On Ants, Humans, and the Challenge of Conflict Resolution

E.O. Wilson is a Harvard biologist, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author, and the world’s leading authority on ants. As this article explains, he believes that human civilizations and ant civilizations have much in common. In some respects, that’s encouraging. Ant civilizations are communitarian in some very positive ways. For example, ants who have had enough food regurgitate the excess to provide food for the less fortunate. But in many other ways, ant civilizations behave in ways that reflect the negative dimensions of group selection that seem increasingly prevalent among the human species. Ants are ruthless to group outsiders, singling out for death individuals with the slightest scent of another colony. They depend for survival on continual population and productivity growth. And ant colonies regularly engage in battles to-the-death with other ant colonies, ending only when one group achieves total domination over the other.

All of that sounds a lot like the politics of group identity that seems to be flourishing both here and abroad. Wilson’s analogy, if true, leads to the conclusion that this is an inevitable state of affairs and that it can only end badly. But of course, what the ant analogy cannot account for is the possibility that humans will overcome their sociobiology (assuming such a thing exists—a big assumption). We have the potential to do peaceful intergroup conflict resolution. Ants don’t. We have rationally backed away from mutual destruction at times in the past (the Cuban missile crisis comes to mind) and we can do so again. We have assimilated divergent cultural and ethnic groups before, and we can do so again. We may be like ants in lots of ways, but it seems to me we may be unlike ants in the ways that matter the most. I certainly hope so.

2 thoughts on “On Ants, Humans, and the Challenge of Conflict Resolution”

  1. The following sentence in the article “Ants are ruthless to group outsiders, singling out for death individuals with the slightest scent of another colony” brought to my mind an episode of 20/20 that covered the issue of bullying in our schools. When a reporter asked two bullies about how they choose their “prey,” they responded that they would bully anybody who was different from them in any way, whether it was wearing different clothes or being shy, smart, pretty….those bullies would find a reason.
    The episode also featured a Milwaukee school that tries to resolve such conflicts by involving teachers. Teachers talk to the bullies and ask them to write down the reasons why they have attacked their school mates. They say that this technique works by making bullies think about what they have done and how their actions affect everybody around them. After all, unlike ants, we can think and evaluate our actions.

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