[ants] Invasion … Tom Junod on ants and what it’s like to live on top of a colony of Argentine ants …

…what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so. Well, once they start accumulating in your house in sufficient numbers, you get a chance to see that accumulated intelligence at work. You get a chance to find out what it wants. And what you find out – what the accumulated intelligence of the colony eventually tells you – is that it wants what you want. You find out that you, an organism, are competing for your house with a superorganism that knows how to do nothing but compete. You are not only competing in the most basic evolutionary sense; you are competing with a purely adaptive intelligence, and so you are competing with the force of evolution itself.

Tom Junod On Ants

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Evolution, Life.

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