Queen in name only

Ants don't organise themselves as you might think. Although kings and queens do have fixed, specific roles, there's little or no evidence that this is true for the rest.

The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, ant societies are in fact organised not by division of labour but by a distributed process, in which an ant’s social role is a response to interactions with other ants. In brief encounters, ants use their antennae to smell one another, or to detect a chemical that another ant has recently deposited.

In the great majority (about 276 of 326) of genera of ants, all the ants in a colony are the same size. Moreover, regardless of size, as ant workers get older, they move from one task to another, switching tasks as circumstances require... Though the largest ants are often designated as ‘soldiers’, in fights between ant species the smaller species often prevails. A large ant, for example, is helpless if six tiny ones grab each of its legs. In some species in the genus Pheidole, the large-headed ‘soldiers’ show no military inclinations; instead they tend to stay in the nest and use their large jaw muscles to crack seeds. But if there are not enough small ants to go outside and forage, the larger ones will do the same tasks as the smaller ones. 

For example, in harvester ants, colonies regulate foraging activity, adjusting the numbers of ants currently out searching for seeds to the amount of food available. An outgoing forager does not leave the nest until it meets enough returning foragers coming back with food. This creates a simple form of positive feedback: the more food is available, the more quickly foragers find it, and the more quickly they return to the nest, eliciting more foraging.  Each encounter, in the form of a brief antennal contact, has no meaning to the ant, but in the aggregate, the rate of encounters determines how many ants are currently foraging.

Distributed processes and division of labour can both be effective, but they don’t function in the same way. For division of labour, specialisation can lead to better work. By contrast, in a distributed process, the fact that individuals are interchangeable makes the whole system more robust and more resilient...  Most fathers might not be as good at changing diapers as most mothers but, at 3am, the finer points of technique don’t matter. If anyone changes the diaper, the baby goes back to sleep.

The differences between networks (horizontal distribution) and hierarchies (vertical distribution) are quite nicely explored in Niall Ferguson's The Square And The Tower. I think the author of this piece has things a bit muddled though :

Plato favoured the horizontal form, in which a single actor performs each task. Adam Smith preferred the vertical, in which different people accomplish parts of a single task. Henry Ford extended and expanded the vertical form in the flow of work in a factory.

That just seems like different degrees of specialisation to me, rather than different types. Plato, not having the concept of an assembly line, proposed that one worker should do one "job", whereas in an assembly line they do one even more specific "task" continuously. The very first Google result for "vertical and horizontal division of labour" tells me that Smith preferred a so-called "vertical" distribution, not a horizontal one. Then things get even more confused with distribution of power versus labour.

I'm not sure this terminology is particularly helpful. The point would seem to be in the degree of specialisation/flexibility and the degree of authority. In a truly "flat" network system, everyone can do every job and everyone makes their own decisions about what to do : every man is an island. In a totally un-flat (feudal) system, workers can only do one single myopic task and their actions are governed entirely by their superiors, whose actions are in turn governed by their superiors, and so on up to the king.

But does examining an ant colony tell us anything useful regarding human societies ?

Switching tasks, either in stages of life or in the short term, is not consistent with organisation by division of labour. However appealing it might be to imagine ant colonies organised by division of labour, the evidence tells us they are not.

Ants can show how distributed processes might allow us to adjust to a changing environment; to build nests, decide when to move, or change from working inside the nest to foraging outside. It is becoming clear that the ant colonies’ algorithms are diverse, in interesting ways. Similar processes are at work in other natural systems without central control. 

Division of labour is a human innovation, drawing on our ability to learn and improve by practice, and to trade goods and services. The growing recognition that natural processes work differently from our symphonies and armies will allow us to see the natural world more clearly. Ant colonies are not factories or fortresses; instead they use simple interactions to adjust to changing conditions. Ant societies, organised by distributed algorithms rather than division of labour, have thrived for more than 130 million years.

So ants are not the micro-version of Plato's Republic we might have deemed them to be. Okay, but individual ants cannot learn, or at least cannot learn as much or in the same way as a human. Doesn't it follow that some degree of division of labour makes sense in certain circumstances ? The ant's flexibility is interesting because we've been previously taught otherwise, but in the end I don't think it has that much relevance for humans, despite the author's laudable effort to convince me otherwise. And then comes the awkward question : what about termites ?

EDIT : Thanks to the ever-perceptive Joe Carter for sending me to this excellent complementary article, describing how ant society may have evolved for "multilevel selection" : if a group is able to out-compete other groups, its genes will propagate. This helps explain eusocial behaviour, but little about morality, leading to the memorable quote :

“But ask me what ants have to say about how we should behave and what they tell us about our own morality. The answer is nothing. Their societies are almost completely female. They eat their injured and they are in almost constant, obliterating war with colonies of the same species. And whereas we send our young men to war, they send their old ladies. There’s not much there to be learnt,” he says.

How ant societies point to radical possibilities for humans - Deborah M Gordon | Aeon Essays

It's easy to find familiar examples of division of labour. In a corporation, some people work in sales and others in accounting; in an orchestra, some play the bassoon and others the violin. Since no one is born an accountant or a bassoonist, in a system with division of labour, differentiated skills must be acquired.