females of the species guard their eggs. One of the best examples of convergent behavior is observed in humans and—hold your breath—ants! And I have witnessed this convergence with my own eyes. When I was on a family vacation in the stunningly beautiful Peruvian Amazon, I stumbled upon the tiny creatures that had beaten our human ancestors to the discovery of agriculture by many millions of years: the leafcutter ants. I had waited years to witness the miracle, and there it was in its full linear glory. A long single column of thousands of large green leaves appeared to be miraculously moving in perfect synchrony of their own volition on the forest floor. Each large leaf was being carried by a single tiny ant, who purposefully disappeared underground to pass on the booty to her specialist sisters. These ants chew the leaves to grow a fungus garden used for food for the entire colony. Not unlike human farmers, these ants produce fertilizers (amino acids and enzymes) to aid the fungal growth, remove contaminants that can hinder the agricultural output, are highly selective in what they grow, and continuously tend to their enormous gardens.8

He’s”—the first speaker waved his hands vaguely, trying to get across the point that someone was a hamper of food, several folding chairs, a tablecloth, an assortment of cooking gear and an entire colony of ants short of a picnic—“mental.

One of those frameworks is known as emergence, a term that until recently has been used primarily to explain natural systems—what biologists call complex adaptive systems, systems that can adapt and evolve within a changing environment. Colonies of insects such as ants and bees, for example, use simple rules and networks to produce adaptive behavior.

Natural selection at the individual level, with strategies evolving that contribute maximum number of mature offspring, has prevailed throughout the history of life. It typically shapes the physiology and behavior of organisms to suit a solitary existence, or at most to membership in loosely organized groups. The origin of eusociality, in which organisms behave in the opposite manner, has been rare in the history of life because group selection must be exceptionally powerful to relax the grip of individual selection. Only then can it modify the conservative effect of individual selection and introduce highly cooperative behavior into the physiology and behavior of the group members. The ancestors of ants and other hymenopterous eusocial insects (ants, bees, wasps) faced the same problem as those of humans. They finnessed it by evolving extreme plasticity of certain genes, programmed so that the altruistic workers have the same genes for physiology and behavior as the mother queen, even though they differ drastically from the queen and among one another in these traits. Selection has remained at the individual level, queen to queen. Yet selection in the insect societies continues at the group level, with colony pitted against colony. This seeming paradox is easily resolved. As far as natural selection in most forms of social behavior is concerned, the colony is operationally only the queen and her phenotypic extension in the form of robot-like assistants.

An ant without olfaction is an ant without a colony, and an ant without a colony is barely an ant at all.

just then a little black ant struggles by alone, alone. And in that moment, I want us to give ourselves over to industry, carry the weight of the day together, lighten it. I want to be a part of a colony where I feel easy walking around. Cool as the goddamn breeze. Where I can breathe, build structures sturdier and grander than this—but the woman crosses to the other side of the street, and I do what I usually do: retreat into myself as far as I can, then send out whatever’s left.

Some ants are entrepreneurs, striking out on their own, finding an unexploited niche, laying eggs, and raising their own employee pool.34 Gradually, the new nest turns from a mom-and-pop operation (without pop) to a major corporation as the growing staff of underlings develops a caste structure and a division of responsibilities. The sheer growth of the community produces advantages. As colony size increases, so does the safety (and the expendability) of the individual. The group can shift resources from a frantic fecundity35 to other forms of production … or of usurpation. Large insect colonies benefit from improved defense. Small colonies have to live in vulnerable lean-tos. Large colonies manage to construct fortresses. (Shades of Jericho!) What’s more, large colonies have evolved the luxury of defending their ramparts with castes of biologically remodeled soldiers—huge, well armored, and well armed. Small ant colonies, where everybody has to do a little bit of everything, cannot afford to produce six-legged battle tanks.

The unplanned but complex engineering of ant colonies display a number of striking similarities to human cities.

