Ant People
Far from being individual independent actors, we humans behave in very similar ways to colonies of ants and other collective species
Are people much more like ants than we realize? If we step back far enough, does our collective behavior more closely resemble ant colonies than the behavior of more solitary species? Although at first glance this idea seems absurd, it turns out to be much closer to the truth than we’d like to think.
We humans love to self-aggrandize; even the name we use for our species homo sapiens is hyperbole as very few people are wise and even then generally only within their domains of expertise. Our perspective is limited and quite solipsistic, yet putting ourselves at the center of things may be a mistake.
When we look down from an airplane as it descends to land near some metropolis we can see how humans spread out from a central point, exploiting the available land and creating structures that have a meta-structure despite local tangles where roads twist and turn inefficiently or topographic features require adaptations. We see vehicles streaming along highways, each with its purpose and intended destination, collectively acting like the arteries of some huge abstract body. It’s difficult not to be reminded strongly of the internal form of an ant-hill or termite…
