I can't remember exactly when it was during my childhood that I tried to start an ant colony. I walked around our backyard until I found an ant mound, and I dug as deep as I could (which wasn't very deep) and placed all of the dirt and the ants - into a large glass jar. My father showed me how to use a hammer and nail to poke holes in the jar's lid, so that the ants could breathe. I don't remember asking my father whether the ants could leave the jar through those same holes, but maybe we should have considered that possibility. Perhaps that’s why my mother made me keep the jar outside! I remember being absolutely fascinated watching how the ants dug this elaborate network of tunnels in the dirt. I think my colony eventually died out, not because of a lack of food, water, or oxygen, but due to the lack of a queen.
I have been reading some fascinating articles about the social behavior of insects, such as ants and termites (for example, check out the article “Swarm Smarts” in Scientific American from 2008). And apparently I’ve always misunderstood the role of the queen of the colony. The “queen” is not like what we usually think of when we hear the term queen. As it turns out, Hollywood has misrepresented the role of the “queen” too, in animated films such as Antz or A Bug’s Life. The “queen” is NOT the leader of the colony, but rather the “mother” of the colony. Her only job is to lay eggs. That’s it.
So who, then, is leading the colony? The surprising answer is that no one is leading the colony! Each ant plays a specific role, whether it is foraging for food, building the network of tunnels in the ground, or guarding the colony from rival colonies or other species of insects. And each ant plays its role without any direction or without any leader telling it what to do or how to do it. The entire colony is leaderless, yet it still thrives!
The social behavior of the colony is entirely determined by the collective, simple behavior of the individual ants in the colony. Here's another example. It is a well-known fact that ants have the remarkable ability to work together to build "ant bridges" across obstacles that block their search for food (check out a video of a massive ant bridge here). The ants work together to form a bridge using only their individual bodies, and what is amazing is that they do so without any direction or instruction from a leader ant. Instead, each individual ant follows three very simple rules: (1) if you come to an obstacle or gap, slow down; (2) if you feel another ant walking across your body, stay put; (3) when you no longer feel ants walking across your body, start moving again. That's it! Three simple rules leads to rather complex behavior! And again, NO LEADER!
Here's one last example from the insect world. Termites, like ants, form social colonies and build complex structures using simple rules of behavior. Interestingly enough, we humans are borrowing some of the "design principles" (and I use that term lightly, for reasons that I will explain in a moment) that the termites use to construct their homes (this interesting and growing field is called biomimetic architecture). For example, the Eastgate building, a shopping center and office building in Harare, Zimbawe was designed and constructed similar to a termite mound. The building is self-ventilating and can stay cool with very little utilization of energy - see the figure below:
Again, it bears repeating that the termites build and construct these complex mound colonies with essentially no direction or leadership (the irony is not lost on me that the construction company that built the Eastgage building likely had one architect in charge of design as well as an engineer in charge of construction).
As it turns out, this ability to self-organize and self-manage is one of the fundamental characteristics of what is called a complex adaptive system. A complex adaptive system is defined as a group of semi-autonomous agents who interact in interdependent ways to produce system-wide patterns, such that those patterns then influence behavior of the agents. These systems are characterized by three fundamental concepts:
1. A system of individual parts or agents that interact with each other
2. Interaction follows simple rules that lead to emergence (the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts)
3. There is no centralized leader who is coordinating the individual parts or agents.
Examples of complex adaptive systems, aside from ant and termite colonies, include the immune system, the brain, the stock market, and the national economy. I would argue, as others have done, that health care organizations also represent examples of complex adaptive systems (more on this in future posts). One of the most interesting characteristics of complex adaptive systems, at least in my opinion, is the third point above - the fact that there is no centralized coordination of the collective actions of the different parts or agents. And this is a topic that I wish to further explore in future posts.
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