Chapter 21
Portland and the Collective
I remember as a kid in Queens, New York, finding ant nests under parts of the sidewalk. I'd use all the might I could muster in my small hands to pull up cracked stones just to look inside. I was amazed to see hundreds of ants swirling in organized chaos, all working independently yet also together. I could never understand how the ants, which individually seemed so dumb, could do the amazing acts of engineering and logistics to build and supply their colonies. I naturally assumed the ant queen, wherever she was, must have been the brains of the whole show, but this is wrong. Her brain isn't any smarter than any other ant. She gives no orders and makes no plans. Instead the intelligent behavior emerges out ...
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