Antes do Século XIX–e, mais especialmente, antes da configuração do movimento abolicionista–, nenhum grupo étnico ou social, no Brasil, foi contra a escravidão enquanto sistema. Pessoas e grupos reagiam contra a sua própria e particular escravização, mas não contra o escravismo como um todo.

... a tese de Florestan Fernandes, estabelecendo que os escravos foram entregues ao deus-dará e à miséria depois da abolição, pode começar a ser desconstruída desde aqui. Primeiro, por se chocar com a notável e comprovada ascensão social de pretos e mulatos em nosso Século XIX, de Pedro II aos primeiros dias republicanos. Depois, pelo fato de que, no 13 de maio de 1888, escravos praticamente inexistiam no país. Terceiro, porque a ascensão social negromestiça se deu antes, durante e depois da abolição. Quarto, no caso particular da Bahia, as informações indicam que não houve maior alteração na situação dos escravos pós-abolição. Os agora ex-escravos continuaram exercendo ofícios tradicionais, além de avançar em outras direções. A conjuntura não foi diversa no Rio de Janeiro.

Monocropping made the forest more vulnerable to storms and disease, and the only reason the first generation of trees grew so well was that it could draw on the accumulated resources of the previous old-growth forest. After that, Waldsterben (forest death) became part of the German vocabulary, and attempts to artificially reintroduce everything that had been overlooked in the economic forest strategy (in the form of nest boxes, ant colonies, and spiders) had to contend with the unfortunate fact of the monocrop forest.

You ever wonder if there’s some different place?” Mary Pat says, “What now?” Jules steps off the curb to avoid a pile of ants swarming what looks like a broken egg. She pivots around a young tree before stepping back up on the sidewalk. “You just, you know, you ever have the feeling that things are supposed to be one way but they’re not? And you don’t know why because you’ve never known, like, anything but what you see? And what you see is, you know”—she waves at Old Colony Avenue—“this?” She looks at her mother and cants a bit on the uneven sidewalk so they won’t collide. “But you know, right?” “Know what?” “Know it’s not what you were meant for.” Jules taps the space between her breasts. “In here.

Because the farming ants have practiced the mutual co-adaptation model during millions of years of relentless natural selection on joint performance, they often surpass us in specific efficiency targets. Not only did ants in general evolve sperm banks at ambient temperature that last a queen’s potential life span of two to three decades (Den Boer et al. 2009), but they also somehow prevented the evolution of resistance by specialized Escovopsis garden pathogens against biocontrol compounds obtained from Actinobacteria that they rear on their cuticles (De Man et al. 2016; Holmes et al. 2016; Heine et al. 2018) (chapter 11, this volume). Recent work has further indicated that the fungus-growing termites are equally efficient in keeping their colonies as free from pathogens as the leaf-cutting ants appear to be (Otani et al. 2019; see also figure 5.1C, D, E). Relative to the extreme specialization of social insect farmers, human farmers are jacks of all trades in their interactions with domesticated crops, and we remain extremely vulnerable to endemic and epidemic diseases of our cultivars.

In many species of ants the specialized caste of workers known as soldiers have formidable fighting jaws, and devote their time to fighting for the colony against other ant armies. Slaving raids are just a particular kind of war effort. The slavers mount an attack on a nest of ants belonging to a different species, attempt to kill the defending workers or soldiers, and carry off the unhatched young. These young ones hatch out in the nest of their captors. They do not ‘realize’ that they are slaves and they set to work following their built-in nervous programs, doing all the duties that they would normally perform in their own nest.

