Civil society has yet to define and accept broader human rights … The struggle goes on, building on those who went before us, for the benefit of those who come after us.

The 50th anniversary of President John Kennedy’s assassination this year is poignant for those of us who were well along in high school or had begun college when we heard the news that awful Friday afternoon. We still remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the word came. I was in the locker room in the seminary dormitory with some classmates when a friend ran in to tell us. First came shock; then, hopeful denial. The television, however, confirmed the unbelievable reality. The next three days we rarely budged from in front of the television – not until the state funeral had ended.

Kennedy was, for many of us, the promise of our generation. His eloquence, humor, and charm captured our idealism, as certainly as his call-to-action inaugural address – “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” – inspired us to build our communities and bring our country further along the path of democracy. He urged us to reach out to the world. The Peace Corps, which Kennedy proposed at the University of Michigan during his campaign, captured our imagination.

Tragic history has a way of deadening dreams, and casting youthful idealism upon its ash heap. We strove to resist that trajectory and continued to push our energy forward in the civil rights movement, and those movements that followed … for women, the environment, and peace.

Many of my generation answered the call, and, with the help of Lyndon Johnson’s masterful implementation, and expansion, of Kennedy’s ideals, joined the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, or the War on Poverty. Others of us dedicated ourselves to other visions of civil society. Some of us were brutally tortured to death. Many were beaten bloody at lunch counters and on buses, or had snarling dogs set upon them. Terroristic violence even killed four little girls at Sunday school in Birmingham, Alabama.

We endured the pain of the unimaginable assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and strove with grit to keep the dream alive and steady the course, despite the odds set against us.

Of course, we were not alone. We were building on the shoulders of the other generations in our time, and marching with them. All of us were honoring the legacy, lives, and struggles of those who had gone before us and now rested in peace. But it was Kennedy’s clarion voice that called us younger folks forth.

I myself ended up in the farm workers movement, following the leadership of César Chávez, and eventually moved into broader human rights efforts.

As I look back fifty years, I have learned that the struggle is so much more difficult than what we had seen through our idealistic-tinted glasses. I still cannot bear to watch the anniversary replays of President Kennedy’s assassination, and this year is even worse.

But there is never a moment that I don’t feel a stirring deep within my heart when I watch his inaugural address or listen to his speeches calling upon our “better angels,” as another assassinated president, Abraham Lincoln, did a hundred years earlier.

It is with the same stirring of heart that I watch the next generations so passionately pick up the struggle to make the dream real.

When I look back, I also see other formative people and events that helped move me in this direction. I have learned from this that everything we do well in life has a good impact on others and that we can always learn from the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Probably the person who influenced my life the most was my grandmother. She was an intensely devout Christian, who practiced every day what she believed. She gave her money to the poor, visited people in the hospital, doted on her grandchildren, helped my parents support our family of six kids and send us to Catholic school, and prayed and went to Mass every day. My grandmother lived a life of compassion, tolerance, and justice. In her late eighties, she was on a picket line, supporting the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott.

Another important epoch in my life was the eight years in seminary, high school and college, studying to be a priest, even though I eventually chose a different vocation to which I felt called because it offered a more activist role in human rights work; after a stint in graduate school studying philosophy, I went on to become a lawyer.

But my time in the seminary gave me a good liberal arts education and taught me discipline, spirituality, philosophy, and grounded me in Catholic social justice teachings. It was the era of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II. Pope John was much like John Kennedy: he “opened the windows” of the Church and challenged us to bear witness to the Gospel in community life in new ways; to help build civil society, in effect.

And, in my later years, coming to know and work with people in the Hizmet movement inspired by Fethullah Gülen gave me yet a broader, more ecumenical vision of the world, and offered the opportunity of collaborating with people of the Islamic faith to help build civil society. This experience further deepened my own spirituality.

Few of us involved in human rights, I venture to say, are without a spiritual basis for our work. Like all generalizations, mine is surely excessive; but it does capture the point that very many human rights advocates remain in their work because of their spirituality, which comes in all shapes and sizes. As the Christian monk and mystic Thomas Merton warned, without spirituality, we find ourselves caught up in the frenzy of activism and overwork, which overwhelms us.

