The March of the Evolutionary Ants

I am reading "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman!" again. (I was going to read Genius but I am saving that as I wan't to get to the new Bill Bryson book - "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Anyway last night, I was reading a bit about Feynman working out how the ants in his college rooms found there way to food. I know this sounds a bit low-level for such a man but that is the whole tone of the book, a Monster Mind, yet a man able to explain very heavy concepts in a simple way - remember the O-Ring in the Glass of Ice water at the Challenger inquiry? I now know that certain properties of ant trails; the way they are reinforced by repeated use but will fade away when the number of ants using them falls, is used in certain telecoms products.

This is not actually the thing which struck me. Feynman went on to talk about the behaviour of Brazilian leaf-cutter ants and in particular, some behaviour which appeared so stupid, he was surprised it hadn;t been evolved out. The issue was that, after cutting out a section of leaf using a great deal of time and effort, the ants do not always hold on to the section of leaf which has been cut and it falls to the ground. The ant will still tug at the uncut piece until it "realises" that it is not going to get anywhere and starts to cut another piece. He also mentions how the transportation of leaves and other bits of food seems haphazzard and it is only by the virtue of a dim awareness of where the nest is that a group of ants will manage to get stuff home. I suspect the reason for this odd behaviour not evolving out is that there are so many ants that they manage to survive very successfully by virtue of numbers rather than intelligence; the survival instinct is only just greater than the desire to just exist and so it manages to keep the colony going. No individual ant has any idea of what it is doing, it simply follows the trails and opens its mouth at the appropriate time, either to cut a leaf or to eat. All this is known; I am just repeating things I read and stuff we did in Information Analysis lectures at college. This is the interesting bit. We humans think we are intelligent and yet we do exactly the same thing. Although we can process a lot more information in our own little bubble of awareness, in these large organisations we simply follow the trails and open our mouths at the appropriate times.

The realisation of this has just depressed me a great deal. I know I don't concentrate in any one thing but I do like to understand something to its logical end and not being able to is quite annoying. Call me a dilettante if you like but I do not look on it as a negative term. I am not one in my work and that is all that counts for the money which goes into my pocket. And the person himself knows who that is a dig at though he probably won't read this. Sly digs hey!

It is raining again here, just to get the boring Englishman type of conversation out of the way. I do not make concessions to the international audience ( of maybe two or three) of this writing; you just have to accept the English fetish with the weather though I like to think that my obsession is a bit more positive than the normal "rain again today" type of conversation. Actually most of my colleagues never mention it other than a cursory discussion on Fridays regarding the odds of a good weekend. I like rain far more than I like sunny weather but you already know that. Off to read some more Feynman. See you later.