Lazy people should observe a colony of ants and learn from their diligence. Prov. 6.7 No one is there to organize them or tell them what to do. They have no commander or ruler giving them daily orders.

and most individual trees of the same species growing in the same stand are connected to each other through their root systems. It appears that nutrient exchange and helping neighbors in times of need is the rule, and this leads to the conclusion that forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies. Of

Ants are among the most warlike of creatures. Their foreign policy has been described as “restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

Carl Anderson and his colleagues have discussed several advantages and disadvantages of a chain transport of harvest to nests, as in Atta vollenweideri, where the last carriers cover the longest distance.73 The researchers argue that such task partitioning can be expected to enhance the work efficiency of individuals, because workers are more likely to become specialists when deployed sequentially. As a consequence, the colony’s overall rate of resource retrieval should be higher. But again, the empirical data do not entirely support these theoretical considerations. Finally, Jacqueline Röschard and Flavio Roces have proposed a second hypothesis: that the transport chains of Atta vollenweideri accelerate transfer of information about the plant species and food quality of the harvest.74 They argue that the dropping of fragments on the trail allows cutting workers to quickly return to their tasks.

Just because an individual ant seems to wander around aimlessly, doesn't mean a colony of ants will behave this way. This is sometimes known as the fallacy of composition.

forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.

However, her ants have a final gift for Portia. There is a passage, in the book of the spiderlings retrieved by Fabian, which is new. Ants of another of Viola’s colonies have been trained to compare these hidden books and highlight differences. The same paragraph, never before seen, turns up in each of the three immune infants.

Los comunistas han difundido la idea de que la religión es el opio del pueblo. Es verdad, porque sirve para frenar las tentaciones de los súbditos, y si no existiera la religión, habría el doble de gente en las barricadas, por eso en los días de la Comuna había poca, y se la pudieron cargar sin tardanza. Claro que, tras haber oído hablar a ese médico austriaco de las ventajas de la droga colombiana, yo diría que la religión también es la cocaína de los pueblos, porque la religión empujó y empuja a las guerras, a las matanzas de infieles, y esto vale para cristianos, musulmanes y otros idólatras; y si los negros de África antes se limitaban a matarse entre ellos, los misioneros los han convertido y los han transformado en tropa colonial, de lo más adecuada para morir en primera línea, y para violar a las mujeres blancas cuando entran en una ciudad. Los hombres nunca hacen el mal de forma tan completa y entusiasta como cuando lo hacen por convencimiento religioso.

paths lead into and out of these piles as if it were a huge hill built for a colony of ants the size of people.

Naught but leaves brushed in the wind, stemming from the forest behind my house. Oh, and of course, the wildlife seized every chance to tell the stars who they were; they hooted, howled, and growled. And deep under the roots of trees in little holes lived rabbits, cuddling next to their young. All the while Mr. Ant and his colony were dragging a once boisterous Nocturnal Cicada to the nest; a feast for days! I suppose my daydreaming occasionally did extend into the night. I’ve spent countless hours I’ll never regain, but for the off-chance I was right just once, it was worth every second.

One of the greatest gifts children bring us is the way they guide, if not force, our attention back home to the present … Once jaded, world-weary parents can find themselves lying in their backyards fascinated at the proceedings of an ant colony. If we let them, children can teach us the value of time with no objectives, a skilful kind of laziness, free from the need for productivity.’ And

A remarkable pheromone-and-allomone combination is used as a “propaganda substance” by an American species of slave-maker ant. Slavery is widespread in ants of the north temperate zone. It starts when colonies of the slave-making species conduct raids on other ant species. Their workers are shiftless at home, seldom engaging in any domestic chore. However, like indolent Spartan warriors of ancient Greece, they are also ferocious in combat. In some species the raiders are armed with powerful sickle-shaped mandibles capable of piercing the bodies of their opponents. During my research on ant slavery I found one species that uses a radically different method. The raiders carry a hugely enlarged gland reservoir in their abdomen (the rear segment of the three-part body) filled with an alarm substance. Upon breaching the victim’s nest, they spray large quantities of the pheromone through the chamber and galleries. The effect on the defenders of the allomone (or, more precisely, pseudo-pheromone) is confusion, panic, and retreat. They suffer the equivalent of our hearing a thunderously loud, persistent alarm coming from all directions. The invaders do not respond the same way. Instead, they are attracted to the pheromone, and as a result they are able easily to seize and carry away the young (in the pupal stage) of the defenders. When the captives emerge from the pupae as adults, they become imprinted, act as sisters of their captors, and serve them willingly as slaves for the rest of their lives.

