Philosophers Meet Animals: the Ant (Colony)
By: Gunnar De Winter
Tags: Animals, Philosophy, Evolution, Science, Biology

Philosophers Meet Animals: the Ant (Colony)

While philosophy seems to be a very human endeavor, other organisms can be useful colleagues for (human) philosophers

(Pixabay, shammiknr)

Who/what?

Ants are great philosopher pets (meant metaphorically, couldn’t resist the alliteration…). In fact, all eusocial species are (such as several species of wasps, bees, and termites, as well as some crustaceans and naked mole rats).

Back to ants. These six-legged insects (oxymoron there) are well-known for their colonies and their eusocial organization. This means that they care for each others’ young, live together in a group of overlapping adult generations, and, perhaps most of interest as philosopher pet, they show reproductive division of labor. That is, some of them get to reproduce, while others do not. Often, this leads to a system of distinct castes: queens, soldier, workers…

The size of colonies ranges from a few dozen to several millions. They can be found almost anywhere on earth and according to some (very rough and contested) estimates they might even comprise around 15–20% of terrestrial biomass.

Beyond sheer numbers and ubiquity, many ant species have other impressive talents, though. Some species herd and ‘milk’ aphids or other small insects, other ant species tend and harvest fungus gardens. It’s almost as if they pretend to be human. (But they’ve been around a lot longer then we have, so maybe we’re just stuck-up apes pretending to be ants…)

Why?

Interesting as all that may be, why does it make ants (and ant colonies) good philosophical colleagues?

Well, first, having an insect republic at your disposal might be of interest to political philosophers. In fact, Aristotle already called ants ‘political animals’, who shared with humans the relevance of ‘the work of all’.

However, the study of social organization is also being pursued in the philosophy of biology. On the face of it, eusocial animals seem to have an odd arrangement: why give up your right to reproduce? (Now we know there are genetic peculiarities that make workers sufficiently related to their sisters to provide a counterweight to the evolutionary edict of ‘go forth and procreate’.) Many other topics in evolutionary biology and philosophy can benefit from an ant’s perspective. Think about altruism, cheating, multilevel selection, fitness alignment across different hierarchical levels (e.g. organism vs colony)…

Speaking of multi-level madness, ants also provide a potential example of how selfish elements at one level could support social behavior on another. Fire ants, for example, contain a social ‘supergene’ (several genes locked together in one inheritable package) that is linked to many social behaviors, but the gene itself behaves (metaphorically) selfish.

A second area — somewhat related — for which ants can provide a framework to explore questions in philosophy involves the idea of individuality. Ant colonies are often referred to as superorganisms, suggesting that they somehow become something of an individual themselves. So ants in ant colonies could be seen as individuals nested in another individual. Or can they? Not crazy enough? Okay, how about the proposal that ant colonies might be (partially) conscious?

Finally, ant colonies are architectural marvels with specifically designed rooms for different purposes, good ventilation, and carefully controlled internal microclimates. But there’s no architect. A few simple rules appear to allow ants to build complex structures. Beyond their homestead, ants leave chemical road-signs and adapt quickly to changing resource availability. All without central intelligence. The chemical road-signs evaporate, so the paths with the strongest pheromone packages along the trail will attract most ‘follower’ ants. Among these paths, the shortest ones will have the strongest signals due to the shortest traveling time — and thus less time for the road-signs to evaporate before being refreshed. Feedback loops ensue, leading the ants to converge onto the shortest, most efficient path. Ant colony optimization algorithms are based on this principle and are often used in computational problems that revolve around finding promising ‘paths’ through graph representations.

How does this apparent complexity and intelligence emerge from simple rule-based agents? What is intelligence really?

Find an ant colony and figure it out.

Recommended reading:

E. O. Wilson & Bert Hölldobler (1990) The Ants. Belknap Press.

Tom Wenseleers et al. (2004). Worker reproduction and policing in insect societies: an ESS analysis. Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 17(5):1035–1047.

Christian Blum (2005). Ant colony optimization: Introduction and recent trends. Physics of Life Reviews. 2(4):353–373.

Frédéric Bouchard and Philippe Huneman (2013). From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality. MIT Press.

Deborah M. Gordon. (2019). The Ecology of Collective Behavior in Ants. Annual Reviews of Entomology. 64:35–50.