“Yes. That’s the point. Local decision making, coupled with feedback, does it for them. We humans think we’re in control. In fact we’re enmeshed in emergent structures—jams, cities, even economies—working on scales of space and time far beyond our ability to map. Now let’s talk about ants.”

That had come out of left field. “From cities to ants?”

“What do you know about ants?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Except that they are persistent buggers when they get into your garden.”

“Ants are social insects—like termites, bees, wasps. And you can’t get them out of your garden because social insects are so bloody successful,” he said. “There are more species of ant in a square mile of Brazilian rain forest than there are species of primate across the planet. And there are more workers in one ant colony than there are elephants in all the world . . .”

“You’ve been on the Internet again.”

He grinned. “All human wisdom is there. Everybody knows about ant colonies. But most of what everybody knows is wrong. Only the queen lays eggs, only the queen passes on her genes to the next generation. That much is true. But you probably think that an anthill is like a little city, with the queen as a dictator in control of everything.”

“Well—”

“Wrong. George, the queen is important. But in the colony, nobody knows what’s going on globally—not even the queen. There’s no one ant making any decisions in there about the destiny of the colony. Each one is just following the crowd, to build a tunnel, shift more eggs, bring back food. But out of all those decisions, the global structure of the colony emerges. That social scaling-up, by the way, is the secret of the social insects’ success. If a solitary animal misses out a task, it doesn’t get done. But with the ants, if one worker misses a task somebody else is sure to come along and do it for her. Even the death of an individual worker is irrelevant, because there is always somebody to take her place. Ant colonies are efficient.

“But it is the colony that counts, not the queen. That is the organism, a diffuse organism with maybe a million tiny mouths and bodies . . . Bodies that organize themselves so that their tiny actions and interactions add up, globally, to the operation of the colony itself.”

“So an anthill is like a traffic jam,” I guessed. “Emergent.”

“Yes. Emergence is how an anthill works. Now we have to talk about genes, which is why it works.” He was off again, and I struggled to keep focused.