The truth is that she was always much more forgiving of animals than people...Her sympathy for the underdog--or the underwasp, underrat, undercat, undersnail, underbird, underspider, undermouse, undergecko, undercentipede--was limitless. In the depths of a gloomy London winter she would trudge to the park with a bag of snacks--stale bread specially sautéed in drippings--for the poor freezing seagulls and ducks. At the height of a Provencal summer she would fill a shallow bowl with water, put it on the terrace, and watch, transfixed, as the poor thirsty wasps hovered just above the surface to take a restorative sip or two. Dogs and cats slept in her bed, baby birds were fed warm milk with eyedroppers, spiders were fished out of baths, and a colony or red ants, which feasted on honey and scurried around inside a special box with a glass lid, lived on the kitchen table in London for many years.

Estamos frente a un nuevo tipo de capitalismo caliente, psicotrópico y punk. Estas trasformaciones recientes apuntan hacia la articulación de un conjunto de nuevos dispositivos microprostéticos de control de la subjetividad con nuevas plataformas técnicas biomoleculares y mediáticas. La nueva «economía-mundo» no funciona sin el despliegue simultáneo e interconectado de la producción de cientos de toneladas de esteroides sintéticos, sin la difusión global de imágenes pornográficas, sin la elaboración de nuevas variedades psicotrópicas sintéticas legales e ilegales (Lexomil, Special K, Viagra, speed, cristal, Prozac, éxtasis, popper, heroína, Omeoprazol, etc.), sin la extensión a la totalidad del planeta de una forma de arquitectura urbana difusa en la que megaciudades miseria se codean con nudos de alta concentración de capital, sin el tratamiento informático de signos y de transmisión numérica de comunicación. Estos son solo algunos de los índices de aparición de un régimen postindustrial, global y mediático que llamaré a partir de ahora, tomando como referencia los procesos de gobierno biomolecular (fármaco-) y semiótico-técnico (-porno) de la subjetividad sexual, de los que la pildora y Playboy son paradigmáticos, «farmacopornográfico». Si bien sus líneas de fuerzas hunden sus raíces en la sociedad científica y colonial del siglo XIX, sus vectores económicos no se harán visibles hasta el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, ocultos en principio bajo la apariencia de la economía fordista y quedando expuestos únicamente tras el progresivo desmoronamiento de esta en los años setenta. Durante el siglo XX, período en el que se lleva a cabo la materialización farmacopornográfica, la psicología, la sexología, la endocrinología han establecido su autoridad material transformando los conceptos de psiquismo, de libido, de conciencia, de feminidad y masculinidad, de heterosexualidad y homosexualidad en realidades tangibles, en sustancias químicas, en moléculas comercializables, en cuerpos, en biotipos humanos, en bienes de intercambio gestionables por las multinacionales farmacéuticas. Si la ciencia ha alcanzado el lugar hegemónico que ocupa como discurso y como práctica en nuestra cultura, es precisamente gracias a lo que Ian Hacking, Steve Woolgar y Bruno Latour llaman su «autoridad material», es decir, su capacidad para inventar y producir artefactos vivos. Por eso la ciencia es la nueva religión de la modernidad. Porque tiene la capacidad de crear, y no simplemente de describir, la realidad. El éxito de la tecnociencia contemporánea es transformar nuestra depresión en Prozac, nuestra masculinidad en testosterona, nuestra erección en Viagra, nuestra fertilidad/ esterilidad en püdora, nuestro sida en triterapia. Sin que sea posible saber quién viene antes, si la depresión o el Prozac, si el Viagra o la erección, si la testosterona o la masculinidad, si la píldora o la maternidad, si la triterapia o el sida. Esta producción en auto-feedback es la propia del poder farmacopornográfico.

