Those People Look Like Ants From Up Here!

Just came across this article at Discovery News suggesting that recent research shows that human societies more closely resemble that of ants than any of our nearest evolutionary brethren. When you think about it, I suppose it's not too surprising. According to Mark Moffat, the author of the study in question:

With a maximum size of about 100, no chimpanzee group has to deal with issues of public health, infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies, mass transit problems, assembly lines and complex teamwork, agriculture and animal domestication, warfare and slavery. Ants have developed behaviors addressing all of these problems.

Some ant super-colonies number in the trillions, but that in itself isn't necessarily a problem. The real issue here, the article points out, is that "what makes such size and growth possible is that membership can be anonymous...[m]embers are not required to distinguish each other as individuals for a group to remain unified."

The same applies to human beings as well, though unlike ants -- who use primarily pheromones to bond into discrete societies -- we have language and symbols and cultural practice and behavior. Though I personally found the following conclusion quite chilling: "Anonymous membership means that both human and ant societies can grow as large as environmental conditions allow, although some researchers suggest that an ultra large society can implode."