Unexpectedly, the researchers arrived at their conclusions by studying ants. As the scientists write in their paper, “Humans live in social groups in which multiple brains contribute to the emergence of collective intelligence.” While understanding the historical forces ...

The scientists believe that the reason we don’t need the same size brains lies in the creation of our social systems, which favor distributed gathering and sharing of knowledge and information while offering advantages in “group-level decision-making.” Since brains us...

“The remarkable ecological diversity of ants and their species richness encompasses forms convergent in aspects of human sociality, including large group size, agrarian life histories, division of labor, and collective cognition,” explain the scientists in the study. The range of...

The research team focused specifically on creating computational models that represent patterns of worker-ant brain size and energy use, looking at groups of Oecophylla weaver ants, Atta leafcutter ants, and the common garden ant Formica. What they found is that colle...

Previous research estimated that, over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human brain went from 1,500 cubic centimeters (cc) to 1,350 cc — shrinking by about 150 cc, or 10% (the size of a tennis ball, as commentators have pointed out.)

“Most ...

A review of the book in The American Journal of Sociology read:

“After many years” observation of the behaviour of ants, the author has written a popular book attempting to show how ant societies function, how they solve many of the ‘social problems’ confronting man - war, reproduc...

Researchers have found that for much of human evolutionary history our brains kept growing. In fact, if you count from our last shared ancestors with chimpanzees six million years ago, the human brain size almost quadrupled. This happened thanks in part to the im...

“Ant and human societies are very different and have taken different routes in social evolution,” Traniello shared. “Nevertheless, ants also share with humans important aspects of social life such as group decision-making and division of labor, as well as the production of their...

The big question of course is, “Why is our evolution going in reverse?” The interdisciplinary research team, which included a biological anthropologist, a behavioral ecologist and an evolutionary neurobiologist, write in the study that their dating techniques do ...

As the author of “Of Ants and Men” himself remarked in 1946, the question is how far can we compare these ant societies with our own without becoming hopelessly involved in a bog of anthropomorphism? In other words, he goes on to reflect, can we legitimately “go to the ant”