it would open an evolutionary niche to be filled by ever larger, more
complex insects to dominate the Earth and build their cities high
upon the ruins of ours. A similar course of events may have taken
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place on other planets, or there may be planets where asteroid
impacts or any one of a million other environmental conditions
favored the rise of social insects rather than of reptilian or hominid life forms.
Even now, here on Earth, the social structure of insects is such
that their collective problem solving capacity is second only to
that of human beings, although each individual ant or termite
is far less intelligent than an individual chimp or dolphin.67 In
the following, I will draw from Simon Conway Morris’ extended
discussion of the collective intelligence of insects in his book on
convergent evolution, entitled Life’s Solution.68 Morris, a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University, believes that life
forms similar to these insects may, on other planets, have evolved
to be as intelligent and industrious as humans.69 He notes that, for
example, the Acromyrmex and Atta ants of Central Asia and South America engage in every essential aspect of the activity that we
call “agriculture”. They maintain gardens, transport plant material,
weed their crop, apply herbicides extracted from plant material,
deliberately fertilize their crops with manure, and exchange crop
cultures.
The often observed leaf cutting procedures carried out above
ground by these ants is impressive enough, but the highly complex
farming techniques take place in underground chambers where
the attine ants harvest mushrooms. The ants clear and pave roads
that run from the sites where they cut leaves to their underground
chambers, and they set up a complex division of labor between leaf
cutters, secondary leaf cutters who bring the plant material to the
road, and road travelers who carry the material back to a further
series of specialized workers underground. Aside from three distinct
castes, there are also miniaturized versions of these attine ants called
“minims”. These minims ride on the larger ants to groom and clean
them, they patrol the edges of trails to warn of approaching dangers,
67 Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
68 Ibid., 197-229.
69 Ibid., 229.
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and final y, they are also found riding on top of the transported
leaf fragments in order to defend the leaf-carriers from attack by
parasitoid flies. Upon arrival within the entryway to the nest itself, one finds the soldier caste on guard against foreign invasions by
other insects.
Within the fungus farm, the leaves are first licked clean of their
waxy film, so as to prevent infection of the crop by associated
microorganisms. Then the ants shred the leaf to a pulp and apply
it to the fungus, which breaks down the plant material and releases
the cel ulose into fungus, turning it into a crop that can be eaten by the ants. Infected parts of the crop are weeded, first being loosened
by the minima and then moved away by the larger ants. The minima
are also tasked with removing alien spores. The ants move the fungi
around their underground enclosure based on small changes in
temperature and humidity that might inhibit growth at one location
but not another. Knob-like ends of the fungus, which are rich in
proteins and sugars, are specifical y removed from the crop for
separate consumption. The ants prevent pathogens from invading
the crop by applying something like an herbicide to the crop, one
that derives from bacteria that grows on their own bodies and acts
like an antibiotic.70 These ants also use their excrement as fertilizer, and they do this deliberately. Only some of their waste is used as
fertilizer for the crop, and at that in a careful y measured manner.
We know this because they also build vast waste management pits
that are manned by older workers who are nearing the end of their
functionality and are not allowed to leave the nest.71
The constant food supply provided by the agricultural activities
of these ants allows each colony to grow to include seven million
members.72 This size is, however, exceeded by more aggressive army
ant colonies, where the population of a single colony can reach 20
million. These army ants are as collectively intelligent in waging war as the attine ants are in farming. Their relentless mobile columns can 70 Ibid., 198-200.
71 Ibid., 205-206.
72 Ibid., 207.
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extend tens of meters in length, and they may defy terrain obstacles
to the advancing front by building bridges using their own bodies.
