COMPLEX multicomponent societies rely principally on communication. Researchers suggest that evidence of 100 million years of communication gives us a deeper insight into the evolution of ant sociality.

Emergent properties of groups occur when many things interact to produce effects that are not seen in the case of the isolated individual element.

From simple things like waves and crystals, to complex ones like swarms and consciousness, these effects are ubiquitous. 

In a world that evolves in the direction of increased complexity, considering what sort of emergent properties will or could occur becomes ever more important.

From the perspective of political worldviews that value collective action, an understanding of emergent properties and collective effects is particularly compelling.

As we’ve written about before, the study of ants is one way that humans have found to think about the problems and benefits of collective and individual action.

Although the study of ants can be interpreted to suit any political or philosophical argument, examining  the myriad social organisations that are found in different ant species is fascinating as fuel for organisational imagination.

Ants are eusocial insects, meaning that they live together in large groups, and have specialised roles within the colony. Some colonies consist of millions of ants.

Although emergent properties occur in assemblies of many different kinds of “elements,” those in groups of living organisms are propelled to special phenomena through the flow of energy
into the system.

Put simply, organisms can do things with energy, and their choices and the communication between them shapes the emergent properties.

We can compare this complex situation to, for example, a pile of sand. Sand also produces emergent properties — large collections of sand act differently to individual elements by themselves — but much of this can be understood by looking at simple physical properties and basic forces.

Not so with ants.

It is these two features — the input of energy, and the structuring through “intelligence or instruction” — that makes the emergent properties of societies of living organisms particularly
fascinating and distinct.

As previously popularised by the quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger in his book What is Life, in the case of groups of living organisms, disorder decreases on a local scale. This is because the interaction between elements (which consist of molecules, through to organisms themselves, and the parts of the world they interact with) allows for these elements to increase in order.

The focus on this unusual feature of living things is often on the intelligence of the individual actors.

Intelligence arises from its own complex system of interacting elements on a smaller scale – that of cells. In fact, communication between the elements has a good claim to being the more vital organising principle.

Communication comes in many different forms: sound, movement, colour changes and smells – which is the transfer of molecules between living organisms.

Often multiple channels of communication occur occurring at  the same time. The study of interacting systems was developed in the 1950s as cybernetics, which originated in interdisciplinary
discussion between psychologists, anthropologists and engineers.

The term “cyber” is more clearly associated with computer science nowadays, due to splits in the field leading to the development of other fields of research, including those of computer networks and artificial intelligence.

Understanding how communication between animals developed in the distant past is difficult.

Messages are generally transient; the sound, colour, movement and smell that organisms produce in a moment of communication more often than not evaporate with time.

In fact, it’s plausible that this transience contributes to the effectiveness of communication, by allowing dynamic changes in messaging, rather than letting past messages hang around
to interrupt the present.

This is the difficulty faced by biologists interested in the development of early communication in animals during evolution.

Historians are able to find clues about the messages and the
capacity for communication of some parts of some past human societies, through preserved written records and other artefacts.

Unlike historians, evolutionary biologists have very little
to work with – mostly fossils of the animals’ bodies themselves.

A recent piece of work reported in Science Advances claims to show evidence of complex communication in ants from 100 million years ago.

They looked at the antennae of ants trapped in amber, and found that they have “sensilla” — hairs with neurons inside. Further,  
these sensilla, with their distinctive shapes and locations, are shared with modern ants.

The earliest ant fossils that have been found are from around 105 million years ago, which would indicate that much of the highly developed communication ability in modern ants was
present in their very early ancestors.

These ants evolved from solitary wasps, but, the study’s authors claim, the evidence that they had such highly developed sensory organs shows that they were already eusocial insects.

They say that the need for complicated sensing organs, some of which are extremely close in anatomy to the sensory organs of
modern ants, showed that they were already co-ordinating with many other ants in colonies.

There are a number of issues with the claim. The most pressing, which the authors address in their article, is that there aren’t as many fossils of ants from the earlier part of the 100 million years of subsequent ant evolution as you would expect if they were living in large groups.

The researchers propose that ants may have been living in small groups of dozens rather than thousands of individuals.

Another problem is a political one: the ants that were studied here were trapped in amber from Myanmar. Amber is a major export of Myanmar, and since 2014, there has been an explosion in the number of papers on the beautiful fossils found in Myanmar amber.

This research has, in all but a handful of cases, been done by researchers outside of the country and the research we are discussing here is no exception.

The boom in research is also synchronised with the takeover of amber mines by Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, who are engaged in fighting the world’s longest running ongoing civil war.

Exporting fossils from Myanmar was made illegal in 2015; however, amber’s use as a gemstone has been used to cover its large-scale export, especially to China.

Unlike in many areas, where the political context of science research is overlooked, the tight connections between amber research and the ongoing civil war has worried some researchers and journals.

Some journals no longer publish research on amber exported since 2015. The authors say that the amber in this research was purchased ‘legally” from “state-licensed dealers” it was exported from Myanmar between 1999 and 2010, and not after the ban on fossil exports.

However, like most other Myanmar amber it came from the state of Kachin, a site of armed conflict since the 1960s.

The structures of science that allow us to uncover features of ant societies are emergent properties of human societies. Researchers should ensure that in studying one type of society, they are not neglecting their awareness of the other.