Ruse lays out his argument eloquently. His conclusion is that both Popper and Kuhn were right. Even single-celled organisms such as bacteria have brainlike functions that enable them to find food and avoid toxins. Perhaps humans, through the invention of agriculture and other cultural means for reducing the hazards of existence, have domesticated themselves. Each ant scratches and prods its way through the tiny world of its immediate surroundings.
Ants meet each other, separate, go about their business.
Somehow these small events create a pattern that drives the coordinated behavior of colonies. Being a meticulous and resourceful experimenter, she has found ways to excavate a colony, to count a colony's population and to learn something about how the ants divide the work. Any system of units that lack identity or agency, whose behavior arises from the interactions of these components, has something in common with ant colonies. It may be that the same kinds of relations that link ants and colonies allow neurons to produce the behavior of brains, a host of different cells to produce immune responses, and a few dividing cells eventually to produce a developed embryo. As urban places have changed successively with the advent of such advances as piped water, printing, electricity and the Industrial Revolution , so they will change again with the advent of the digital revolution, Mitchell says from his perspective as dean of the school of architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.