The Myth of the Ant Queen

"When we see repeated shapes and structure emerging out of apparent chaos, we can't help looking for pacemakers," (199) says Johnson in his essay "The Myth of the Ant Queen," referring to humans natural need for a pattern to explain things. The essay highlights how patterns seem to arise from what we perceive as complete disorganization, in spite of a lack of authority figure. Beginning by discussing a harvester ants colony the word "self-organizing" reoccurs throughout the essay. 

He uses it to describe the sophisticated seemingly state-planned layout of the ant colony, with designated a cemetery, garbage dump and even an emergency escape tunnel for the ant queen, all possible even though "the queen is not an actual authority figure" (194) and gives no orders to the worker ants. The colony function despite having a completely decentralized behavior, emerging "from the bottom up" (194), being derived from years and years of evolution. This same "self-organization" is seen in her description of Manchester in the early 1800s. While industrializing "the city grew too fast for the authorities to keep up with it" (196) leading to a natural division between the working and the middle class in the city. This time a self-organization emerged from a lack of authority but people unknowingly created this pattern, rather than their genes telling them to as in the case of the ants. Fast-forwarding to the middle of the 20th century, the author discusses of self-organization also applies to the language of coding. Primitive computers could learn and thereby see patterns if rules were set up and a program was run thousands of times. So here a computer self-organizes its connections to better carry out its function, similarly to how the ant colony self organizes to carry out its function: survive and reproduce.

While Davidson advocates the decentralization and modernization of the school system in her essay "Project Classroom Makeover," Johnson has a more objective view in his essay, stating facts and letting the reader draw his or her own conclusions. They both do deal with a similar subject, however, in their study of self-organizing systems. Davidson has seen what crowdsourcing can accomplish through her iPod program at Duke and the internet itself, and if she were to look for more support for her argument she could utilize "The Myth of the Ant Queen" as an unbiased study of crowdsourcing. Harvester ants function without a leader and even our modern computer programs rely on a bottom-up relay for information, so why does our educational system stick to a hierarchical structure?