Week 11: 'I know... because I've counted all the ants''

Wonderdate: 2003

Wondered into being by: Evolution, plus Deborah Gordon

Wonderspan: 20 min (ooh, cheating)

To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

So this is a 20 minute wonder but I'm hoping that by 10 or 11 you'll be hooked.  If you're not, please accept my apologies as you return to your important work.

So, surely a social colony of any kind needs some kind of leadership - from an insect queen, for example, or a soviet of workers councils, or a David Cameron?  Well, ants manage with just a simple, constant instruction set, repeating over and over in each individual with no central control at all.

Deborah Gordon has watched ants for 20 years and finds that while an individual has very little of anything you could call cognitive ability (the queen included), as a colony they become intelligent problem-solvers.  The ants rely on patterns of contact with others in order to know what to do next, and that appears to be enough.  It's completely haphazard but because of their numbers (10,000 or so in a colony) the repeated pattern gets them all where they need to be... eventually.  So, no chief executive, no workers councils, no edicts or directives or commandments, no wavy-handy consensus decision-making, no hotline to God; for ants, anarchy works.

That said, every now and then one ant must turn to another and ask: 'Hey mate, do you know what it's all for?'

• http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants.html