The Colonists

Folks who study termites know two secrets. For a start, they know that we aren’t the only species that farms, builds cities, and jointly cares for its young. Termites work together to do all that too. They divide labor so much that they divide even the labor of reproduction: most of them are sterile. In terms of Darwin’s natural selection, that’s impossible. They will even die for each other. That’s impossible too. They annoyed Darwin so much that he called them “by far the most serious special difficulty” of his theory. Largely because of them he held off publishing his Origin of Species for almost 20 years. How do they work?

Huge termite mounds pimple the planet—in American badlands, African veldt, Australian bush, Indian jungles. Normally they look dead, but if you visit one in the evening, especially after a rainstorm, you might see it boiling with activity. Thousands of winged termites gush from it, like water from a pricked firehose. Fluttering here and there, they seem desperate to learn how to fly in minutes—which is wise, because they’re defenseless. Toads, lizards, and snakes will soon hop, skip, and slither in for the impromptu banquet. The flyers barrel off as soon as they can, scattering like bomb shrapnel. When a female lands she sheds her wings—wings she took months to grow in the pitch black nest, wings she never used before and will never use again. Then she balances on her forelegs and raises her hindquarters. Frozen in place, her scent calls males to her. Some time later one comes buzzing in and as soon as he touches her she bursts into motion, scuttling about until she finds some place that suits her in the dark, rain-moistened earth. He keeps up with her and they quickly burrow in a short way, hiding from the birds that will come looking for breakfast the next morning. There they make their small nest.

The male then inseminates the female and she lays about five eggs. Those grow up to become the first brood. That brood then digs into the earth, sometimes as much as six feet down. There they hollow out a cavern for their mother, the new queen. With the king to inseminate her, she crawls down to her cell. Once there, she begins to lay eggs in earnest. Fed to bursting point by her children, she swells to monstrous size over the next few years. Her body keeps adding ovaries as it distends. Far too fat to move, she turns into a kind of giant glistening worm with her tiny head still attached. Entombed deep in the earth, termites crawl all over her, feeding her and rushing her eggs to nurseries. She’s now nothing but an egg-making sac, pumping them out like bullets from a machine gun. For the next 20 or so years she might lay up to 30,000 eggs a day in that cave. Her one Cinderella night of flying on gossamer wings is long gone.

Her offspring form castes, and based on age and caste they (very loosely) divide labor. They’ve much to do too: digging, building, farming, nursing, fetching water, pulping wood, attending the queen, repelling invaders. They dig and build and scurry until their nest is a huge, intricate warren, with a stone-hard, honey-combed turret rising above the earth perhaps ten feet high. Then one evening, after it’s dark enough that the birds have nested but before it’s dark enough for the owls and bats to be out, and often only after a rain has softened the earth, the nest will churn with activity. Sighted and sexual fliers with newly minted wings, wings they took months to grow in the dark, will boil out then buzz off into the rain-moistened night.

The Colony

That’s roughly what termites do, but how do they do it? That’s the second secret that termite watchers know. They’ve realized that besides studying particular insects we can also study how they organize. It turns out that certain organizational strategies don’t vary much regardless of whether we look at termites, ants, bees—or even ourselves. Economists and ecologists have known that for a long time too. So have urban planners. Lately, computer scientists and mathematicians have noticed the same thing. So have physicists, biochemists, embryologists, and lots of other -ists. Together they’re firming up a new field called ‘complex systems.’ It’s about how a lot of separate parts can sometimes organize to make a whole far different from its parts.

Termites make for a good example. They work like one well-oiled machine, but no one plans it and no one’s in charge of it, not even the queen. She’s buried at the nest’s base. She can’t move, far less leave her cell. Even if she could, the tunnels are a hundred times too small for her. Plus, her pinhead brain is no larger than that of any other termite. Just keeping in mind a map of the nest alone may be more than it can handle. And considering that she may be as much as 16 feet below the top of the nest, her scents can only diffuse a short part of the way. Relative to the size of a single termite, that would be like one of us living at the base of a skyscraper two miles tall. So central control can’t explain how termites work.

Something is organizing the colony but it isn’t the queen’s brain. It isn’t even the queen’s genes alone. Geneticists can explain why ants, bees, and wasps behave as they do, but not termites. Termites in a nest aren’t near-clones the way bees in a hive are. We recently figured out that they don’t even form a separate order of animals. They’re really cockroaches. Why aren’t they loners, like all other roaches—and nearly all other animals? What we’ve missed all these years is the nest itself. Termite interactions create it, but then it aids their further interaction. It’s a huge investment, made over generations, but that investment also pays huge dividends—and for many more generations. It keeps them warm, dry, fed, and safe. It thus lets them avoid the expense of having individual defenses and temperature-control mechanisms. Most of them aren’t just blind—they’re eyeless. They’re also wingless and sterile. And future generations will inherit all those benefits.

