In reality, no individual ant has the brain power to design a colony; ants have 250,000 brain cells, humans have around 100 billion. The colony’s structure emerges from the aggregation of individual instinctive behaviors—digging, foraging for food, collecting trash—triggered by primitive communications—ants recognize patterns in the pheromone trails left by other ants. The field of “emergence” examines how complex patterns and forms can arise from a multiplicity of simple, low-level interactions
