Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [148]
Beyond the similarities, I have tried in this book to point out ways in which ant societies perform better than ours. The ant’s self-sacrifice can be a little frightening; we have seen how readily the workers of some ant societies put themselves at risk and even condemn themselves to death when it serves the interests of the colony. Also, the lack of centralized control and the redundancy of operations in ant communities allow for fast responses to local situations and social continuity even when individuals make errors or die.11 These features also make it more difficult for parasites, predators, and competitors to bring down an ant society (in contrast, human terrorists can find easy targets in key buildings and leaders). Human hunter-gatherers and some of the earliest farming communities appear to have had a similar egalitarian social structure, without hereditary commanders. That’s because members of these societies were unlikely to accumulate resources and wealth, and therefore power, so that leadership, when it emerged at all, was weak and fluid, and easily trounced by the collective will of the group.12 As in some ant societies, there could even have been several leaders at a time, but they led by example, never by decree.
An Acanthognathus trapjaw ant colony lodged within a single twig in Costa Rica. The workers, like those of most ant species with small colonies, are slow, methodical, and capable of working independently.
Ants along the trail of a large Crematogaster nest in Ghana. In ant species with large mature colonies, workers tend to move fast, constantly gather information from nestmates, and rely more on joint action.
After five millennia in which despots have ruled civilizations around the world, the rise of modern democracies with systems of checks and balances represents, in a sense, a return to the ant style of governance, yet we remain dependent on hierarchies of political power. Some argue that the Internet and cell phones have enabled people everywhere to reexert collective influence over their societies, however. Without the bottlenecks that hamper bureaucracies, networks of people can handle masses of data and act on them more efficiently, like the community of scientists who weed through all the published ideas on a topic to find and follow up on the best few.13 “Smart mobs,” communicating, for example, with text messages, have disseminated ideas and combated fraud with almost antlike speed, even among people who don’t know each other well.14 Such “weak ties”—wide-ranging connections that take us beyond the tight-knit groups we interact with regularly—are likely of special importance in organizing both ants and people.15
Has this collective mode of organization improved the quality of life for the industrious ant? Measured by longevity, it certainly has for the queens: successful ones can live for many years, especially those belonging to species in which a single queen rears a large colony. For ant workers, however, existence appears to be “poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” to borrow a phrase used by seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes—a matter of weeks to a couple of years. Individuals who engage in lower-risk behaviors, such as the replete workers who store food in their bodies, tend to live the longest. And yet, despite the cannon-fodder expendability of some members of large colonies, their life spans are still an improvement