Their coordinated action allows them to attack and dismember
comparatively large prey and carry its pieces back to the nest, prey
so large that it would be utterly impossible for one or a few ants to
dismember and transport.73
The industrious capabilities of termites exceed even those of
these attine ants. Outside of human engineering, termite nests are
the most impressive artificial constructions on Earth. Temporary
and comparatively shoddily built access tunnels from the surface
lead down into a maze of very careful y constructed branching
tunnels with few crossroads. The wal s of these tunnels are smoothly
modeled and curve upwards in the middle at sharp bends, as if to
form archways. The deep tunnels can run for several kilometers
in length, with 50 meter tunnels extending up to the surface as
access routes to foraging areas. The termites apparently cultivate
fungus, but not to eat it as the attine ants do. Rather, they allow the fungus to break down foraged food into a more digestible form.74
Experimental set ups have also noticed the construction of latrines
for waste disposal.75
The termites construct a complex system of ventilated passages
that cleanse the mound of excess carbon dioxide and waste gases
and allow the circulation of fresh oxygen. The size and shape of
these passages are precisely corrected by worker termites, in order
to careful y calibrate oxygen levels. The temperature inside the hive
is also collectively regulated by the termites, who despite being cold blooded, col aborate to regulate their body temperatures to provide
just the right amount of ambient heat for the good of the group. These termite cities can be up to 18 feet in height. If a termite were the size of a human, as a termite-like creature might evolve to be on a planet
with a lower gravity, such structures would be 4,000 feet in height,
73 Ibid., 201.
74 Ibid., 209.
75 Ibid., 208.
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some three times taller than the Empire State Building.76 Termites
do not use tools, other than their limbs, to help them excavate their
hil s into these complex structures. However, if larger termite-
like creatures were to evolve on another planet, their size would
permit them to use tools and possibly to develop advanced tool-
ma
king techniques that require mining, iron forging and smelting.
Empowered by technology, an industrious termite-like group mind
could produce veritable cities of such scale and complexity that our
metropolises on Earth would look like shantytowns by comparison.
Whereas collectively, this alien intelligence may far exceed that
of homo sapiens, on an individual level, such beings might be far
inferior to the average human – both mental y and physical y. For
example, each ant hardly has any directional sense of its own. Its
directional preferences are conditioned by tactile signals and trail
pheromones col ated and amplified across an ant swarm.77 A human
being, once raised to adulthood, can do a fair job of surviving on
her own, but ant-like or termite-like alien intelligence in isolation
from its Collective may only be capable of unreflectively carrying
out a limited range of stereotyped actions.78 It might even be helpless in reacting to its environment if deprived of the ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’ of other members. Given that ants have only vestigial eyes and are
effectively blind, it has been surmised that an ant colony perceives
its environment through its member units. The whole swarm of
ants forms a single compound “eye” with hundreds of thousands of
facets, each ant contributing two lenses to form the swarm’s 10 to 20
meter wide field of vision.79
If an intelligent, technological y advanced, hive mind were to
evolve out of a species like Earth’s social insects, we could expect
its sense of morality to be entirely different from ours. In fact, in
the absence of a conflict of interest between individual persons there might be no need for social negotiation, so such a species may lack
76 Clifford Pickover, The Science of Aliens (Basic Books / Perseus, 1998), 37.
77 Morris,
Life’s Solution, 204.
78 Pickover,
The Science of Aliens, 37.
79 Morris,
Life’s Solution, 204.
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morality altogether. In his layman’s guide to astrobiology, entitled
The Science of Aliens, Clifford Pickover surmises that if insect behavior on Earth is to be any guide, the form of life of such an alien technological society (‘civilization’ is the wrong word here) would
deeply offend even the most broadly shared human sentiments of
what constitutes ethical conduct.80
Collective insect intelligences are often divided into castes, with
each caste having a specialized function. The worker drones among
the bees or the soldiers among attine ants have no choice whatsoever
as to the function that they perform. Unlike humans oppressed by
a caste ideology that need not constrain their life possibilities, the intelligent insects’ caste status would indeed be a fact of nature for them. They could not even conceive of the ‘heretical’ mixing of
castes and lament its allegedly ‘degenerative’ social consequences.
The brahmanical Hindu might be persuaded to come over to a
different view of the possibilities for his human life, but no ground whatsoever would give in the case of alien intelligences similar to
the denizens of perfectly ordered beehives or ant colonies.
What of the equal rights of the sexes? Females might eat their
mates during sexual intercourse, as in the case of the praying mantis
that can continue to copulate with the female of his species even after his head has been adoringly eaten away by her. The fly Serromiya
femorata mates bel y-to-bel y and mouth-to-mouth with its partner, until at the end of the mating, the female literal y consumes the male, sucking out the entire contents of his body into her mouth. Certain
insect species feature a huge size difference between female and male
members of the species, with the males sometimes more than eight
times smaller than the females.81 Beehives have long been taken as a
model for science fictional societies of intelligent extraterrestrials.
