The Myth of the Ant Queen

“The Myth of the Ant Queen” by Steven Johnson was an interesting essay on complex systems. It is so true how every part of a complex system has its own way of working and it doesn’t need any one or thing to tell it how to do its job. Such as the example of the ants all doing their little jobs that may seem worthless but without the ants doing these jobs the colony won’t survive. Because of a joined team effort they all get food. It is weird that the ants do these jobs without being told to do them and that everything all seems to have been organized by the governing ant such as the Queen, who made the plans for the jobs or that, controlled the colony. When really they are just doing these things by instinct of what their genetic genes tell them to do. I also thought it was interesting how the ants had a cemetery for their dead. It shows that they respect their dead just as humans do. It was crazy that they put the cemetery as far away from the colony as they could and also as far away from their trash pile. And they did this without seeing what they were doing or being told how to do it. They just did it naturally.

In the essay when he started to talk about the town of Manchester he was describing this city as a chaotic place with no rules or form of government. The city did not have people organizing how life should be or how to get things done. They just did what they thought was right and natural to do. It was growing so fast that they wouldn’t have been able to govern in if they wanted to. The town was composed of people just doing what they wanted when they wanted to. Yet in all its chaos it managed to be the city that defined the future of urban life. And it wasn’t really even a city until the great explosion took place.

Both of these examples showed that a complex system can function and survive just as good as a system with rulers and people being told what to do. The way that the two examples are kind of linked together is that they both just functioned by doing things naturally. They didn’t have anyone bossing them around and they didn’t have an organized way of getting things accomplished. They just did what they thought was right naturally.