The prominent biologist E.O. Wilson (1929-2021) was perhaps best-known for his studies of ants. His 1990 book with evolutionary biologist Bert Hölldobler, The Ants, won the Pulitzer prize for General Non-Fiction in 1991. They then followed up in 1994 with a more “popular science” (that is, easier to read for nonspecialists) book called Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration. In the opening chapter, they write:
Our passion is ants, and our scientific discipline is myrmecology. Like all myrmecologists–there are no more than five hundred in the world–we are prone to view the Earth’s surface idiosyncratically, as a network of ant colonies. We carry a global map of these relentless little insects in our heads. … The abundance of ants is legendary. … The British entomologist C.B. Williams once calculated that the number of insects alive on the earth at a given moment is one million trillion (1018). If, to take a conservative figure, 1 percent of this host is ants, their total population is ten thousand trillion. Individual workers weigh on average between 1 and 5 milligrams, according to the species. When combined, all ants in the world taken together weigh about as much as all human beings. But being so finely divided into tiny individuals, this biomass saturates the terrestrial environment. …
How have ants and other social insects come to lord over the terrestrial environment? In our opinion their edge come directly from their social nature. … The most advanced social insects, those forming the biggest and most complicated societies, have attained this rank through a combination of three biological traits: the adults care for the young; two or more generations of adults live together in the same nest; and the members of each colony are divided into a reproductive “royal” caste and a nonreproductive “worker” caste. …
In our view, the competitive edge that led to the rise of the ants as a world-dominant group is their highly developed, self-sacrificial colonial existence. It would appear that socialism really works in some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.
The comment about Marx is just a throwaway line for Hölldobler and Wilson. Their discussion immediately refocuses on ants. But it had enough of an edge to give me a smile.
