It was just a tiny drop of lychee squash, but for the ants that had clustered around it, it was pure nectar. Those at the front of the queue drank deeply, with their front legs raised and swaying in a paroxysm of ant-ecstasy. The ranks behind, struggled frantically forward, their way blocked until a front-liner backed away, replete, and a new ant could take its place.
Ants in the kitchen is a common phenomenon. When an army of ants invaded our Cupertino kitchen, we waged chemical warfare on them. We won battle after battle, but lost the war. A few weeks of peace would ensue and then one day we would wake up to find a new trail of ants winding across the passage floor and into the kitchen.
The ants that live in our Bombay kitchen are tiny; befitting the minuscule size of the kitchen. They live behind a crack in the wall and have easy and direct access to the kitchen working surface. My wife has come to terms with them and we live in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. In Bombay she lives closer to her Jain religion's tennets. Jainism rejects violence of all forms; including any action that could harm any living being, however small and insignificant. Our kitchen ants are about 1.5 millimeters long (say one sixteenth of an inch). That's just pretty close to the limit where you stop noticing things, even if they fall into your soup.
Looking down on such a minute creature makes you think. Firstly the size difference is staggering; I am more than a thousand times taller than my ant co-habitants. That would make me perhaps a billion times heavier. Maybe more; my wife keeps insisting that I have put on weight. I pride myself on being a fair bit smarter, too. After all, we creatures of the species Homo Sapiens are not known for our modesty. How much smarter is a good question. I am not sure I even know how I would go about estimating the IQ of an ant. Much of their smartness is hard-wired -- what we call instinct. Individual ants aren't too bright at tackling new situations. Teams of ants somehow transcend the individuals' abilities. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I should be comparing the intelligence of the ant colony, not individual ants.
The idea of a colony as an intelligent super-organism is not new. Douglas Hofstadter in Ant Fugue (from his brilliant book Gödel, Escher,Bach) has the Anteater talk about Aunt Hillary, a colony of ants that the Anteater claims to spend many happy hours in conversation with. He likens the ants of the colony to neurons in our brain. At the ant level, they simply run around in panic when the Anteater comes near them. Aunt Hillary -- she's not anyone's aunt, "but the poor dear insists that everyone calls her that" -- exists only at the colony level. Of course, Aunt Hillary, like the Anteater is just a product of Hofstadter's fertile imagination. Ant colonies are not intelligent at the conversational level. Not the one in our kitchen. Nor any other I have encountered.
But could an ant colony be intelligent? Is there any reason why a race of Nietzschean super-ants couldn't develop? Could that self-satisfied, smug race that calls itself Homo Sapiens one day find itself outsmarted by an ant colony? A colony might develop specialised brain-ants. It would also would have to develop long term memory that would survive the lifetimes of individual ants. Perhaps there would be some process of training for replacement ants so that they would fit into their alloted rôle? The pressure of evolution hasn't pressed ant colonies into that direction yet, apparently.
Then again, maybe we just wouldn't recognise intelligence in an ant colony. Our ideas of alien intelligence, as witnessed by comic books and films, is firmly modelled on us. Such aliens may look grotesque, but they are scary just because they are distorted images of ourselves. The only alien intelligence that I can bring to mind that broke totally from the classic swolen-head-and-tentacles mold was Fred Hoyle's black cloud from the book of the same name. Interestingly, it was also a sort of super-organism made out of the individual particles of the cloud.
Is there intelligence out there? Is there some ant colony that has developed so far that it is, even as you read this page, pondering over the final solution to the problem of those troublesome Homo Sapiens creatures? I think not. Not yet, anyway.
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