Are ants capable of self recognition? (2015) [pdf]
journalofscience.net
journalofscience.net
> For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and, still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A‑Number‑l experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat‑running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat‑running.
- Ants ignore other ants behind clear glass but inspect their own reflections.
- An ant with a blue dot on its head when shown its reflection will rub at the dot.
- An ant with a brown/invisible dot on its head will ignore it.
- An ant with a blue dot on the back of its head where it can't be seen in the mirror will ignore it.
At a certain point Occam's razor comes into play, doesn't it?
The consequence wouldn't be that ants are conscious, it would be to question why "self recognition" was made out to be such a big deal.
In this case self-recognition == self-awareness. The ants had a stored representation of themselves in memory that didn't include a blue dot on the head. When met with their reflection they were able to deduce that:
a) they were looking at themselves
b) the blue dot was not a part of them and so should be removable
Whether it's possible to be unconsciously self-aware is an interesting question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
Maybe that's why they have the hardware to recognize themselves in reflections (water droplets are pretty reflective on their scale, right?) and to groom if anything is on their heads?
Consider a disease that kills everything incapable of resisting it. The survivors are incidentally immune to the disease, regardless of the reason they possess the trait, and only because everything else was destroyed, and so now their descendents fill the vacuum the disease created.
It also means that the subsequent generations get to carry forward any odd traits that their ancestors displayed, whether they make sense or not, simply because there's room for baggage to slip through. So, it would not be unreasonable to consider that the intelligence is incidental to a hypothetic disease immunity, rather than an essential survival characteristic. The reproducing survivors just happened to carry both traits, but only needed one.
I don't think it fits this parasitic ant fungus scenario, because the fungus is not an invasive extinction level pandemic species of fungus, rampaging so violently throughout ant populations that it creates a bottleneck that eclipses substantial portions of ant species. The fungus is limited to small regions, compare to the full range of ant activity, worldwide.
But, it's not unreasonable to consider ideas that don't intuitively correlate to the observed result, at least in terms of biological evolution.
It is something that we dismiss because we humans are handicapped, nose-wise.
Second, dogs are notorious for failing the mirror test, along with many monkey species, and these species have plenty more brain calls than ants (although brain size may bear only a superficial relationship to the outcome of this test). Extraordinary results require extraordinary evidence.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Much less complex societies though, for what it's worth.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5895435/how-to-create-an-ant-spiral-o...
For one of the more dramatic examples.