Ant intelligence (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, September 07, 2013, 12:14 (4096 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: how do you know that insects and birds do not think and have no intelligence?-DAVID: I used birds as a bad example. Corvids are very clever. Back to ants. They are compartmentalized into types of workers, the queen, etc. Each type has their programmed duty. If you ask E.O. Wilson I'll bet he agrees with me.-Presumably then you now concede that birds and our fellow animals think and have intelligence. Not so long ago in human history, before our society branched out into millions of compartments, humans also had their restricted duties: they hunted, gathered, bore and raised children, maybe even occasionally cleaned out the cave. You apparently "know" that ants are preprogrammed to do their duties. So here's another question to keep you going: how do you "know" that our ancestors were not preprogrammed to perform their limited tasks, and that you yourself were not preprogrammed to be a physician-cowboy-author?
 
Back to ants: not long ago I think it was you who drew our attention to an incident in which a mantis attacked a colony of ants. One particularly large ant climbed into its jaws to block them (an altruistic suicide), while others swarmed over its head and eventually decapitated it. The particularly large ant was certainly not the only particularly large ant. Why did this ant climb in while the others didn't? We know that some social animals hunt in packs. To do so they must communicate a strategy to each other, which I'm sure you will concede is a form of intelligent thought. We know that ants also communicate, and each attack or defence will require a strategy to fit the situation. How does each individual ant know what to do, and when they communicate, what do they communicate if not some kind of intelligent thought? Are you telling us that your God sits there directing operations by remote control, or are you telling us that he provided a mechanism which would enable all his creatures to work out their own strategies as and when the different situations arise? Would you not agree that working out a strategy, and the decision of one ant to sacrifice itself as part of that strategy, both constitute evidence of intelligent thought?