I watched an eagle turn slowly and fall away, quick-sliding across the dark stands of spruce that marched in uneven ranks up the slopes. His piercing cry came back on the wind. I thought of the man at his desk staring down from a city window at the ant colony streets below, the man toiling beside the thudding and rumbling of machinery, the man commuting to his job the same way at the same time each morning, staring at but not seeing the poles and the wires and the dirty buildings flashing past. Perhaps each man had his moment during the day when his vision came, a vision not unlike the one before me.

Pero «los orígenes del actual iliberalismo en la región son emocionales y preideológicos —dice Krastev—, se basan en la rebelión ante las humillaciones que deben acompañar a un proyecto que requiere que una población acepte que hay una cultura extranjera superior a la suya. El iliberalismo, en un sentido estrictamente teórico, es entonces una coartada. Da una pátina de respetabilidad intelectual al deseo, ampliamente compartido en un nivel visceral, de deshacerse de la dependencia colonial implícita en el propio proyecto de occidentalización».

They were the poorest, grubbiest people I had even seen, and yet, despite their obvious poverty, they were not at all melancholy or apathetic. They burgeoned like a colony of ants in the gargantuan skeleton of the past, shifting rubbish, recycling everything, conjuring a new art from the bones.

From the human perspective, an ant is pretty much just an ant. As soon as you begin to look at ants through a magnifying glass, however, a world of wonderful diversity snaps into focus. With the benefit of magnification, Wilson and Hölldobler write, ants “differ among themselves as much as do elephants, tigers, and mice. In size alone the variation is spectacular. An entire colony of the smallest ants . . . could live comfortably inside the head capsule of a soldier of the largest species, the giant Bornean carpenter ant, Camponotus gigas.

Perhaps the decisions we agonize over are, in fact, predetermined—the sums of a million individual cellular choices. Our conscious minds assume that we are in control, but often the role of consciousness is simply to justify and explain decisions over which it has no control. Are consciousness and reason just things evolution trumped up to keep us from going insane, a Matrix-style fantasy world that keeps us from recognizing the horrific reality that we have no agency and all the perseverating we do over choices is really just rationalization to convince ourselves that we have free will? Or, to flip the comparison around, could an ant colony develop consciousness? Feelings? Spirituality? Crumble some pecan sandies on a note-card with your daughter and eventually you end up grappling with the basic tenets of philosophy. These are the questions that arise if you spend enough time staring at ants.

Looked around at the wind-blasted peaks and the swirls of mist moving past them. It was hard to take my eyes away. I had been up on some of them, and I would be up there again. There was something different to see each time, and something different from each one. All those streamlets to explore and all those tracks to follow through the glare of the high basins and over the saddles. Where did they lead? What was beyond? What stories were written in the snow? I watched an eagle turn slowly and fall away, quick-sliding across the dark stands of spruce that marched in uneven ranks up the slopes. His piercing cry came back on the wind. I thought of the man at his desk staring down from a city window at the ant colony streets below, the man toiling beside the thudding and rumbling of machinery, the man commuting to his job the same way at the same time each morning, staring at but not seeing the poles and the wires and the dirty buildings flashing past. Perhaps each man had his moment during the day when his vision came, a vision not unlike the one before me.

demonstrates how ant-colonies also provide a working model which humanity can aspire:

Meanwhile, the most frequent question I am casually asked about ants is, 'What do I do about the ones in my kitchen?' My answer is, Watch where you step, be careful of little lives, consider becoming an amateur myrmecologist, and contribute to their scientific study. Further, why should these wondrous little insects not visit your kitchen? They carry no disease, and may help eliminate other insects that do carry disease. You are a million times larger than each one. You could hold an entire colony in your cupped hands. You inspire fear in them; they should not in you. I recommend that you make use of your kitchen ants by feeding them and reflecting upon what you see, rather like an informal tour of a very foreign country. Place a few pieces of food the size of a thumbnail on the floor or sink. House ants are especially fond of honey, sugar water, chopped nuts, and canned tuna. A scout in close vicinity will soon find one of the baits and, to the degree the colony is hungry, run excitedly back to the nest. There will follow social behavior so alien to human experience that it might as well be on some other planet.

