close window
Questions for Discussion: E. O. Wilson: Ants and Ecosystems
150 million years after Darwin, many still think that world and evolutionary forces are based on competition. In the late 20th Century, what did scientists come to understand about a different way of looking at the relationships among many organisms? Explain. How do leafcutter ants feed? Why does E.O.Wilson say that ants are the "little things that run the world"? Why are ants important? "[Ants] provide us with a view, too, of how life might look upon another planet. They are among the pinnacles of social evolution on this earth and they represent a high order of programmed social organization, totally independent of that developed in our evolution and worthy of our close study for that reason alone." According to Wilson, what might we learn from studying ants?
