

Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment - outrightfree
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28658268

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Describing ant colonies as entities with a personality instantly reminded me
of the dialogues between the anteater and the ant hill in Godel Escher Bach.

In it, Hofstadter likens an ant colony to the human brain, and ants to neurons
in an attempt to explain how intelligence appears to be an emergent quality.

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harshreality
This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone at this point. Environmental and
inter-species signalling? Why would neurons communicating with each other in
the presence of external signalling inputs be any different, fundamentally,
than ants (with brains and neurons of their own, but not as many)
communicating with each other in the presence of external [environmental]
signalling inputs? There are scale differences but that's it. Aggressiveness
or passivity is not something you'd only expect to emerge from highly complex
biological signalling networks. If you can make people more peaceful by
putting them in drunk tank pink rooms, it's perfectly plausible that you could
find some things that make ant colonies more aggressive, and some things that
make them less aggressive.