El régimen de López Obrador ha sido bautizado como el gobierno de la 4T, es decir, de la Cuarta Trasformación. Las tres anteriores fueron la independencia de España, la reforma liberal y la revolución de 1910. Posiblemente estas grandes trasformaciones son las tres máscaras que adopta como estilo de gobierno el presidente. Más concretamente, podemos ver que usa las máscaras de Morelos, Juárez y Madero para representar un cuarto episodio supuestamente tan trascendental como los tres anteriores. Tenemos aquí a un personaje que declara su humilde servidumbre ante una nación que debe ser independiente, aunque no haya ya un enemigo colonialista al que vencer. También encarna la severa austeridad y la gran tenacidad de un reformista liberal que se enfrenta a los molinos de viento de un conservadurismo inventado. Asimismo, retoma la espiritualidad mística y moralista de un luchador por la democracia contra una dictadura imaginaria. Allí están las tres máscaras, completamente fuera de su contexto original, que fueron terribles tiempos de guerra: ya no hay una España colonial de la cual independizarse. Tampoco vemos una Iglesia ultraconservadora a la que es necesario arrebatar de sus manos muertas las propiedades que acapara. Imposible, además, ubicar una larga dictadura que sea preciso derrocar. Pero sí aparecen los enemigos fantasmales que hay que combatir o reducir: el reino de España, los conservadores y los neoporfiristas. El combate contra estos tres fantasmas se transforma en un estilo de gobierno. La historia tachonada de grandes héroes que invoca López Obrador elude su lado amargo, incómodo e irónico: la independencia acaba degradada por un ridículo emperador, la reforma liberal desemboca en la dictadura y la revolución acaba en manos de burócratas autoritarios. Me temo que la transición a la democracia acabe naufragando gracias a un demagogo populista.

My mother reinforced this affinity for the natural world. In the grandeur of its design—the skeleton of a leaf, the labors of an ant colony, the glow of a bleach-white moon—she experienced the wonder and humility that others reserved for religious worship, and in our youth, she’d lectured Maya and me about the damage humans could inflict when they were careless in building cities or drilling oil or throwing away garbage.

He’s”—the first speaker waved his hands vaguely, trying to get across the point that someone was a hamper of food, several folding chairs, a tablecloth, an assortment of cooking gear and an entire colony of ants short of a picnic—“mental. And he’s got a funny eye.

To keep sales increasing during the mid-1970s, we relied on new ideas implemented in existing stores. This was my favorite form of growth. I don’t think that any given store ever fully realizes its potential. During those four years of no expansion in terms of number of stores, our dollar sales kept right on growing while the CEO of Trader Joe’s struggled with trying to reconcile good business practice with the Whole Earth Catalog. Whole Earth Harry indeed! In my private life, I had become an organic gardener. Few things have so enriched my life so much as my own personal conversion to organic gardening, something that I still practice except when the ants start raising colonies of aphids in my blood orange trees, and it’s Grant’s Ant Control to the rescue. In any event, the schizoid marriage of the party store with the health food store was a great success for Trader Joe’s, if not for the biosphere.

Munich Airport reminded Micah of an ant colony. It was busy, but efficient and organized.

