"Humans can get a glimpse into the future of human society from the activity of observing ants." —Kevin Kelly
Recently, biologist Mark M. Mark W. Moffett's new book, From Tribe to Nation: The Rise, Prosperity, and Decline of Human Society, was introduced and published by CITIC Publishing House. This is Mark S. W. Moffitt's fourth book, written and published, combines new discoveries in the fields of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and history, providing a new perspective on the nature of society from a broad research perspective.
Mark M W. Moffitt is a tropical biologist, research assistant at the Smithsonian Institution, and a visiting scholar in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He was hailed by National Geographic as "Indiana Jones of the Insect Kingdom." This is the fourth book he has written and published.
Kevin Kelly, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of The Inevitable, gave a high rating after reading From Tribe to Empire, saying: "This is a book full of amazing ideas, and many of the author's ideas are unexpected. These amazing stories about animal societies told by Mark Moffitt lead me to believe that humans can glimpse the future of human society from the activity of observing ants. If you want to change your mind and get into some fresh ideas, read this inspiring book. ”
Mark M W. Moffitt writes in the book: "When I first walked into the rainforest as a young man, what attracted me most was not monkeys, parrots or orchids, although they were also attractive, but some leaves cut into the size of coins, carried by a group of ants as flags, and these ants were actually 1 foot 1 wide and the length of a football field!" You don't have to read entomology to like ants. We modern humans may be genetically closer to chimpanzees and bonobos, but the animals most similar to us are ants. By comparing the many similarities between humans and ants, we can learn more about the history of complex societies and how they have evolved. ”
From examining the ant empire to analyzing the logic of human social development
Despite human fear of outsiders, why did our societies develop on a scale as massive as the Mayan civilization or the United States? Why can societies maintain their independent status, but they cannot avoid the fate of gradual decline and extinction?
Imagine the following scenario: In an airport crowded with strangers waiting quietly, if it is not a human, but a chimpanzee, panic is inevitable, and even bloody killings are likely to occur. How does humanity manage to be in the same room with a complete stranger?
Anthropologists have long sought answers to the development of human society by conducting research on chimpanzees. In this book, biologist Mark M. W. Moffitt examines an unexpected creature: ants. In a society of ants, each individual is a stranger to each other, but these little guys have achieved a lot of amazing things together.
From Tribe to Nation: The Rise, Prosperity, and Decline of Human Society, by observing, analyzing, and summarizing the basic principles that keep anonymous societies alive, it reveals how humans interact and multiply based on common traits, such as clothing, gestures, accents, beliefs, and other group identity markers.
The following is an excerpt from From Tribe to State: The Rise, Prosperity and Decline of Human Society:
Ant slavery society and commodity circulation
Comparing the same things can be overwhelmingly boring. Comparisons are most effective when people notice similarities between ideas, things, or behaviors that are often seen as different.
And this applies to our study of slavery in ants, where individual ants had to work hard against their will in another colony, which was different from the way the Americans practiced slavery and the treatment of prisoners of war by the ancient Greeks.
The slavemaking ants used ants to identify their slaves with odors, allowing them to provide services to their societies. Slave ants will invade other nests in a big way, usually choosing the nests of other species of ants as targets. Ants that have grown up in other nests are of no use to slave ants, because these adult ants are out-and-out nationalists who would rather die than accept the rule of the enemy.
As a result, slave ants will catch the young ants in the colony and they especially prefer the pupae in it, which is a dormant stage that the larvae must go through before they become ants, at this time, the ants have not yet produced social odors. A kidnapped ant that appears in a nest of slave ants—not at all aware of anything wrong—takes the social smell around it as its "social marker" and dutifully works for it, not caring about the difference in size or color between itself and the slave ant.
Think again about the distribution of goods and services. Human beings exhibit all kinds of differences here: under different social systems, societies deal with problems differently. Ants, on the other hand, have their own solutions.
In the society of the red imported fire ant, the flow of goods is regulated according to existing stocks and specific needs, which reflects the relationship between supply and demand in a market economy.
Worker ants monitor the nutritional needs of other adult and juvenile ants and adjust their commodity supply according to specific situations. In a nest filled with food, the reconnaissance ants and their assistants climb into the buyer's nest and spit out the food they have eaten for the other party to taste, in this way to sell goods to the buyer.
And these buyers, in turn, roam the nests, peddling food to any other member who needs it. If these middlemen find that customers are interested in meat (perhaps just insect carcasses), they will try their best to search the market for other goods until they may eventually find a seller who can provide themselves with something to offer, such as some kind of sugary food, and thus expand their sales channels. When the market is oversupplied and sellers can't peddle goods, buyers and sellers alike will do other work or take advantage of the opportunity to sneak around and take a nap.
"Mushroom" grower
Leafcutter ants, which live in the tropical regions of the Americas, have a more complex society than any other animal.
They carry out large-scale agricultural production in their nests, with flag-like green leaves being broken down into a matrix, while ants grow their own food crops on it, an indoor fungus. Ants plant the fungus in spherical gardens, ranging in size and size from baseball to soccer balls.
What makes the leafcutter ant story even more striking is that their evolutionary approach to agricultural practice is very similar to that of humans. As genetic analysis of ants and their growing fungi reveals, the ancestors of leafcutter ants began dabbling in horticulture 60 million years ago. They grow wild fungi in small gardens. In fact, they resemble smaller human societies in many ways: they often grow wild species derived from nature, and grow only what they need on small plots of land near humble dwellings. Long before the advent of Homo sapiens 20 million years ago, some members of these easily overlooked ants learned to grow fungi — depending, of course, on the careful care of the ants.
However, after such a modification, these fungi do not need to grow in the wild, but can be cultivated in large quantities on an incredible scale. As a result, the number of members of ant societies soared, just as human societies experienced after they began to produce agriculturally based on food cultivation in places like the Nile Valley.
Ant also has a three-lane highway
Leaf-cutting ant colonies can be large in size. For example, in the jungles of French Guiana, I once stumbled upon an ant nest the size of a tennis court. Their nests are made up of long tunnels, some of which go down at least 6 metres underground. If converted according to human units of measurement, these subway systems of ants are equivalent to being located 100 kilometers underground.
Such a large, metropolis-like ant nest has the same drawbacks as a human city: transporting the necessary supplies into it means a difficult and heavy commute.
Each year, the worker ants transport hundreds of pounds of fresh leaves along six "highways" from remote corners around the large nests. In some parts of the world, people are used to driving on the left, and in other places they are used to driving on the right. On the busy routes of the Asian marauder ants colony, the lines of traffic into the nest are along the center of the highway, while the outgoing ants travel along the sides of the highway, a three-lane mode of transportation that has never been tried by human society.
But both models show how important it is to get goods and services safely and efficiently where they need when the number of people who depend on goods and services is enormous, and they are not or even impossible to go out foraging.
Nandu reporter Zhu Rongting intern Qiu Xiaolin