Cosmology of the Ants

It appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.

Courtesy: Farm4.static.flickr.com

(CALGARY, Alberta) - As children, it’s natural for us to believe the world is flat. Everything around us is flat. If we live on a prairie, the world stretching away looks flat; everything just gets smaller in the distance. No mystery there.

Courtesy: audienceoftwo.com

But see in your mind's eye what the world looks like from an ant’s point of view. Blades of grass would tower overhead, just as trees do for us in the middle of a forest. The primary challenge for an ant culture would be to see the lawn for the grass. Out on the lawn, molehills would become mountains.

Assuming an ant/human ratio of a thousand to one, the Earth's circumference would be (in our terms) 25 million miles. A worker ant's lifespan is one to three human years—Jules VernAnt would have written a novel: "Around the World in 80 years". Exploration by land would mean journeys of hundreds of ant years. An AntBus 380 would take about 40 ant generations to circumnavigate the globe.

The earth’s surface area (land, water and ice) is about 200 million square miles. From an ant’s perspective that would be about 200 billion square miles. No shortage of room for anthills. In fact, they are already extensively populating the earth.

Ants in your yard. Ants in your basement. We have no real conception of how pervasive ant culture is around the globe. Scientists have learned that a single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world.

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and do not fight one another, as unrelated ants do. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and may rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is believed to stretch for 6,000 kms (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the U.S., known as the "Californian large", extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

It appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.

Some ant facts

'Ant's Point of View' courtesy: painting.about.com

• Ants are studied by myrmecologists
• More than 12,500 species are classified with an upper estimate of species at 22,000
• Lewis Thomas: "All of us are able to smell ants, for which the great word pismire was coined."
• Ant societies have division of labour, communication between individuals, and an ability to solve complex problems—the latter of which is lacking in many human societies
• Ants are found on all continents except Antarctica and only a few large islands such as Greenland, Iceland, parts of Polynesia and the Hawaiian Islands have no native ant species
• Ants can “see” ultraviolet light
• In the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, ants are held up as a good example for humans for their hard work and cooperation
• The eggs of two species of ants are the basis for the Mexican dish called escamoles. They are considered a form of insect caviar and can sell for as much as $40/lb
• In areas of India, and throughout Burma and Thailand, a paste of the green weaver ant is served as a condiment with curry
• Mashed up in water, like lemon squash, these ants form a pleasant acid drink which is enjoyed by the natives of North Queensland

A final observation: Is there any cosmic significance to the the fact that Antarctica is the only continent that has no ants? Just wondering.

Cosmology of the ants

Essayist Lewis Thomas observed:

"A solitary ant, cannot be considered to have much of anything on its mind; indeed, with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he can't be imagined to have a mind at all, much less of a thought. He is more like ganglions on legs. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. they fumble and shove, gradually move toward the Hill, but as though by blind chance. It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is intelligence, a kind of computer, with crawling bits for its wits."

What will be the form of intelligence arising from hundreds of billions of ants connected on a global basis? Let’s find out.

Considering that, from an ant's point of view, virtually the entire Earth would be terra incognita, what would their picture of "the universe" look like?

Some ants are photosensitive, i.e., cannot come out in daylight. So, at night, they would first wonder about what was visible to them—the sky above. Here their minute size compared to humans would make no difference at all. Once they were able to get out into an open area, the sky would look the same to them as it does to a thousand-times-larger human being.

An antsview of the Earth would be similarly speculative. The ants' understanding of their universe would be, like ours, based on a series of assumptions. The basic assumption in our science-oriented society is that our universe began in what physicists call the Big Bang, pinned down, as of 2010, to 13.7 billion years ago—137 million centuries.

But, says science writer Stephen Strauss, “the psychological reality is that the cosmos is more and more frightening the further we get from Earth.” The same would be true for ants—the farther they get from the anthill.

Cosmology is the branch of astronomy dealing with the origin, composition and evolution of the universe. Physicist Alan Lightman calls cosmology "the grandest and most speculative of all sciences [sitting] at the boundary between what is considered science and what is not."

From a cosmic point of view, there is no difference in size between the ant and the human so that our cosmologies will be the same.

Albert Einstein said, "It is the theory that decides what we can observe." Put another way, it is the assumptions that we hold, consciously and unconsciously, that are the filter through which we interpret the world we “see”. Charles Darwin is a prime example.