While in law school, I worked summers with migrant farm workers in Michigan, the vast majority of whom came from the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, along the border with Mexico. It was the era of César Chávez, who galvanized the country around issues of justice, decent pay and working conditions for field laborers.

So it was that I ended up in the Valley and worked there for ten years, helping to support farm worker organizing efforts and undertaking other human rights endeavors. It was an amazing way to witness that people living in poverty had great personal wisdom and an amazing sense of family and community.

Eventually, my work brought me to Austin, Texas, and the Texas Civil Liberties Union.

In 1990, two of us located free office space in a benefactor’s community building and began the Texas Civil Rights Project. Over the years, through the help of many generous people and organizations, TCRP has grown to a staff of 38 people in five offices: El Paso, South Texas, West Texas, Houston, and Austin.

TCRP handles the full panoply of civil rights issues, including: voting, free speech and assembly, economic justice, jail and prison matters, police misconduct, discrimination, and disability. For 23 years, the Texas Civil Rights Project has been a tireless advocate for racial, social and economic equality for low-income people, through its education and litigation programs.

Some of the achievements of the TCRP staff include:

• Handling more than 3000 legal cases for poor and low-income people
• Developing a vigorous VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) legal program for abused immigrant women in rural Texas that includes our unique “Circuit Rider” component and counseling and support services provided by a MSW supervisor and social work interns
• Publishing twelve Human Rights reports on issues such as hate crimes, Title IX rights of girls in high school, and the death penalty, and seven “self-help” legal manuals, on matters like veterans rights, disability laws, and prisoner rights
• Conducting community and lawyer trainings for more than 50,000 persons
• Publishing more than 400 opinion editorials in Texas newspapers
• Giving more than 500 speeches and talks on civil rights to diverse groups (such as school conferences, law enforcement trainings, and senior citizen organizations)

Due to the tireless advocacy of many TCRP employees, jails in Texas counties now do much more in preventing inmate suicide, providing interpreters for deaf prisoners, protecting vulnerable inmates from sexual assault, and administering HIV medications.

TCRP set the national model in ballot accessibility for blind voters and has led more than 30 regional compliance campaigns in Texas under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Thanks to our intrepid staff, businesses, churches, and courthouses in Texas are much more accessible to elderly and people with disabilities, as are government programs.

TCRP’s Title IX programs on sexual harassment and equal sports opportunities have helped make rural middle and high schools more hospitable for young women, and respectful of them, and opened up the prospect of athletic scholarships to college for them. Our Safe Schools project works with community groups on anti-bullying programs for students and our “Equality under the Law” campaign addressed “benign” discrimination against African Americans and Hispanic Americans in banks, restaurants, motels, and other public accommodation.

Efforts to help South Asian, Muslim, and Arab citizens, permanent residents, and students who fell victim to post September 11th discrimination included filing a suit against a major airline and enlisting Texas attorneys to represent, on a pro bono basis, individuals who were questioned by the FBI.

TCRP worked with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) to help create single-member school board districts and assisted in redistricting the Texas Legislature and congressional districts so as to protect the voting and representational rights of minority citizens.

We assisted the NAACP is persuading the U.S. Department of Justice to audit the Austin Police Department and make more than 200 changes, including its use of force practices in the city’s minority communities.

TCRP joined with the American Jewish Congress in one of the first court cases in the country to challenge the constitutionality of government funding of a religiously-orientated job training program that used the Bible as an employment text and proselytized its trainees.

And we are a leading voice in raising questions about the fairness of Texas’ death penalty scheme, and the possibility of executing innocent people. So, too, are we an intrepid advocate of traditional civil liberties, such as free speech and assembly, due process, and equal protection under the United States and Texas Constitutions.