These groups were a new kind of vehicle: a hive or colony of close genetic relatives, which functioned as a unit (e.g., in foraging and fighting) and reproduced as a unit. These are the motorboating sisters in my example, taking advantage of technological innovations and mechanical engineering that had never before existed. It was another transition. Another kind of group began to function as though it were a single organism, and the genes that got to ride around in colonies crushed the genes that couldn’t “get it together” and rode around in the bodies of more selfish and solitary insects. The colonial insects represent just 2 percent of all insect species, but in a short period of time they claimed the best feeding and breeding sites for themselves, pushed their competitors to marginal grounds, and changed most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems (for example, by enabling the evolution of flowering plants, which need pollinators).43 Now they’re the majority, by weight, of all insects on Earth. What about human beings? Since ancient times, people have likened human societies to beehives. But is this just a loose analogy? If you map the queen of the hive onto the queen or king of a city-state, then yes, it’s loose. A hive or colony has no ruler, no boss. The queen is just the ovary. But if we simply ask whether humans went through the same evolutionary process as bees—a major transition from selfish individualism to groupish hives that prosper when they find a way to suppress free riding—then the analogy gets much tighter. Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.44 Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultrasociality, and so are human societies. One of the key features that has helped all the nonhuman ultra-socials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest. The biologists Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson summarize the recent finding that ultrasociality (also called “eusociality”)45 is found among a few species of shrimp, aphids, thrips, and beetles, as well as among wasps, bees, ants, and termites: In all the known [species that] display the earliest stages of eusociality, their behavior protects a persistent, defensible resource from predators, parasites, or competitors. The resource is invariably a nest plus dependable food within foraging range of the nest inhabitants.46 Hölldobler and Wilson give supporting roles to two other factors: the need to feed offspring over an extended period (which gives an advantage to species that can recruit siblings or males to help out Mom) and intergroup conflict. All three of these factors applied to those first early wasps camped out together in defensible naturally occurring nests (such as holes in trees). From that point on, the most cooperative groups got to keep the best nesting sites, which they then modified in increasingly elaborate ways to make themselves even more productive and more protected. Their descendants include the honeybees we know today, whose hives have been described as “a factory inside a fortress.”47

Now consider this. A small number of invertebrate species, a mere 2 percent of all species of insects, is capable of social behaviors that do rival in complexity many human social achievements. Ants, bees, wasps, and termites are the prominent examples.10 Their genetically set and inflexible routines enable the survival of the group. They divide labor intelligently within the group to deal with the problems of finding energy sources, transform them into products useful for their lives, and manage the flow of those products. They do so to the point of changing the number of workers assigned to specific jobs depending on the energy sources available. They act in a seemingly altruistic manner whenever sacrifice is needed. In their colonies, they build nests that constitute remarkable urban architectural projects and provide efficient shelter, traffic patterns, and even systems of ventilation and waste removal, not to mention a security guard for the queen. One almost expects them to have harnessed fire and invented the wheel. Their zeal and discipline put to shame, any day, the governments of our leading democracies. These creatures acquired their complex social behaviors from their biology, not from Montessori schools or Ivy League colleges. But in spite of having come by these astounding abilities as early as 100 million years ago, ants and bees, individually or as colonies, do not grieve for the loss of their mates when they disappear and do not ask themselves about their place in the universe. They do not inquire about their origin, let alone their destiny. Their seemingly responsible, socially successful behavior is not guided by a sense of responsibility, to themselves or to others, or by a corpus of philosophical reflections on the condition of being an insect. It is guided by the gravitational pull of their life regulation needs as it acts on their nervous systems and produces certain repertoires of behavior selected over numerous evolving generations, under the control of their fine-tuned genomes. Members of a colony do not think as much as they act, by which I mean that upon registering a particular need—theirs, or the group’s, or the queen’s—they do not ponder alternatives for how to fulfill such a need in any way comparable to ours. They simply fulfill it. Their repertoire of actions is limited, and in many instances it is confined to one option. The general schema of their elaborate sociality does resemble that of human cultures, but it is a fixed schema. E. O. Wilson

Helena knows the research better than most: there are Portiid scientists who say that the mind is like an ant’s nest, individual neurons, like ant workers, weighing in on either side of any given issue until a tipping point is reached and the brain, or the colony, thinks, I have made a decision and here (post facto) are my rational reasons.

Ants live in colonies that can number in their millions, but every single ant is a colony unto itself.

I face an immense ant colony that stretches the length of a wall, all the way up to the ten-meter-high ceiling. Acid-yellow ants the size of my pinky toil behind the glass. They swarm in a mound of legs and teeth over some carcass above the surface of the colony and make a line to carry the food from the top desert level down into the belly of their labyrinth, past storage rooms, barns for aphids, egg hatcheries and nurseries filled with squirming larvae. In the center of the colony, an obese queen the size of a small cat with a swollen, purple abdomen excretes transparent eggs that are ferried away in the mouths of workers with black mandibles.