Cwm Idwal (pronounced koom idwal) is a hanging valley in the Glyderau range of mountains in northern Snowdonia, the national park in the mountainous region of North Wales. Its main attraction is to hill walkers and rock climbers, but it is also of interest to geologists and naturalists, given its combination of altitude (relatively high in UK terms), aspect (north-facing) and terrain (mountainous and rocky). In a 2005 poll, Cwm Idwal was ranked as the seventh greatest natural wonder in the UK.

Cwm Idwal seen from the shores of Llyn Idwal Credit: Mick Knapton

In his autobiography, Charles Darwin said:

“We spent many hours in Cwm Idwal, examining all the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick [his companion] was anxious to find fossils in them; but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that…a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had still been filled by a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they are now.”

Because Darwin and his companion were not psychologically prepared to see glaciation, they did not see it. This, basically, is the story of science over the last four centuries. Things are not seen until people are psychologically ready to see them. This applies equally to each of us in our individual perceptions.

Darwin was also able to see something that wasn’t there. In 1837 he visited a section of the Scottish Highlands, the so-called “parallel roads” and decided that the ledges were beaches that had been formed when the glen had been filled by an arm of the sea and published a paper about it in 1839. Over the next twenty years, however, the idea of at least one Ice Age seemed, to most geologists, to be the source of the ledges. Darwin was receptive to the idea of an Ice Age, but still maintained that the ledges were the result of a lake. In 1861 he suggested that the geologist Thomas Jamieson should visit the site and resolve the matter. He did and said that Darwin was wrong. Darwin wrote to him: “Your arguments seem to me conclusive...I give up the ghost. My paper is one long gigantic blunder...I have been for years anxious to know what was the truth, & now I shall rest contented, though ashamed of myself.”

Assumptions are passed on from teacher to student and from one generation to the next.

In 1862 Lord Kelvin speculated on the source of the sun’s heat and how long it might be expected to shine. He concluded:

“It seems, therefore, on the whole most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years, and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years. As for the future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation”.

This, of course, was three quarters of a century before the discovery of nuclear energy. In 1933 physics Nobelist Ernest Rutherford, known as the father of nuclear physics, said: “Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of… atoms is talking moonshine.” But, writes biologist Lewis Wolpert in The Unnatural Nature of Science: “Today’s moonshine is tomorrow’s technology, and it is with technology and politics that the real responsibility lies. Even so, one must guard against taking scientific ideas as dogma and treating science as infallible.”

In the 1890s a debate arose between physicists and geologists over the age of the earth. Kelvin argued that, from the cooling rate of the earth as estimated from measurement of heat in mines, the earth must have been nearly molten as recently as twenty million years ago. Geologists countered that the formation of some rock deposits must have taken at least twenty times as long—four hundred million years. Backed, not by theory, but by a vast accumulation of observation, geologists doubted the physicist’s theories. Kelvin had assumed that Earth had been created as a completely molten ball of rock, and determined the amount of time it took for the ball to cool to its present temperature. His calculations did not account for the ongoing heat source in the form of radioactive decay, which was still unknown at the time.

In 1897 J. J. Thomson experimentally discovered the electron. At about the same time, however, the same experiment was done by Walter Kaufmann. The main difference between their experiments was that Kaufmann’s was better, yielding a ratio of the electron’s charge and mass that today we know was more accurate than Thomson’s. But Kaufmann is not listed as a discoverer of the electron, because he did not think he had discovered a new particle. Kaufmann was a positivist and did not believe that physicists should speculate on things they could not observe. So, he did not report that he had discovered a new kind of particle, but only that whatever flowed in a cathode ray tube carried a certain ratio of electric charge to mass.

In 1905 the French mathematician Henri Poincaré independently discovered the same space-time transformations as Einstein. But, to Poincaré, they were just mathematical concepts, with no physical significance. Einstein, on the other hand, took the physics seriously and developed the Special Theory of Relativity which is thus credited to him alone.

In 1910, after atomism had been widely accepted, Ernst Mach wrote to Max Planck that “if belief in the reality of atoms is so crucial, then I renounce the physical way of thinking. I will not be a professional physicist, and I hand back my scientific reputation.” Planck didn’t believe in atoms, either, and invented his own convoluted theory to assure himself that they did not exist.

On Nov 6, 1919 there was a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society in London where the Astronomer Royal announced that Einstein’s theory had been verified. J. J. Thomson said that relativity had now to be reckoned with and that our conceptions of the fabric of the universe must be fundamentally altered. At this point the eminent astronomer Sir Oliver Lodge rose and walked out of the meeting. Ideas that require people to reframe their picture of the world provoke denial and hostility. It is no different in science, than it is in politics or religion.

