[MD] Social Ants?

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

Hi Horse, Steve, Case, Matt, Michael, Craig, Platt (if you are still in this
one)... dang, heavily populated topic...

Besides being caught up in the World Cup, your posts (along with the rest of the
direction of the conversation) has given me a lot to think about (as always). I
wanted to let you know that I am not stepping out fo the thread. I had wanted
to go back and review the Emergence book by Steven Johnson as he touches on
ants and ant colonies quite heavily, before getting too much more into this.
I'm also recalling a section from GEB by Hofstadter where he has an "Aunt
Hillary" character, an emergent intelligence from an ant colony that looks on
the ants that compose her "body" the same way we look at cells. Not sure how
related that is, but all this talk on ants made me think of it again.

A quick question for Horse. Let's say we consider an ant colony as a non-social,
biological network. What then distinguishes social human activity from this ant
activity? Would it be language, whether vocal, gestural or the like? Would it
be, as I think Steve(?) suggested, "learned behavior" as opposed to
"instinctual behavior"? Would it be, as maybe Ham would agree, some form of
conceptual awareness of self? Or, if the social level is reserved, as Pirsig
suggests, for humans, is the social level contingent upon some form of unique
human biological trait (btw, Tomasello in The Cultural Origins of Human
Cognition argues just that)?

In other words, in this conversation about whether or not ant activity is
social, I've lost track of what we are saying would constitute the "bare
minimum" of activity, conception or biological precursor, that we would say
places something on the social level. 

Arlo