Man, give somebody an endoskeleton and a hundred years of evolution and they think they're the world's oyster. This anti-invertebrate chauvism will not stand!
I spent a few hours surfing the net getting my PhD-equivalent in entymology and it turns out that juvenile ants do learn. Apparently it is at that stage that they learn to distinguish nestmates and establish positions of dominance or submission relative to other ants. I never realized life in an ant colony was so fractious.
Interestingly, ants appear to be the only animals other than primates in which interactive teaching behavior has been observed. Also, and this is really cool, ants that prove to be bad at foraging are reassigned jobs inside the nest. "Worker 347X17B, you are a crappy forager. You are hereby reassigned to fixing tunnels." "Crap! Not a shit job!"
What would be really interesting is to learn if social insects have a historical memory, e.g., if the colony knows that a certain location was a good place to get food or slaves a couple of generations ago. (Jerry? Are you there?)
Insects are also very neurologically sophisticated, given all the complicated stuff they do and the tiny brain space they have for dealing with it.
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Larvae also aren't, as far as we can tell, learning
> much by way of experience in their larval stage, and
> while ants are probably semi-sentient, they are far
> far more hard-wired than humans. It's actually quite
> misleading to speak of them as "social" animals the
> way that humans and other primates or even pack
> animals like wolves or herd animals like sheep are
> social. And The Jungle Books aside, it's very
> questionable whether any non-primates have enough
> social complexity and neurological capacity to
> attain
> anything like what humans have in the way of
> self-consciousness. They may have some, if you buy
> Hegel's account of the early state of S-C as the
> self
> absorbing its object by literally eating it, but not
> much more than that.
>
> --- Charles Brown <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us>
> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >
> > Baby ants are totally helpless larvae that are
> > tended
> > by specialist nursing ants. They can't even move.
> >
> > ^^^^
> > CB: And they aren't babies nearly as long as
> humans
> > are, right ?
> >
> > ^^^^
> >
> > In fact now that I think of it IIRC juvenile ants
> > develop into whatever caste they develop into
> based
> > on
> > the current needs of the colony. Not only is their
> > behavior socially determined, their very biology
> is!
> >
> > ^^^^^
> > CB: Needs ? Biological needs, right ?
> >
> > (Yoo-hoo, Jerry Monaco...)
> >
> > --
> >
> > > Charles Brown charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
> >
> >
> > Ants are social for non-human animals, but not
> more
> > social than
> > humans. An ant can function almost from birth. A
> > human cannot function
> > on its own at birth. It need social care more than
> a
> > baby ant.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
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