The battle
Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, termite-hunting ants battle termites up to five times per day. The ants kill the termites and return them to their nest to be eaten later. Termite soldiers kill and wound many of the invading ants. So the ants have a multifaceted system that deals with injured individuals. It begins with an injured ant sending a pheromone call for help. This is a chemical secretion - similar to a scent - that other ants can detect.
Ant triage
Dr. Erik Frank, who is currently at the University of Lausanne but researched these ants at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, found that there are three facets to the system of care that these ants employ. It is similar to triage. First, an ant that has lost a limb in battle is carried back to the nest where another ant administers cleansing of the wound and some form of 'medication' using its mouth parts. Second, ants that are heavily injured in battle do not attempt to send the pheromone call for help. And third, ants that are lightly injured were observed 'acting' more injured than they really are in the name of providing incentive for others to pick them up and return them to the safety of the nest.
The purpose
Termite-hunting ants live in colonies of one to two-thousand ants, which is relatively small. They also have a very low birth-rate, so it is important for the colony that as many individuals survive as possible. The injured ants learn to run on fewer limbs so they can return to battle termites again. Even though this behaviour is similar to human medical care, in this ant species it has nothing to do with empathy or cognition; social wound treatment in termite-hunting ants is derived from evolutionary selection.
Of course it was that last series of claims that jumped out at me, both in listening and in what was printed. The first question is how in the world would they know what is being described "has nothing to do with empathy or cognition" and how do they know it is derived from "evolutionary selection" by which is meant, of course natural selection.
There is certainly no way for any scientist to know how ants see or experience their lives and behavior, everything that human beings can conclude about that isn't from the ants, it's a human explanation of what they're looking at. Someone being indoctrinated in mainstream biology doesn't remove some kind of veil to direct understanding of that, it imposes a bias as to what is being seen. There isn't any way to remove such biases, if it were not that of conventional neo-Darwinism, it would be whatever other set of conventions that are there in its place. So the attribution of non-empathy is an ideological claim, not a scientific one. The scientific claim would be that there is no way for a human being to discern such a thing. It's hard to impossible to discern such things within human beings. The attempts of the pseudo-sciences to define and classify human thoughts and emotions is fraught with all kinds of problems, to think you could begin to discern the experience of an ant is ridiculous.
Even more absurd is the claim that what the ants are doing has nothing to do with cognition. The claims of the scientist, themselves, refute that. If the behavior of the ants is a product of their perceptions of the pheromone signals, they would have to be conscious of perceiving those, their decision to take the complex actions he describes, appropriate to the circumstances, producing a beneficial result for the individuals and the colony obviously are explained in human terms only by the consciousness of the individuals involved based on their perceptions of circumstances. That is especially obvious in his claim that individuals which are too seriously injured to be savable don't send out the signal and in "lightly injured" individuals sending out the signal to be helped
You have to wonder how this research was carried out, how accurately and adequately described the actual facts are, how much of what was seen by the researcher(s) might have been discounted and how many events which would not fit into their hypothesis were thrown out as "outliers" or "anomalous". I don't have answers to these last questions but they're something you need to know before you can judge even "science" done about human behavior, nevermind animal behavior in which the individuals tested can't testify as to their own perceptions and experiences. I have to wonder if they ever even take these things into account or if science reporters ever think to ask such questions.
The conclusion of the researchers aren't a matter of anything rigorous enough to deserve the name "science" it is a ideological assertion based on a perception of events presented in a specific ideological framing. That's always the case when such sciency assertions are made about behavior which is too complex to really be subjected to the methods of science. Of that I am very certain, far more certain than the claims made about ant behavior and, especially, ant consciousness.
I like Quirks and Quarks but this stuff is bull shit.
-------------------------
Also of interest is this lecture that Ros Barber did about the pseudo-scientific character of "stylometrics," as a means of determining authorship of literary pieces. It's a complex topic, mostly made complex by the wildly ridiculous and varied claims, the totally wacky series of "methodologies" that the would-be "stylometricians" use to, as she and I suspect, get the results they want to get. Her point alone that the methodology, first developed to make claims about the frequency of letter pairs in English was irrationally extended to words (without any demonstration that it was meaningful) and that even the "experts" in the practice claim that you need samples of at least 5,000 words to determine anything of any validity. In short, the literary works are generally too short (scenes, acts, even entire plays or poems) to even begin to make claims about it. You might want to consider that the next time you come across the claims about authorship from the "science of stylometrics."
Ant cognition is, first, based on the assumption of Cartesian dualism, that animals lack "souls" and therefore lack compassion, self-awareness, etc. It's pretty much a Christian idea which Descartes took up so he didn't get in trouble with the church. Like the Big Bang, emanating from a Jesuit, the irony is hilarious, even as science continues to be misguided by it.
ReplyDeleteThe "stylometric" idea is one I've always considered a dodge, based on the fact most of us are not well schooled enough in statistics (nor, for that matter, in formal logic) to recognize the fallacies in the reasoning. I never see it "in use" except in vague articles about how some long dead writer probably wrote this otherwise anonymous stuff. If forgers can create paintings that fool experts, why can't students or a writer produce work that sounds like the master, and fool even a "statistic analysis."
As if the latter were an unvarying thing applied to data to produce an absolutely correct result. I know enough about analytics to know that's an idea held by the ignorant. I don't need any training in statistics to question the concept of "stylometrics," though I imagine a statistician could take it apart rather nicely (not unlike the people who claimed primates learned sign language, based on the fact most of us don't know ASL. Experts in American Sign Language pointed out the primates were signing gibberish or worse, but who listened? Never did mean any other creature than humans uses language, but people still think that's not a uniquely human characteristic. Mostly because they don't understand the linguistic definition of "language" that applies.)