You Gotta Love the Ants

Here's a nice clip of African driver ants and the mating ritual of the queen and males that fly up to the nest:



Oddly humans and ants are alike at some level: both are social animals that dominate their local ecology. Our cooperation is based on mammalian empathy with the added zest of an ape's ability to read other minds. Ants have none of this. Their social collaboration is built into their genes and runs blindly based on a small number of simple behaviours.

Edward O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology started his studies with ants. He has written some nice books on ants. And his great tome entitled Sociobiology that came out in the mid-1970s. His next big attempt at synthesis was his book Consilience. I bought the arguments of Sociobiology, but I'm less enthralled by those in Consilience.