In exchange for a posh hotel with an all-you-can-eat buffet, their nest gives them just one headache: how can they cooperate to build and maintain it? The answer is surprising: they use the nest itself to help them organize. Their nest induces them to form a nest-maintenance network. Kill their queen and they soon make a new queen. But destroy their nest and they soon nearly all die. Now, none of us wants to be compared to anything as icky as a cockroach. Termite lives also seem quite far away from our lives. But the organizational principles behind how they work help us see some principles behind how we too work. We too make nests. We too found colonies.

The Colonizer

The Admiral of the Ocean Sea stood on the poop deck looking west, trying to stare down the setting sun. The lookout in the forechains had just shouted that land was ahead and he hoped to find an anchorage before nightfall. The last heavy storm had scared his fleet greatly. He’d made this voyage west once before, the previous year, and with just two small caravels and a nao, but this, his second voyage to the far west, was an invasion fleet. It was packed with court hidalgos, who, unused to the sea, had grown restless. Promised women and gold, not toil and trial, they’d grown weary of manning the pumps and mucking out the bilges during the three-week trip. Nor did they like being led by a jumped-up commoner. They didn’t much like the rotting food either. Only the excitement of this novel get-rich-quick scheme kept them in line as they sailed into the unknown.

What drove Columbus across three thousand miles of open ocean in the teeth of his near-perfect ignorance of what he would find? One answer could simply be his own desire. But that wouldn’t have mattered much without Queen Ysabel’s interest. Then too, she couldn’t have done much if Santángel hadn’t extorted money from Spain’s Jews to pay for the trips. Yet his efforts wouldn’t have changed much without the Pinzón brothers’s support. Then there’s Toscanelli’s new map. Marco Polo’s and Niccolò Conti’s trip reports. Portuguese competition. The increased price of spice. The development of ocean-crossing caravels. The fall of the Mongol empire, the rise of the Ottoman empire, and so on backward through time. We know many pieces of the puzzle. Putting them together gives us our usual style of explanation. It’s some combination of desire, new knowledge, and new pressures. Typically it foregrounds Columbus, and maybe a few others. It’s all about individuals, or individual nations, not our species as a whole.

Such an explanation is common. It satisfies many of us and is true enough, but is it big enough? Try the same kind of explanation with the above female termite, flinging herself out into the night for the first and only time in her life. They all amount to saying that she did what she did because she grew wings. How she grew those wings (and eyes) deep underground, where she could use neither, is interesting but the real question isn’t so much how she did it, but how her nest did it. She was just one small actor within a far larger, and far older, system. So was Columbus.

The Swarm

A termite colony isn’t a nest of insects ruled by a queen—put the image of zombies marching in lock-step from your mind. It’s much more like a plant that makes spores, which then scatter. It’s thus like a composite being—not a plant, not an animal, something new. It’s something we don’t really have a word for yet. It’s made of tangible parts, but it itself isn’t tangible; it’s a self-sustaining pattern. An ever shifting but still stable pattern moving through time, it’s a time-traveling termite-thing. Call it a termite swarm.

That swarm has a brain, of a sort, but it’s quite alien from anything we’re used to. We look at termites and see a boiling mass of insects. We don’t see that mass as a kind of plant on a million legs. We track one of its successful spores and ignore the thousands that got munched. We then look at Columbus with a microscope and make the same mistake. Caught up in his life story, we lose the bigger picture of which he forms a small part. We lose the time-traveling human-thing—the human swarm.

Just as termite genes shape them to do what they do, our genes shape us to do what we do. Just as termites build a giant nest out of clay and spit and dung so do we build a giant technological nest. And just as their nest shapes them, so our nest shapes us. That didn’t start happening last Wednesday, or even just since Columbus. It’s been going on for thousands of years. We’re all forever shaping and reshaping our shared nest. Like termites, we mostly do so without knowing it. Like termites, none of us need know what we’re really doing. Our changing nest still changes us. In a sense, that nest is us. Kill our leaders and we’ll make new ones. Destroy our nest and nearly all of us would die. Without it, you and I are no more than clever mammals endlessly worrying the lock of a cage we can never escape.

This book is about how we organize to sometimes do things far beyond the reach of any one of us. We all depend on such a system for our daily bread, our jobs, our health, our lives. We aren’t merely individuals contending against each other, we also work together. Sometimes we’ll even die for each other. Each of us fits into a large and old pattern moving through time. How does it work? Where’s it going?

By now you’re probably pretty suspicious. You’re right to worry. We have a word for people who claim to explain the world with one idea—they’re called cranks. Our nest, and the swarm it induces among us, can’t explain everything about us. The world is too complicated for that. Plus, we still know very little so a lot of it is going to change as we learn more. Still, this book will give you some idea of how we fit into something far larger than ourselves. It will also give you some idea of where it might be headed.