Mindless acts of leadership

When I was a child, I loved watching ants as they followed their established paths, carrying food back to the their home to stuff into the mouth of their greedy queen. I even had an ant colony between two narrowly separated sheets of glass so that their tunnels and activity could be seen; but others proved far more observant.

The BBC News's "'Leaders and lifters' help ants move massive meals" (Webb, 2015), reports that a group of physicists, inspired by ants stealing cat food in a new apartment, carefully recorded and studied ants'ability to move large objects. They discovered that while the ants conform most of the time to the common effort to move an object, a small number act independently, running around and then returning to the work in progress, where their distinctive pushes add new information about the best direction to move in to lead to success, typically getting food into the colony.

These days I'm generally not so keen on ants, which occasionally come exploring in my condo.. I don't dislike them, so before I resort to chemical warfare, I try to cut off any contact with food, which usually means moving my table away from the wall, and spraying just a little insecticide around the base of the table legs. This usually works, and the and trail thins then disappears as these mindlessly intelligent (intelligently mindless?) animals stop sending hopeful messages back to head quarters. Just as when I was child, I'm still fascinated by the way they move along trails, which are often not the straight lines that would be the shortest distance between two points: there seems to be a lot of randomness, combined with some purpose, albeit mindless, in the way their trails are formed.

Did it surprise you that the scientists who did the research, on which they spent four years, were physicists? It did surprise me when I first read it, but when I thought about it a bit more, I thought, "Why not physicists?" Although I think the discoveries from the study ask interesting questions about evolution and how animals function, also the nature of intelligence, the physicists were interested only in questions about the behaviour of the bodies involved in the movement of an object of size X from position A to B. It isn't really that important that the bodies happen to be living animals, and the physicists certainly had the mathematical skills needed for the analysis.

As my title suggests, I liked the article because it is a good study in how an appearance of intelligent, organized behaviour can arise from no intelligence or planned organization. I sometimes think that a lot of human activities are similar, with unplanned for outcomes, often just good luck, being discovered to work by processes that are often not that well understood. An example that comes to mind is the rapid reduction by almost 50% of all types of crime in the US in the 1990s - lots of experts had been trying lots of things to reduce the crime rates, which had been rising since the 1960s, but nothing seemed to work, and then in the early 1990s, crime rates suddenly plummeted in the United States.

As a concluding exercise: What do you think caused the rates of all crime, murder, violence, theft, and so on, to rapidly decrease in the 1990s? And might it be possible to replicate the same thing in Thailand? Comments are welcome.

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Reference

Webb, J. (2015, July 29). 'Leaders and lifters' help ants move massive meals. BBC News.  Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/33692054