Our work that I’m proudest of dealt with:

• Ending secret collection of and research on blood of all babies born after 2002 
• Directing 480 suits under the Americans with Disabilities Act and related enforcement campaigns
• Challenging grand jury discrimination against Mexican Americans, women, and poor people
• Eliminating the statutory exclusion of farm and ranch laborers from the Texas workers’ compensation and unemployment compensation laws
• Extending the Texas Equal Rights Amendment to minority voting and redistricting
• Establishing a habeas corpus mechanism to review claims of innocence for persons sentenced to death
• Winning the right of blind voters to cast secret, adapted election ballots 
• Banning mandatory polygraph testing of state employees (and establishing privacy as fundamental right under the Texas Constitution)
• Protecting United Farm Workers Union members from retaliatory employment termination
• Securing the right of blind people to use dog guides in public accommodations 
• Seven McAllen police brutality class actions suits that reorganized the department

The most recent and profound personal development, as mentioned earlier, was coming to work with hizmet. It started with one of the movement’s interfaith dialog trips to Turkey and eventually led to writing a book on the eight-year-long political trial of Fethullah Gülen, which ended successfully and actually helped the process of more deeply democratizing Turkey.

International human rights law had always been a passion, and it was an honor to write on a subject that no one else in the world had written on. In subsequent trips, I met so many people in hizmet and was always singularly inspired by their good deeds, hard work, amiability, and commitment. It reminded me that people from all walks of life and faiths are struggling for democracy and human rights.

There remains much to do, of course. Human rights is a life-long struggle; it is painstaking to build civil society. As Eugene Debs, the renowned American labor organizer, said, every struggle for human rights is lost, and lost, and lost, before it succeeds. Indeed, many people have given their lives over the years, and suffered enormously to help make the world a better place for its people.

Civil society has yet to define and accept broader human rights, such as the right to employment, the right to a social and economic safety net, the right to medical care, the right to participate in community’s cultural life, the right to adequate standard of living, and the right to an education. The struggle goes on, building on those who went before us, for the benefit of those who come after us.

Eleanor Roosevelt put it well in her remarks at the United Nations in 1958:

Where, after all, do universal rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

Such has been the journey of those of us inspired by John F. Kennedy all those years ago. It has been an incredible blessing to “labor in the vineyard” with so many good and decent people; they have contributed to my own growth as a person. I hope and pray that I have given back to them a portion of what they have given me. That, after all, is what living in the human community is all about:

We make a living from what we get.
We make a life from what we give.
What we have done for ourselves dies with us.
What we have done for others and for the world is immortal.
MaryAnn Evans

Harrington is founder and director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit foundation, promotes civil rights and economic and racial justice throughout Texas, for low-income people. He is author of Wrestling with Free Speech, Religious Freedom, and Democracy in Turkey: The Political Trials and Times of Fethullah Gülen.

Termites are 1-2 cm in size, but they live in mud towers that can grow to five meters tall. The scale, between termite and tower, is comparable to that between a human and a skyscraper. When their life style, which seems chaotic from the outside, is investigated, one finds that termites maintain social lives within perfect urban communities. These wondrous mini cities feature air conditioning and ventilation systems, in addition to a queen chamber, and rooms for incubation and juveniles.

An instinctual sense of solidarity that has been ingrained among living organisms also plays an important role among termites. They display an amazing form of cooperation in matters like foraging and defense. As termites live in colonies, they follow a particular arrangement of duties. The queen is in charge of new generations; workers meet the nest’s needs, and soldiers are responsible for its defense. When necessary, workers also participate in defensive tasks. One of the termite’s defense mechanisms, which amazed scientists, was recently discovered in June 2012.

Jan Sobotnik, with the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and Thomas Bourguignon, of Université Libre de Bruxelles at French Guiana, discovered an unseen feature of the termite species Neocapritermes taracua. The workers of this species are, in a sense, enlisted to military duty when they “retire” due to old age and an inability to forage due to weakened mouths. They serve the defense of the nest as something of a chemical weapon specialist. When the colony is under attack, these veterans blow up a droplet-size balloon filled with a type of chemical generated in between segments of their neck and dorsal region.

When worker termites get older, blue crystal chambers, which resemble backpacks, grow on their two shoulder blades on their back. These crystals are a kind of protein called hemocyanin that contains copper, and they join together with saliva when under threat. This fusion causes a chemical reaction. The end product is a sticky liquid, like a gel, that is compressed to expand and then burst. This can fatally injure a predator. The poisonous substance that is dispersed causes rotting upon contact. The chemical formula of this blue crystal substance, along with its reactions, are still unknown.

