Consider the Ant!

Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest."
- Proverbs 6:6-8 (ESV)

What can ants teach us about economics and how to do scientific research? Quite a bit actually!

First, GMU Prof Russ Roberts interviews Stanford Professor Deborah Gordon in this podcast, discussing the similarity between the behavior of ants and that of humans in the economy. They give particular attention to economic concepts such as the division of labor and the emergent order:

Deborah M. Gordon, Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, is an authority on ants and order that emerges without control or centralized authority. The conversation begins with what might be called the economics of ant colonies, how they manage to be organized without an organizer, the division of labor and the role of tradeoffs. The discussion then turns to the implications for human societies and the similarities and differences between human and natural orders.

Elsewhere, Seth Roberts explains what ants can teach us about research strategy:

In Forbes, Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, made some comments I like:

Things, it turns out, are all too often discovered by accident. . . . Academics are starting to realize that a considerable component of medical discovery comes from the fringes, where people find what they are not exactly looking for. It is not just that hypertension drugs led to Viagra or that angiogenesis drugs led to the treatment of macular degeneration, but that even discoveries we claim come from research are themselves highly accidental. They are the result of undirected tinkering narrated after the fact, when it is dressed up as controlled research. The high rate of failure in scientific research should be sufficient to convince us of the lack of effectiveness in its design. If the success rate of directed research is very low, though, it is true that the more we search, the more likely we are to find things “by accident,” outside the original plan.

If the success rate per test is low, a good research strategy is to start with low-cost tests. Ants do this: They search with low-cost tests (single ants), exploit with high-cost tests (many ants). I don’t think the need to use different tools at different stages in the scientific process is well understood. John Tukey used the terms exploratory data analysis and confirmatory data analysis to make this point about data analysis but distinguishing exploratory and confirmatory experimental design is much less common.

Read my previous posts on The Black Swan here and here and think twice the next time you see an ant moving around. Turns out we may have quite a bit to learn from them.

There's also rumor that there's an Ant-Man superhero movie in the works based on the Marvel comic book character.

You can run an agent-based model of ants foraging for food here. This is one of the models that got me interested in considering agent-based models as a tool for economic research.