These were all men who acted out of a scientific orientation grounded in their individual psychology. Thomson was willing to speculate, Kaufmann was not. Planck and Lodge could not adjust to a potentially new reality. Perhaps the most explicit example would be 19th-century physician and experimental psychologist H. L. F. von Helmholtz. When asked about the possibility of telepathy, he said: “Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, would lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independent of the recognized channels of sense.” Even Albert Einstein, who single-handedly initiated the 20th century revolution in physics, could not to his dying day accept what quantum physics said about the world.

As physicist Heinz Pagels wrote:

“Why did Einstein reject the interpretation of the new quantum physics—when most of his fellow scientists accepted it? Any answer to this question cannot be simple. Einstein’s rejection reflects not just his rational choice but also the roots of his personality and character formed during his childhood in Germany. By examining his childhood we find clues to his later persistent adherence to the classical world view.”

What can all this mean? Astrophysicist John Bahcall at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton said:

“I personally feel it is presumptuous to believe that man can determine the whole temporal structure of the universe, its evolution, development and ultimate fate from the first nanosecond of creation to the last 10¹⁰ years on the basis of three or four facts which are not very accurately known and are disputed among the experts. That I find, I would say, almost immodest. So I don't take those models very seriously. That doesn't mean that I don't publish papers based upon them, but it does mean that I tend to regard them pretty much the same way that I would regard Newton's theology. An interesting intellectual exercise, but nothing to be worried about.”

The soundness of Ant/Human cosmology would be a matter of opinion because its foundation would rest on unverifiable assumptions. This is why some physicists can believe in the Big Bang origin of the universe while others, like Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven and cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle, could not.

Science, and the assumptions of the so-called scientific method, dominate Western culture. This would be unremarkable if science were open-ended and unlimited in terms of its potential. But it is not. Technology is the practical side of science and, because there have been such incredible accomplishments, from the steam engine to satellite communications to micro-miniaturized medicine, and nanotechnology, science is regarded as unassailable.

Harvard cosmologist Sheldon Glashow, however, describes the basic insubstantiality of science:

"We believe that the world is knowable, that there are simple rules governing the behavior of matter and the evolution of the universe. We affirm that there are eternal, objective, extrahistorical, socially neutral, external and universal truths and that the assemblage of these truths is what we call physical science. Natural laws can be discovered that are universal, invariable, inviolate, genderless and verifiable…. This statement I cannot prove, this statement I cannot justify. This is my faith."

Where do we go from here? MIT physicist Heinz Pagels wrote: "While deeply held beliefs should not contradict science, they also cannot be founded on science."

I believe that science in its current form, as a method of exploring and understanding reality, has come as far as it can. This is not to disparage or discard science. Its handmaid, technology, still has a long run ahead. But science itself has come to explain and explore more and more about less and less.

Essayist J. B. Priestley gives us a perspective on the harm that science has done to our society:

“It is our Life-shrinkers who have been busy as long as I can remember just sealing us down and then squeezing the juice out of us. We quit their company feeling like desiccated dwarfs. The most important of them have been lop-sided ‘nothing but’ men on the very highest and most imposing level. And to prove I am not dealing in vague abuse, I will stick my neck out as far as it can go. Among the very greatest names of the last hundred years, those men whose influence can hardly be over-estimated, are Marx, Darwin and Freud. And with all due respect for their personal qualities, I say that all three of them, working in their very different fields, have been Life-shrinkers”.

As Sir James Jeans summed it up: “The history of physical science in the twentieth century is one of progressive emancipation from the purely human angle of vision.”

”Leningen versus the Ants”

I first read this story in high school and I’ve never forgotten it. It’s about Leningen who has a plantation in Brazil. Here is one of the opening paragraphs:

The Brazilian official threw up lean and lanky arms and clawed the air with wildly distended fingers. "Leningen!" he shouted. "You're insane! They're not creatures you can fight—they're an elemental—an 'act of God!' Ten miles long, two miles wide--ants, nothing but ants! And every single one of them a fiend from hell; before you can spit three times they'll eat a full-grown buffalo to the bones. I tell you if you don't clear out at once there'll be nothing left of you but a skeleton picked as clean as your own plantation."

You can read the story here: classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html