Researchers from Oregon University (USA) reported that the mouth of an ant is worn down by age. When this occurs, these senior individuals, which used to cut leaves, now take on different jobs, like carrying the leaves. Leaf cutter ants, which are also known as the ranchers of the animal kingdom for their ability to cultivate fungi in their nests, can cut and carry leaves whose weight can be up to 50 times their body weight.

The leaves that are transported to the nest comprise the main ingredient required for the growth of fungi in a suitable environment regulated for the right temperature and humidity. This fungi is ultimately used to feed the colony. This is a fine example of senior members of a community staying active in a new role. And this is not just unique to termites: research shows that members of animal societies adapt to changes in their lives, and continue serving their colonies even if they lose some dexterity.

Our universe seems to be set up this way. As mentioned in the above examples, there is a change of occupation instead of just retirement. Just as there is no termite that stops working, there is no bird that says “I do not want to fly anymore because I am old,” or no tree that says, “I will retire and stop giving fruit because of my old age.” Organisms adapt to new conditions and find new ways to provide for our planet.

Our aging planet will continue rotating and the sun will keep smiling on us with its heat and light until the end of such organism’s lifetimes.

When it comes to humans, continuing with occupation and business as much as they can should be the desired effort. Especially for charity work, no one should mention retirement or leave of a duty, and receding to one’s quarters. Let us renew our intentions now, and review our senior living plans.

Ants and Ecosystem³

The abundance of ants on earth is legendary. They live almost everywhere except very cold places such as Antarctica and Greenland. A worker is less than one-millionth the size of a human being, yet ants taken collectively rival people as dominant organisms on the land. Lean against a tree almost anywhere and the first creature that crawls on you will probably be an ant. Stroll down a suburban sidewalk with your eyes fixed on the ground, counting the different kinds of animals you see. The ants will win hands down. The British entomologist⁴ C. B. Williams once calculated that the number of insects alive on earth at a given moment is one million trillion, 1018. If, to take a conservative figure, one percent of this host is ants, their total population is ten thousand trillion. Individual workers weigh on average between one to five milligrams, according to the species. When combined, all ants in the world taken together weigh about as much as all human beings. But being so finely divided into tiny individuals, this biomass⁵ saturates the terrestrial environment.⁶

Ants absolutely dominate in rainforests, which are the most biologically diverse ecosystems on earth. Rainforests are so diverse that in a single leguminous tree (a relative to beans and peas) in Peru, 43 species of ants belonging to 26 genera⁷ were found, about equal to the ant fauna⁸ of the British Isles. In a single square mile of tropical forest in Peru or Brazil, there may be 1,500 or more species of butterflies-twice the total number found in the United States and Canada combined.⁹ In Amazon rainforests ants and termites together compose nearly a third of the animal biomass. In other words, when all kinds of animals, large and small, from jaguars to monkeys down to roundworms and mites, are weighed, nearly a third of the weight consists of the flesh of ants and termites.

All of the ants, composing in formal taxonomic classification the family Formicidae of the order Hymenoptera, contain about 9,500 species known to science and at least twice that number of species remaining to be discovered, most of which are confined to the tropics. The total number of species of social insects is about 13,500 out of a grand total of 750,000 insect species that have been recognized to date by biologists. These numbers show that social insects seem to constitute 2 percent of all insects yet, in terms of biomass, social insects are half or more of all insects. Why are ants and other social insects so successful in the terrestrial environment? Their strength comes from their social organization.¹⁰ In addition to the question of why ants and other highly social insect species have been so successful, it is also important to understand how such a large collection of individuals maintains order and collectively accomplishes tasks without producing chaos. With potentially thousands of individual ants to coordinate, how do they make decisions regarding who does what and when, especially critical decisions regarding reproduction?¹¹ These questions become even more intriguing when you realize that ants have quite limited sensory devices to experience the world. They also have relatively simple nervous systems that process only a limited number of stimuli and are aware of only a few minutes to a few hours into the past.¹²

What is Collective Intelligence?¹³

Intelligence can be defined simply as the ability to solve problems. One system is more intelligent than another system if in a given time interval it can solve more problems, or find better solutions to the same problems. A group can then be said to exhibit collective intelligence if it can find more or better solutions than the whole of all solutions that would be found by its members working individually.

