Maybe Bees Can Do Calculus

This just in: that ant you squashed on your countertop with the Home Depot ad you found in the newspaper is a more rational creature than you are.

Not just you. All of us. New research shows that “ants can accomplish a task more rationally than our — multimodal, egg-headed, tool-using, bipedal, opposing-thumbed — selves.” (See article here.)

This doesn’t really surprise me all that much when I think about it. Ants have always been a nuisance to me. It doesn’t seem to matter how tightly-sealed my windows are, how securely my food is stored, or how clean I keep everything, they still find a way to survive alongside me. Plus, they’re a helluva lot older than I am (as a species, anyway). I may belong to a family of primates who figured out how to make iPods and frozen yogurt, but if you put too many obstacles between me and survival, I’d get frustrated, lay down, and die.

Not ants. Probably because they’re not as complex as I am, ants seem to be able to try and try and try and try again. And really, if you’ve ever watched an ant — or an army of them — navigate through what must be, to them, a vast jungle of a living room, it doesn’t actually seem to take them all that many tries to figure stuff out.

So there you have it. Next time you one of your friends tells you that his kid got into Harvard, tell them your community college-attending, refrigerator repairman son prefers to eschew higher education to live as the noble ant would. It’ll confuse him for a long time before it pisses him off, and by then, you’ll be long gone.