Frazz by Jef Mallett for July 26, 2024

Well, the aspens are a single clone and the individual ants aren’t.

But I’ve always considered that the individual ants (and worker bees too for hives) are more like human skin cells: Useful and important but not individually: the loss of some of them doesn’t mean anything to the nest (or hive) which is what I think of as the real organism.

This is why the kids like you, Frazz(and Miss Plainwell, to a extent)!

20 quadrillion minds fewer, in fact (give or take). >

Isn’t a stand of bamboo a single organism?

Glad it’s Friday. Only one more day of scintillating dialogue

Speaking of trees, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, by Peter Wohlleben. Maybe not such a single organism after all? Great book, I must say.

Now, how bees seem to know what to do in every situation, amazes me.

Douglas Hofstadter, author of “Goedel, Escher, Bach”, devotes an entire chapter to this very proposition. He calls the organism Aunt Hillary.

Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” books occasionally mentioned “Hex,” a digital computer made from an ant colony. It was assembled by Ponder Stibbins, who was failing as a wizard because he was too good as an engineer.

As long as we’re plugging books, let me put in an excellent word for An Immense World, by Ed Yong. It’s about the way animals sense the world. It does indeed cover ants, termites, bees, and other colonial insects, and their perceptions and means of communication are intriguing.

Probably because they’re not a single brain, don’t act like one, and it’s another bad assumption.

Does the queen ant/bee mate with just one male? If yes, there would be 1/2 sisters.

If “great minds all thought alike”, there would not be any progress. It’s the oddballs and weirdos coming up with viewpoints challenging the current paradigm/consensus that move our understanding of the world forward.

Aunt Hillary (GEB)

And if you could just charge each ant at least $100 rent in your yard? Unreal….