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Intelligent Ants?; What would life have been like for them?
Topic Started: Mar 29 2010, 03:56 PM (2,562 Views)
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Ants have sometimes been called "the perfect society". In many ways, they behave like humans; they "domesticate" other bugs, they use problem-solving and teamwork to overcome obstacles, they wage war, they have complex systems of organization, and they have huge complexes where they all live. However, most ants (and most eusocial insects, for that matter) rely on instinct rather than intellect to solve their problems and keep their society afloat.

So what if, in some small part of the world (presumably, any part of the world), ants developed a sense of knowldge, emotion, and willpower to match our own? Would their civilization be any different? Would they conquer their brothers and claim the world as their own?
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Dorylus
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Ahh, ants, one of the best creatures IMO. If they devloped willpower however, they may stop working for the queen. However, tempered by the fact that they are intelligent, they may realise that without subservience to the queen, the society will die. Therefore, the hive may retain integrity and promptly develop extraordinary hunting strategies specific to each prey item, as well as probably defeating ant allcomers.
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I've been toying with the concept of ants becoming sentient. They caste system (to some extent) would probably be preserved; in the fact, the only thing needed is for their society to have the capacity to change.

No doubt their world would be both spectacular and terrifying.
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Ook
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there are genus of ants,that are very big symbiosis with aphids...young mated queen catch one aphid and they set up new colony and from one aphid breed numbers of then
http://myrmecos.net/formicinae/AcrEpe1.html
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Theirs seems to be more of a symbiotic relationship, though.
I'm talking about fire, tools, maybe even a few weapons here and there, domestication, crops and farmland, myths and legends... y'know, the fineries that define a civilization.
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Pando
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I don't think ants will be able to do that unless they developed centaurism. And if they do start to try to start wars we could always drop a grenade on their ant hill. So they aren't a threat.
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Dorylus
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I think horses will disagree however. Driver ants can take out tethered horses without sapience.
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Pandorasaurus, while I don't think they need to develop centaurism (that's a little too anthropomorphic, and besides, they've got perfectly fine mandibles), though you do bring up a point about the fragility of such a civilization. Who knows? Maybe there was an intelligent bunch of ants that developed (maybe even several times over), and we killed them off without knowledge of it.
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Ddraig Goch
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I don't think they would be a threat to humans, and if they did develop sentience, they might have problems with some of the larger animals - after all, the ants couldn't grow too large, or else they'd be crushed by their own exoskeleton. I'd say that, if they did develop sentience, they would probably find it easier if the world re-developed a Carboniferous-style atmosphere.
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...they could speed up global warming. :P
Well, yeah, there'd be all sorts of problems they'd face, particularly since they're so small. Intelligent fire ants (*shudder*) might have a better time, though.
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Canis Lupis
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No no. Intelligent SIAFU ants. They already kill humans. What would it be like if they got smarter?
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...they'd rule the world with an iron fist, and strip much of the land of life. They might even clear the land of almost all large organisms, to make way for their massive civilization where insects are the dominant land form.

...Why is it that every time ants get intelligent, we make them out to be just like an evil empire?! Let's just keep them as innocent black ants somewhere.
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Scrublord
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Interestingly, in my story The Insect God (you can find the first few chapters in Cafe Cosmique) there's a sentient species of wasps, called Vespimancers. The catch is that only the queens are actually intelligent--all other individuals are mere puppets, controlled by the queen's pheromones. Check it out!
Edited by Scrublord, Mar 29 2010, 06:34 PM.
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Flisch
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The point is, that it's not the ant that needs to become sapient. It's the superorganism as a whole. Just as each brain cell within our body is nonsapient (not even sentient) by itself, all together form the brain, which is more than the sum of its parts.

Note that ants will never evolve independent thought on the individual level, because the workers don't need to think about themself. Humans are given their own personality per person, because each human carries its own genetic code and thus wants its DNA passed down to the next generation. Ants only work for the queen (and for the drones I guess). Independant thought, that means thought that serves the individual ant trather than the colony is counterproductive. Independent thinking ants would be like cancer cells.

Ants could evolve a new caste, one whose sole task is to coordinate the workers and soldiers by pheromones. Such a caste could create similar patters as brain cells, several caste individuals would be able to remember stuff. If you have thousands of those "thinker" ants they could probably solve relatively complicated problems.

The question is not if ants can reach sapience, but if the anthill can. Unfortunately anthills* are on the same evolutionary level of superorganisms as flatworms or similarly primitive invertebrates of organisms.

*Since the anthill is the true organism, we should probably start refering to colony-building ants as anthills. We don't say "human cells" to humans either, do we.
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El Squibbonator, I've started reading, and it's interesting.
Funny you should mention wasps, though...
Edited by Practically Uninformed, Mar 29 2010, 06:50 PM.
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