Ants, live by intelligence or by instinct?

[Ayoungnerd]

I've a lot of time wondered that ants were intelligent beings gathering together to handle many tasks that one couldn't. And thought that one ants would be succsesers. But now, I consider a different theory. I've heard of a theory stating ants run all by instinct instead of intelligence.( This would also explain why ants work like clockwork)

[UncleAl]

How many neurons are in an ant's brain? How much does it weigh? What could such a processing unit do? Not much. Ants are hard-wired. They succeed by successive approximation, brute force, and by having a tremendous reproductive potential to fill in for bad mistakes.

[lindagarrette]

Until recently, I would have said that intelligence is pretty well limited to mamals but after seeing a Nova video on "origins," I'm not so sure. It struck me that cephalopods are pretty smart. Cuttlefish, for example analyze their surrounding material and modify their skin patterns to imitate it almost exactly. They don't just copy it, they create an appearance that makes them indistinguishable from the objects around them. The Nova scientists called tis ability intelligence. It involves the brain, a visual input system, and neural network of responders to produce the desired result.

 

Ants may not have grey matter but they do have a very sophisticated communication system that resembles a neural network. This could be considered a form of intelligence. It's more than just instinct.

[C1ay]

I think it's important to realize that there are different kinds of intelligence and maybe some that we haven't recognized yet. At a glance ants seem predetermined to do one thing but a show I saw recently kind of showed differently. It showed how most of the ants in the mound were raised to have one job or another based on needed antpower. Some would be nursery workers, some mound workers, some soldiers, some foragers, etc.. If the mound was attacked and suffered a big loss of soldiers some of the larvae that were being raised to become workers or foragers would suddenly be raised to become soldier replacements. I seem to remember them showing how the soldiers would develop different mandibles for the job at hand. It could be programmed by instinct but then again, it seems that some analysis is performed so the nursery knows what jobs are short handed and that indicates some kind of collective intelligence.

[Fishteacher73]

An ant is no good without its colony. Perhaps the "intelligence" is that of the group. One ant dumb, a colony can take down a whole lot. There are specific interactions and comunications that exists between the ants. Is it so hard to extrapolate out that the colony as a whole is essentailly an organism?

 

Termites relativisticlly speaking are far superior archtects than humans. A termite mound can easily be 6 feet tall. When compared to human standards that would be enormous. NOt to mention that they are ventilated, farmed, and cooled by design.

[Buffy]

An ant is no good without its colony. Perhaps the "intelligence" is that of the group. One ant dumb, a colony can take down a whole lot. There are specific interactions and comunications that exists between the ants. Is it so hard to extrapolate out that the colony as a whole is essentailly an organism?

Ah yup: that's the whole concept behind the character "Auntie Hill" in Doug Hofstadter's "Goedel, Escher and Bach"... one of the best science books ever written...

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[Qfwfq]

Yup, Doug compared the colony as a whole to a sort of a brain, with all the signals going around. How intelligent is one of our neurons by itself?

 

A colony of social insects is a very instinctive brain though, quite more instinctive than intelligent. All insects have involved very much in instinct and zero in intelligence. Insects appear to be totally incapable of learning from experience, which is imv quite a fundamental requisite to talk of intelligence. Their bahaviour, their reaction to a given stimulus depends on the genes and doesn't make use of previous experience.

 

This consideration might even apply to the clever cuttlefish, I'm not sure I would call that ability intelligence.

[Fishteacher73]

Most of the higher cephalapods(cuttlefish and octopi) are considered intelligent. Octopi have show the ability to learn through just visual observation and through trial and error of others. That would qualify as intelligence in my book (I know people that can not do that).

[Queso]

octopi are such amazing creatures. i agree, that is intelligence.

[lindagarrette]

Sometimes we relate to intelligence to development of technology, especially concerning ET since it would seem unlikely that we would be able to contact extraterrestrial intelligence unless they had long-distance communication. Maybe ETs are like cephalopods or dolphins or ants.:Alien:

[bumab]

I agree with LG- intellegence doesn't neccessarily relate to technology. Ants have not devloped technology, but they do interact similarly to neurons- not intellegent by itself, but pretty good as a collective. However, the lack of any ability to learn is a strike against ants being especially intellegent. Perhaps we could call them "clever" but not smart- they solve problems en mass and work well together, but they don't really learn from their mistakes.

 

Facinating little guys, though!