Convergent evolution, that process that makes the Australian marsupial Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) look like the placental gray (timber) wolf (Canis lupus), has paired us with army ants. No, we don’t look alike. We don’t pair up the way those two “wolves” pair or the way a wombat (Vombatus ursinus) and a woodchuck (Marmota monax) pair in appearance. Nothing in our appearances makes us, the self-proclaimed apex of social mammals, look like ants, those joint-legged social insects. But we seem to have evolved a similar behavior in our penchant for acting and thinking en masse.
You might be thinking, “This guy’s sitting on the branch he’s sawing between him and the trunk of sanity. Ants and people. No way. Army ants are famous for their mass raids in which thousands, even tens of thousands of ants, go off to find and devour anything and everything edible. That’s why they are nomadic. Once they clear an area of its edibles, they move to eat. Some of those colonies have as many ants as there are people in big cities. And look, people in cities aren’t nomads. They’re pretty much fixed in place because food comes to them.”
Yes, food does go into human colonies with millions of residents. But that doesn’t stop local mass raids on grocery stores, gas stations, and hardware stores in times of crisis. Did you try to buy toilet paper at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic? Have you tried to buy food or generators just before a hurricane hits? Did you wander down aisles of empty shelves in the local grocery store?
Army ants (genus Dorylus, for example) just clean out the local “grocery store” and move on; they don’t have the wherewithal to create a worldwide supply chain that fosters a stay-at-home human colony. So, you’re probably having difficulty seeing much similarity in humans and ants. But what if we take away the mass raids for food and supplant them with mass raids for thinking, for thoughts, for ideas?
Look how people respond to any bit of news and rumor. En masse thought raids occur almost daily in social media. They are the essence of chat rooms. And those thought raids can manifest themselves in ant-like actual raids, the mob violence that periodically disrupts societies, now much of it promulgated by some “scout” that carries a message to a Web-colony.
Isn’t there a hint of convergent evolution in episodes of looting? Aren’t the human army ants making the local area untenable for further habitation? Isn’t the ultimate result an abandoned neighborhood, a slum, an economic death zone?
And isn’t the mass behavior also responsible for disrupting and even destroying the lives of the local human organisms? Aren’t relentless social attacks by the masses responsible for ruining lives? And don’t many of those attacks stem from something a single person says? Army ants in the genus Dorylus send out scouts that return with a pheromone trail to the food they found. The colony then follows that trail en masse. The raid begins. There’s a parallel, if you want to look. There’s a convergence, also. Want proof? Read the tabloids. Listen to the politicians. Watch the pundits on TV. Look for those instances in which not only the thoughts but also the very language in which they are expressed are as uniform as a colony of foraging army ants.
Mass raids are mass raids. Our physical mass raids don’t differ in kind from those of the ants. Our mental mass raids might differ in kind from those of the army ants, but they are still mass raids that destroy everything in their path. We don’t just clear the area of food; in a convergent or parallel behavior we share with army ants, we destroy all the food for thought in our paths.
You might be thinking, “This guy’s sitting on the branch he’s sawing between him and the trunk of sanity. Ants and people. No way. Army ants are famous for their mass raids in which thousands, even tens of thousands of ants, go off to find and devour anything and everything edible. That’s why they are nomadic. Once they clear an area of its edibles, they move to eat. Some of those colonies have as many ants as there are people in big cities. And look, people in cities aren’t nomads. They’re pretty much fixed in place because food comes to them.”
Yes, food does go into human colonies with millions of residents. But that doesn’t stop local mass raids on grocery stores, gas stations, and hardware stores in times of crisis. Did you try to buy toilet paper at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic? Have you tried to buy food or generators just before a hurricane hits? Did you wander down aisles of empty shelves in the local grocery store?
Army ants (genus Dorylus, for example) just clean out the local “grocery store” and move on; they don’t have the wherewithal to create a worldwide supply chain that fosters a stay-at-home human colony. So, you’re probably having difficulty seeing much similarity in humans and ants. But what if we take away the mass raids for food and supplant them with mass raids for thinking, for thoughts, for ideas?
Look how people respond to any bit of news and rumor. En masse thought raids occur almost daily in social media. They are the essence of chat rooms. And those thought raids can manifest themselves in ant-like actual raids, the mob violence that periodically disrupts societies, now much of it promulgated by some “scout” that carries a message to a Web-colony.
Isn’t there a hint of convergent evolution in episodes of looting? Aren’t the human army ants making the local area untenable for further habitation? Isn’t the ultimate result an abandoned neighborhood, a slum, an economic death zone?
And isn’t the mass behavior also responsible for disrupting and even destroying the lives of the local human organisms? Aren’t relentless social attacks by the masses responsible for ruining lives? And don’t many of those attacks stem from something a single person says? Army ants in the genus Dorylus send out scouts that return with a pheromone trail to the food they found. The colony then follows that trail en masse. The raid begins. There’s a parallel, if you want to look. There’s a convergence, also. Want proof? Read the tabloids. Listen to the politicians. Watch the pundits on TV. Look for those instances in which not only the thoughts but also the very language in which they are expressed are as uniform as a colony of foraging army ants.
Mass raids are mass raids. Our physical mass raids don’t differ in kind from those of the ants. Our mental mass raids might differ in kind from those of the army ants, but they are still mass raids that destroy everything in their path. We don’t just clear the area of food; in a convergent or parallel behavior we share with army ants, we destroy all the food for thought in our paths.
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