BOOK REVIEW
Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior, Author: Deborah M Gordon.
Gödel, Escher, Bach, Author: Douglas Hofstadter.
By Deborah M Gordon – Historically, many have found the idea of division of labor a compelling and powerful model. Plato admired it, Adam Smith explained how economies benefit from it, and Henry Ford industrialized it. But it’s not natural.
A vision of human society ordered and improved by division of labour has permeated and distorted our understanding of nature.
We know now that ants do not perform as specialized factory workers. Instead ants switch tasks. An ant’s role changes as it grows older and as changing conditions shift the colony’s needs. An ant that feeds the larvae one week might go out to get food the next. Yet in an ant colony, no one is in charge or tells another what to do.
So what determines which ant does which task, and when ants switch roles?
The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, ant societies are in fact organized not by division of labor but by a distributed process, in which an ant’s social role is a response to interactions with other ants. In brief encounters, ants use their antennae to smell one another, or to detect a chemical that another ant has recently deposited.
Taken in the aggregate, these simple interactions between ants allow colonies to adjust the numbers performing each task and to respond to the changing world. This social coordination occurs without any individual ant making any assessment of what needs to be done.
For millenniums, ants have been held up as models for human societies, characterized by coordinated and efficient mutual regard and selfless hard work.
Humans have always used arguments about supposedly intrinsic attributes to justify social roles. Kings ruled by divine right and ancestry, while others were slaves based on race or physical attributes.
Ant societies, organized by distributed algorithms rather than division of labor, have thrived for more than 130 million years. more> https://goo.gl/Im9s8k