> The Sum of its Parts
Now, you might think that ants are dumb. If you wipe out the trail left by an ant, it will walk back and forth, retracing its steps over and over. Not a practice generally reserved for intelligent beings. However, if you've done any sort of reading about ants, you may have heard about the cool things ant colonies can do. They can form themselves into bridges and rafts. They can farm, and fight wars with each other (something that should not be associated with intelligence, but is). They can engineer and work as a coordinated team. The question is, where did the intelligence come from? There’s no way that a bunch of mindless insects that can’t remember where they walked 2 seconds ago do anything like this. Even if they worked together, they could only manage to carry a fallen leaf back to their colony, right? Well, apparently not. Ants are just one example of small things working together to form something bigger than the sum of their parts. One ant might not be able to do much o