> 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 on its own, but a colony can accomplish some pretty advanced stuff.

                Now I’m going to go into some weird stuff. Let’s compare ant colonies to people. In this example, the ants are like cells, and the person is like the ant colony. Each cell isn't much on its own. One cell can’t really do anything, much like an ant (well, one ant can do a little, but not much). However, when you combine tons and tons of them, you get something that is infinitely more capable and intelligent. A human is definitely greater than the sum of all the cells that make it up, and I have said the same earlier about ant colonies. My question is: Where did the intelligence come from? It’s not like any single cell is the mastermind and controls all the others, likewise for ants. I honestly have no idea, nor do I expect to find out for a long time, but regardless, it’s a pretty cool thing to think about.

                Alright, so let’s zoom out a little bit further now. Let’s extend our ant analogy to societies. If you think about it, each person is kind of like a cell, or an ant. People have a job, just as cells and ants have a specific purpose that they fulfill, and if the society is functioning properly, it can get more done than a bunch of people working independently. For example, let’s say there are 10 buildings that need to be built. Instead of having 10 people each spend years and years building an entire building on their own, you have a group of 10 people, who all have different jobs on that building, work on one building at a time. Eventually all the buildings get built, probably much faster that they would have using the first method.

                So what’s the takeaway? Well, I didn't really plan anything like that. I just thought that it was funny to think of a giant person made out of ants, with ants instead of cells. Or maybe a giant creature made up of different societies that each are, like, an organ or something like that. Basically, I had no point in writing this, I just thought it was cool to think about, and also really weird. It made my brain hurt, and if you want to hear more about ant colonies, you can listen to this this RadioLab podcast about it.

(Photo credit: https://www.marialoveswords.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/zt-ants-ifc_01.jpg by Maria Garcia Teutsch)