Because it’s high time we stopped anthropomorphizing ants

Pollution makes many cities uninhabitable for their human inhabitants, but it also divides families and communities. Ants recognize each other by sniffing the thin layer of hydrocarbons on the outside of their exoskeletons; each colony has a specific “smell”. But see you soon studies reveals that ozone emissions can change the structure of these hydrocarbons. After ants roam around in relatively typical urban air with 100 parts per billion of ozone, their nestmates no longer see them as allies. Some are attacked by their own families. Others neglect the larvae that are exposed to ozone and let them die.

If you consider that there are roughly 20 quadrillion ants on Earththat means Homo sapiens he figured out how to produce homewrecking on an unimaginable scale.

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? This is because the story I just told you is a case of anthropomorphism, or the projection of human characteristics onto non-human creatures, likening ant colonies to human families. Although many scientists reject anthropomorphism as misleading, others like to draw parallels between ants and humans as a way to explain the evolution of everything from altruism to social networks.

Famously, entomologist EO Wilson used ants as evidence for his “sociobiology” theory, which suggests that most animal behavior is the result of evolutionary necessity. Wilson argued that by observing how biology drives ant behavior, we could learn a lot about it biology also shaped human achievement and progress.

The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most outspoken critics of Wilson’s ideahe called it “biological determinism” and warned that it could lead to eugenic social policy or worse. The conflict over the role of biology in human society continues in academia today, although sociobiology is now generally referred to as evolutionary psychology.

But something fundamental has changed in the way scientists talk about ants. Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University who studies ants, discovered in the early 2000s that ant behavior is algorithmic. She spent years studying carpenter ants, among other species, and eventually began working with colleagues in computer science to explain the way ants assign tasks in their colonies using what are effectively distributed signaling networks. If a worker ant discovers a giant pile of sugar, for example, it leaves behind a pheromone trail that other ants can follow. As she returns to the nest, she meets other ants who sniff her out and discover that she has found far more food than one individual can carry. They make a quick calculation and realize that more harvesters are needed and drop what they are doing to join the ants gathering sugar.

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Algorithmic determinism has replaced biological determinism, but the result for the ants is still the same
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There is no single leader or group of managers ordering the ants to change tasks. They do this simply by communicating with each other, individual by individual, passing on the message of recruiting workers until the task is completed. Gordon called this process “internet“, because it resembles the way distributed computer networks allocate bandwidth for data transmission. But rather than allocating bandwidth, ants allocate, well, ants.

Gordon’s work seems to represent a dramatic shift from Wilson’s—after all, she compares ants to computers rather than humans. And yet we live in a time when AI companies are betting billions that the human mind can be replicated by software algorithms. Algorithmic determinism has replaced biological determinism, but the result for the ants is still the same. People use them as analogies for the behavior of other animals, but often don’t appreciate them for their own, unique ants.

Which brings me back to the study of how human pollution disrupts the ability of ants to recognize each other. Gordon’s internet depends on ants from the same colony meeting, exchanging information, and then calculating whether they need to help their sisters with a task. However, when the ozone causes the hydrocarbons on the ants’ bodies to oxidize, the sister colonies no longer recognize each other. They cannot coordinate work. This could lead to the death of the colony.

Doesn’t sound like a big deal to a human. We don’t sniff each other’s bodies to see if we need to gather food or take care of babies. We do not operate in large, distributed networks of women who collectively care for each other and their homes. But we live on the same planet as wild, wonderful animals. And if we don’t limit ozone, we could destroy their societies. Maybe it’s time we stop using ants as an analogy for ourselves and our machines and start looking at who they really are.

What am I reading?
HG Wells war of the worlds where the Martians are cybernetic vampires (no really, they are).

What am I watching?
my life is murder a delightfully corny detective series starring Lucy Lawless.

What I’m working on
Find housing in a new (for me) city.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and writer. Their latest book is Automatic noodles. They co-host a Hugo-winning podcast Our opinions are correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com