You're right. I do them a disservice. But the outcome will be the same. Even if we beat the Romans another time, and another, they will not have been defeated. A man cannot kill all the ants in a colony. It's not possible.

There is a ground spray that can be applied to the area around your colonies that will kill the larvae when they cross it. It also is effective against fire ants, but it must be reapplied after it rains. If you routinely move colonies it doesn’t do much good either.

Sus expectativas respecto de la guerra con Japón se resumían en que dicho conflicto probablemente sería largo. Al entender que tal iba a ser el probable desarrollo de la guerra, señaló una estrategia óptima en tres etapas. La primera etapa era defensiva. A final, se alcanzaría un estancamiento (segunda etapa) y luego los comunistas tendrían la confianza y la capacidad para iniciar una ofensiva (terdera etapa). Aunque en aquella época los chinos estaban solos, Mao era consciente de que en algún momento dado podía haber factores externos que podrían entrar en juego y socavar la superioridad japonesa. Creía que tanto la guerrilla como la lucha posicional (defensa o ataque de puntos concretos) tenían su papel, pero los mejores resultados exigían una guerra con un ejército. Solo un ejército podía conducir a la aniquilación del enemigo: dicha «aniquilación» se definía más como abatimiento y renuncia a la resistencia que como destrucción absoluta. Mao estaba combatiendo a un enemigo con quien se podía llegar a un callejón sin salida, pero nunca a un acuerdo. Así que la tercera etapa exigía fuerzas regulares. Hasta que estas pudieran organizarse, las unidades guerrilleras serían cruciales. En la tercera etapa solo desempeñarían un papel de apoyo. El seguidor más ferviente de Mao tras la revolución fue el general Vo Nguyen Giap, un maestro vietnamita que luchó contra la Francia colonial y luego contra el gobierno anticomunista apoyado por Estados Unidos en el sur. Se sumergió en la teoría y la práctica maoísta de la China de 1940 y luego regresó a Vietnam para liderar la lucha contra los japoneses y más adelante contra los franceses. También se dijo que había descrito los Siete pilares de la sabiduría de Lawrence como su evangelio bélico y que nunca se apartaba de él. Giap se tomó muy en serio las tres etapas dictadas por Mao, pero su mayor innovación fue la facilidad que tuvo para moverse entre las distintas etapas de acuerdo con las circunstancias, mientras que Mao las había visto solo como pasos sucesivos. Vietnam era un país relativamente pequeño, comparado con China, y por tanto requería una enorme flexibilidad. En concreto, Giap ya estaba preparado para utilizar fuerzas regulares antes de la tercera etapa, y para proteger y mantener el territorio conquistado, por ejemplo.

One morning on his way to campus he saw a pitiful sight. A colony of poor migrant lepers from Tamil Nadu were gathered outside their huts, wailing and beating their chests. A bulldozer was knocking down their homes, sent by a landlord who wanted to take over the land. Satyam flung his books aside and ran in front of the bulldozer. His friends Nancharayya, Rama Rao, and Vishnu joined him, and together they halted the destruction. A few months later a court awarded the land to the lepers, who renamed their colony Satyamurthy Nagar out of gratitude.

He shook his head. “And I’m not talking the kind of power that’s obvious, that’s military, that’s been used in the past. No, it’s power that can shape history from well behind the curtain. It isn’t the strong killing the weak. It’s the strong controlling the weak. “An ant colony that wipes out another ant colony is strong. But an ant colony that infects another with pheromones and takes it over is powerful. That’s MJ-12, and that’s why they are the most powerful organization in the world. They can do all this without the general public even believing they exist.

For ants, service to the colony is everything. As individual workers approach natural death, it benefits the colony more for the old to spend their last days in dangerous occupations. The Darwinian logic is clear: for the colony, the aged have little to offer and are dispensable.