1—A piece I wrote for @BBC_Future, on how discoveries about social insects transformed assumptions regarding humanity's position in nature and time, and why this remains important today.
bbc.com/future/article…
2—Early 1900s, scientists realise just how complex insect societies can be. But they also discover how ancient they are. Ants were social millions of years before humans evolved.
This transformed people's sense of humanity's own position in time, and how much might be left ahead.
3—This is a bit of a spiritual sequel to a previous piece I wrote, for @aeonmag, on how the 'discovery' of dolphin smarts influenced the way we think about the placement and prospects of minds like our own in the wider cosmos. Read on for summary!
aeon.co/essays/dolphin…
3—In the 1910s, experts find evidence that ants have been social for tens of millions of years.
Humans, comparatively, have only been cooperating at widescale for only a handful of millennia.
Suddenly, our civilization—by contrast with our insect elders—seemed immensely young...
4—Ants became a cultural fascination. In 1911, W.M. Wheeler coined the word "superorganism". He argued that each ant is a "speck of intelligence", combining into an astonishingly coordinated whole, just as individual cells synergise into the adaptive and reactive organism.
5—It was also during this era that the unrivalled ecological success of arthropods first became undeniably apparent.
Entomologists claimed our geological epoch was, in fact, "Age of Insects". Many insisted insects challenge humanity's assumed pre-eminence as "monarch of Earth"...
6—This toppled Victorian assumptions about the place of Homo Sapiens, as the final product of evolution, it's most optimal and inevitable result. But it wasn't just brute quantity: social insects had apparently "solved" many of the conundrums facing complex societies, ages ago...
7—And they had done so with nothing like our vaunted rationality. Unreasoning, insects seemed to have simply inherited instincts honed by millions of years of blind evolution.
Scientists were awed that such divergent methods had tackled such convergent problems with such finesse
8—In response, people first began imagining aliens might be more insectoid than humanoid.
Others turned the tables: would aliens—from lofty distance—even recognise our rationality? Wouldn't it be easier to assume our cities are like ant-heaps, built by unthinking instinct alone?
9—But the overall lesson was uplifting. Ants proved some legacies—indeed, societies—can, and do, persist & flourish for millions of years.
This was during a period when predictions on Earth's habitable future had ballooned.
Could humanity emulate the ant?
bbc.com/future/article…
10—Yet, to some, this made our methods seem unproven, untested, unstable—compared to the unthinking, blindly loyal ant, plodding steadfastly through geologic time, an obligate altruist.
This was expressed best by Archy the Cockroach, a popular character invented by Don Marquis.
11—Archy's speciality was wittily deflating human egotism. In satirical poems, he would gloat that his cousins—the social insects—had invented flight and farming without ever having to *think* about it.
Instinct is infallible; rationality, on the other hand, is error-prone.
10—Musings on the volatility of human invention, compared to the ant's unerring instinct, assumed a much graver tenor when the Atomic Age dawned.
It turns out that Archy partly inspired Cold War mythology about cockroaches. In 1946, New Yorker hailed him the Atomic Era's mascot:
11—Cockroaches, even elder than ants (by a huge margin), had proven astonishing staying power in the fossil record.
So emerged a potent Cold War motif: the roach would be World War 3's "only winner". Roaches had thrived through geologic epochs, they look set to survive yet more.
12—This meme, spawned by Archy, survives to this day...
12—Dire warnings aside, the lesson remained hopeful. This was best articulated by Harlow Shapley. An astronomer at Mount Wilson: he mapped the Milky Way by night, & studied the microcosm of the ants by day, fascinated by their anciently-evolved "virtues".
doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2…
13—Shapley argued that, compared to ants, we are an "inexperienced" species. This means our brand of brains remains unproven, even unstable. But this confers all the plastic potentials of youth. Our world remains young.
For Shapley, this is how ants give us "orientation in time".
14—Our "enlarged frontal lobes" may yet "erase" us from Earth, Shapley mused. But they also grant unique capacity for foresight: hoisting us into a "transcendency" where "personal survival" is not enough. Humans, uniquely, care also about the further future & future generations.
15—Our altruism can extend further—in time & space—than ever could an ant's. Humans cooperate across generations rather than within one. We accumulate learning.
If we live up to this quiddity, we may find ourselves at the start of a millions-year saga—just like Archy's ancestors.
16—Each time we 'discover' another mind, we clamour to conclude what it reveals about our own: comparison distinguishes what might be essential to all intellects—no matter their origin & ancestry—and what might just be incidental to us.
I wonder which 'mind' will obsess us next?
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