Social Behavior: Collective Wisdom of Ants
In the 2015 summer blockbuster Ant-Man, the character Hank Pym, a scientist who has invented a suit that can shrink a person down to the size of an insect, remarks that ants can perform amazing feats, but they need a leader to tell them what to do. Pym wears a small device behind his ear that allows him to instruct the ants to act as a phalanx of attackers that helps the ant-sized human hero defeat an evil mastermind.
The idea that ants have commanders that set the agenda and orchestrate their activities resonates because of the hierarchical way in which many human organizations work, and it provides a convenient premise for a Hollywood film whose heroes are people. There’s just one problem: it’s wrong. Ants never march in lockstep, united in obedience to a single command. In the real world, the often random and apparently inept actions of individual ants, each without any sense of a common goal, combine to allow colonies to find and collect food, build nests, form trails and bridges, defend their host plants from herbivores or cultivate gardens — all without supervision. Ants do not need a leader, and no ant ever tells another what to do.
Ant colonies are not the only systems in nature to operate without central control. Collective behavior, without instruction from on high, occurs everywhere, from the flock of starlings that wheels in the sky to the network of neurons that allows you to read this sentence to the molecules that work with genes to make proteins. All the many outcomes of collective behavior are accomplished through simple interactions among the individual actors, whether they are ants, birds, neurons or molecules. ...
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