The Next Great Demotion

This contains the former posting, "Ants And Civilization".

Humans have been through several of what are sometimes called "Great Demotions", with regard to our relationship to the universe. These are steps in finding out that our earth is not as special as it seems to us.

I find it interesting that early in the Bible, in the Book of Genesis, there are six days of creation. There are the same number of Great Demotions. As we learn more and more about God's Creation, we become increasingly aware of how great it is relative to what we had previously thought.

It was once thought that the earth was the center of everything. The sun, moon, and all the stars revolved around the earth. The first clue that this wasn't correct was the moon going through phases, indicating that it's position changes relative to the sun. The second clue was that a few stars gradually move, relative to the other stars. These were actually planets. The word "planet" means "wanderer".

Copernicus introduced the idea that the earth actually revolves around the sun, and Galileo confirmed it by observations with a telescope. This really shook up human thinking. So the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. The planets that we could see all revolved around the sun, and the earth was a planet. This is the First Great Demotion.

That wasn't all. Far from being supreme among the planets, the earth was found to be actually one of the smaller of the planets. It was the largest of the four inner planets, slightly larger than Venus, and larger than the moon, but was much smaller than the four outer planets. This was the Second Great Demotion.

A clue that it wasn't quite correct that the sun was the center of the universe was all of the stars in the sky. This explained how the planets shined, by reflecting the light of the sun, but not all of the stars. The ancients had believed that the stars had been holes in some kind of canopy, with light beyond it, but that explanation didn't fit as well if the earth was moving around the sun.

When large telescopes were developed it was found that, not only were there countless more stars than we could see with the eye alone, but that the sun was just a typical star. The dense band of light across the sky on a dark night is actually the countless stars of the structure of stars that we live in. We call this structure a "galaxy" and we realized that our sun, which we had thought to be the center of everything, was just one among several hundred billion stars in our galaxy. This is the Third Great Demotion.

The vastness of our galaxy was impossible for humans to comprehend. There were more stars than we could ever count. How could the universe be this big? But the Great Demotions weren't over yet.

It was found that some of the patches of light that can be seen in the sky were actually other galaxies, far away from our own. It had previously been presumed that these patches of light were nebula, clouds of dust and gas from exploded stars, within our own galaxy. Our galaxy is only one of dozens of galaxies in what we now refer to as the "Local Group". 

Our galaxy is not even the largest one in the group, the Andromeda Galaxy is larger than ours. The two "Magellanic Clouds", that can be seen from earth's southern hemisphere, are actually galaxies, although not as large as ours. Just as we found our sun to be just an ordinary star so our galaxy, which we commonly refer to as the "Milky Way", is just an ordinary galaxy. This is the Fourth Great Demotion.

This scale was just incomprehensible to the human mind but the Great Demotions weren't over yet. As vast beyond imagination as our Local Group is, there was nothing at all special about it. Our Local Group contains a few dozen galaxies. We cannot grasp the number of stars in our own galaxy, several hundred billion, but finally it was found that there are more galaxies in the universe, among which our galaxy is quite ordinary, than there are stars in the universe. This is the Fifth Great Demotion.

These are known as the Great Demotions. As humans learn more we are increasing our capabilities. But at the same time we are, step by step, realizing that we, and our earth, are nowhere near as important as we think we are. I think it was Carl Sagan who coined the term.

I would like to add another Great Demotion. Humans are not even the dominant form of life on earth, or that our basic idea of civilization is original. I do not believe in space aliens but if there were hypothetical space aliens, and they visited earth, they would decide that ants are the dominant form of life on earth. Ants are the only creature that the Bible specifically instructs humans to emulate, in the Book of Proverbs.

What couldn't possibly have been known in the Middle East at the time the Book of Proverbs was written, about 1,000 B.C., is just how dominant ants really are.

There is a simple way to gauge which species is the most successful. There is only a certain amount of biomass, atoms and molecules suitable to be part of living things, available on earth. The most successful species will be the one that manages to collect the most biomass.

The vast majority of biomass belongs to plants. This is necessary as all creatures are dependent on plants for survival, first for food and second to release the oxygen in the carbon dioxide exhaled by creatures by using the energy of sunlight to split a carbon dioxide molecule, then using the carbon to build it's structure and releasing the oxygen back into the atmosphere.

According to the Wikipedia article on Ants, they add up to 15-25 percent of all non-plant biomass on land.

That is absolutely phenomenal. It means that all of the ants in the world by far outweigh all of the humans in the world. Beetles have more different species than ants but nothing can top ants when it comes to accumulated biomass.

The only way that ants could accomplish this is to be the most successful species, in terms of fitness for it's environment. Ants have been around, virtually unchanged from what they are today, for at least 150 million years.

Human civilization began after the end of the last ice age, having lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers before that. Civilization is generally defined as humans abandoning the nomadic life for fixed settlements, growing their own crops rather than searching for food.

Civilization, which began independently in a number of places, is believed to have started when someone noticed that, in a place where plant seeds have been left, plants had grown. This discovery meant that people could plant their own crops, rather than roaming to look for them, and could live in fixed settlements while tending the crops.

Another major factor in the beginning of civilization was the control of fire. This brought warmth, enabled the cooking of food, and kept wild animals away. People were able to make simple stone tools but control of fire made possible the smelting of metals, which brought civilization from the Stone Age to the Bronze and Iron Ages. Metals are almost always found combined in ores, and require smelting to separate.

A defining factor in the development of civilization is the recording of information, in other words writing. Indeed "prehistoric" means before written history. 

But I have my own theory about how civilization began. 

Early human settlements, ruled over by some kind of king or queen or chieftain, have an amazing resemblance to an ant colony. People have always been fascinated by ants.

Ants have a "court" that tends to the queen. An ant colony has a highly-specialized division of labor. Ants have organized armies when it is necessary to go to war. Ants have farms in that they "milk" aphids in the same way that we milk cows.

The streets of a human town seem to be modeled on the tunnels of an ant nest. A queen, with her attendants, leaves the nest, to found another nest, in the same way that humans leave one town to found another.

Towns and cities vary in size in the same way as ant colonies, some have a few dozen members and some have millions. But ants have always amazed humans in how the entire colony seems to operate effectively as a single organism.

I believe that God created humans with a special purpose but I have never believed that humans are really the dominant land species on earth. That honor belongs to ants.

They can live virtually anywhere. They can modify their environment in a way that seems to be a model for humans. Their biological structure is simple enough that they would be relatively little affected by cataclysms such as that which ended the dinosaurs or a nuclear holocaust that could do the same to humans. They have been on earth for hundreds of times as long as humans. If we could weight all ants, they would weight far more than all humans.

It's time to give ants credit not only for being the predominant land species on earth, best-suited to it's environment so that it accumulates the most biomass, but also the likely model for human civilization.

This is the Sixth Great Demotion, that we are not even the dominant form of life on earth. We have a spirit, given to us by God, but that doesn't mean we are physically the dominant form of life over the long-term. 

We are more intelligent than ants and other creatures, but what is intelligence? It is open to definition. Intelligence should enhance our chances of survival. We are so intelligent that we can destroy the planet, and can destroy ourselves by pressing a few buttons. But ants are so simple in structure and adaptable that such cataclysms that would destroy us would only temporarily affect them.