These shapes are shorthand for a moment in time, a way of evoking an era and its peculiar obsessions. You can see the last ten years or so as a return to those Victorian webs, though I suspect the image that has been burned into our retinas over the past decade is more prosaic: windows piled atop one another on a screen, or perhaps a mouse clicking on an icon. The first few decades of the twentieth century found their ultimate expression in the exuberant anarchy of the explosion, while later decades lost themselves in the faceless regimen of the grid. The epic clash and subsequent resolution of the dialectic animated the first half of the nineteenth century the Darwinian and social reform movements scattered web imagery through the second half of the century. “Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods. The colonies that Gordon studies display some of nature’s most mesmerizing decentralized behavior: intelligence and personality and learning that emerges from the bottom up.”Įmergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software While they are capable of remarkably coordinated feats of task allocation, there are no Five-Year Plans in the ant kingdom.
Popular culture trades in Stalinist ant stereotypes-witness the authoritarian colony regime in the animated film Antz-but in fact, colonies are the exact opposite of command economies. In other words, the matriarch doesn’t train her servants to protect her, evolution does. Their genes instruct them to protect their mother, the same way their genes instruct them to forage for food. It would be physically impossible for the queen to direct every worker’s decision about which task to perform and when.” The harvester ants that carry the queen off to her escape hatch do so not because they’ve been ordered to by their leader they do it because the queen ant is responsible for giving birth to all the members of the colony, and so it’s in the colony’s best interest-and the colony’s gene pool-to keep the queen safe. In a harvester ant colony, many feet of intricate tunnels and chambers and thousands of ants separate the queen, surrounded by interior workers, from the ants working outside the nest and using only the chambers near the surface. She does not decide which worker does what. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by the workers. “Although queen is a term that reminds us of human political systems,” Gordon explains, “the queen is not an authority figure.
“But despite the Secret Service–like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there’s nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking.
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