The complexity of behavior and cognitive processing abilities of bees, with memory that is sustained by periods of sleep, is comparable
only to that of vertebrate animals.82 However, the male bee’s penis
80 Pickover,
The Science of Aliens, 123-124.
81 Ibid., 35.
82 Morris,
Life’s Solution, 202.
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always breaks off once it is inserted into the Queen, so that he bleeds to death as a result of copulation.
Orthodox Muslims might strongly reject the idea that women
can enjoy the same rights and responsibilities as men, but any given
person holding this view could potential y be persuaded to abandon it by changing his or her environment. A Muslim woman might
renounce this dogma, inculcated in her from childhood, once she
responsibly as she had once thought impossible. Similarly, a slave
owner can come to appreciate the oppression and constraint on
human potential that slavery represents, perhaps if he himself is
bound up in chains and subjected to the whip for a sufficient period
of time. But try telling some intelligent tool-using analog of a Queen bee that the males of her hive have a right to be ‘loved’ without being killed, or that the worker drones have a right to periods of rest and
leisure and are entitled to due compensation for their labor. Could
the technological y advanced equivalent of attine ants be made to
understand that it is ungracious to condemn their elderly to waste
disposal management simply because they are too weak and slow to
continue performing other tasks?
Laws against murder, torture, sexism, rape, and slavery mean
different things to different human societies. However, we can debate
them at all because they do mean something. To such species they would be nonsense. Who would we hold responsible for adherence to these standards anyhow? Some intelligent species with a group
mind might not even have something like a Queen that oversees and
directs the behavior of the hive. They might be more like termites
than bees, where no one unit is in itself cognizant of the behavior of the whole group, and consequently where no one unit is responsible even for its ‘own’ behavior, which is after all determined by the group mind. It may be that only the entire ensemble is, distributively, self-aware of its behavioral patterns in response to its environment.83
How this could possibly function is hard to imagine, but that is
exactly the point. Nevertheless, it does function in social insects on 83 Pickover,
The Science of Aliens, 39.
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Earth, and some quadrant of the galaxy may already be colonized by
more intelligent versions of such creatures.
Clearly, such beings would not be capable of even conceiving of
the happiness of others or their own perfection as individuals, let
alone holding these as objects of the faculty of desire so that the
attendant sentiments of doing so could provide a mediating incentive
for making the moral law one’s own. Kant’s allegedly apriori universal ethics would seem to be invalidated by the empirical possibility of encountering even one species of alien intelligence of this type. Kant would protest that acting as if one belonged to a Kingdom of Ends cannot be based on the expectation of the empirical rea
lization of
such a Kingdom of Ends.84
In other words, within Kant’s theoretical framework, it is always
possible that such a species could continue to evolve, or in his
language, further its perfection, along lines that would eventual y
allow its members to be sufficiently individuated so that they
co-exist with us as responsible members of a Kingdom of Ends.
However, practical y speaking, it utterly strains credulity to believe that an alien intelligence of the type evoked above, with a level
of technical development hundreds of thousands or millions of
years beyond our own, should be expected to take some radical y
different evolutionary turn – and at that, in our direction – upon
encountering us. Kant could perhaps also assert that such beings,
although ‘intelligent’ in the sense of being capable of technological
manipulation of the environment, are not “rational” beings. Such
a desperate distinction between “intelligence” and “rationality” is
vacuous and would only deepen his anthropomorphic prejudices.
This does not mean that Kant’s universal ethics is a failure, only that it implicates a theory of the convergent evolution of all intelligent
beings towards self-consciously individuated and responsible
personhood.
Now we can definitely answer the core question posed at the
outset. We are to understand “an end in itself” with respect to the
84 Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” in Practical Philosophy, 4:439.
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existence of beings, as a claim that the world of sense exists only through and towards rational beings. They are the only ends in
themselves insofar as they are the ends of everything that is. This is why Kant assumes that natural processes must always already
end in persons, regardless of the great differences in the empirical conditions of diverse worlds throughout the cosmos. His claim, in
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, that it would be absurd if the universe were not filled with intelligent life, is rooted in this. It is not a question of a waste of space, but of the fact that without rational beings to be conscious of their existence in it, there could be no universe – because nothing else in the universe properly
exists (“properly” meaning exists for its own sake, as its own end).