All organizations, whether they are firms, institutions or sporting teams, are created on the assumption that their members can do more together than they could do alone. Yet, most organizations have a hierarchical structure, with one individual at the top directing the activities of the other individuals at the levels below. Although no president, chief executive or general can oversee or control all the tasks performed by different individuals in a complex organization, one might still suspect that the intelligence of the organization is somehow merely a reflection or extension of the intelligence of its hierarchical head. This is no longer the case in small, closely interacting groups such as soccer or football teams, where the “captain” rarely gives orders to the other team members. The movements and tactics that emerge during a soccer match are not controlled by a single individual, but result from complex sequences of interactions. Still, they are simple enough for an individual to comprehend, and since soccer players are intrinsically intelligent individuals, it may appear that the team is not really more intelligent than its members.

With the growing interest in complex adaptive systems, artificial life, swarms, and simulated societies, the concept of “collective intelligence” is coming more and more to the fore. The basic idea is that a group of individuals (e.g. people, insects, robots etc.) can be smart in a way that none of its members is. Complex, apparently intelligent behavior may emerge from the synergy created by simple interactions between individuals that follow simple rules.

How do ants succeed?

Now we have lots of questions to ask about the success of ants as a group. How do they govern? Who is the ruler? How do they foresee the future? How do they elaborate plans and preserve equilibrium? These, indeed, are puzzling questions. Every single ant in a colony seems to have its own agenda, and yet an insect colony looks so organized. The seamless integration of all individual activities does not seem to require a supervisor. For example, leaf-cutter ants cut leaves from plants and trees to grow fungi. Workers forage for leaves hundreds of meters away from the nest, literally organizing highways to and from their foraging sites. Weaver ant workers form chains of their own bodies, allowing them to cross wide gaps and pull stiff leaf edges together to form a nest. Several chains can join to form a bigger one over which workers run back and forth. In their moving phase, army ants organize impressive hunting raids, involving up to 200,000 workers, during which they collect thousands of prey.¹⁴

A harvester ant colony performs many tasks: It must collect and distribute food, build a nest, and care for the eggs, larvae, and pupae. It lives in a changing world to which it must respond. When there is a windfall of food, more foragers are needed. When the nest is damaged, extra effort is required for quick repairs. Task allocation is the process that results in certain workers engaged in specific tasks, in numbers appropriate to the current situation. Task allocation is a solution to a dynamic problem and thus it is a process of continual adjustment. It operates without any central or hierarchical control to direct individual ants into particular tasks. Although “queen” is a term that reminds us of human political systems, the queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by the workers. She does not decide which worker does what. In a harvester ant colony, many feet of intricate tunnels and chambers and thousands of ants separate the queen, surrounded by interior workers, from the ants working outside the nest and using only the chambers near the surface. It would be physically impossible for the queen to direct every worker’s decision about which task to perform and when. Consider the commercially available ant farms being sold. Since it’s forbidden to transfer ant queens, in the US ant farms are sold with only worker ants. Still they work in harmony. They build their nest, they build bridges, they collect food and they defend their colony. They do all these things without a queen. The absence of central control may seem counterintuitive, because we are accustomed to hierarchically organized social groups in many aspects of human societies, including universities, businesses, governments, orchestras and armies. This mystery underlies the ancient and pervading fascination of social insect colonies.

No ant is able to assess the global needs of the colony, or to count how many workers are engaged in each task and decide how many should be allocated differently. The capacity of an individual is limited. It cannot make complicated assessments. It probably cannot remember anything for very long. Its behavior is based on what it perceives in its immediate environment. Each worker needs to make only fairly simple decisions. There is abundant evidence, throughout physics, the social sciences and biology that such simple behavior by individuals can lead to predictable patterns in the behavior of the group. It should be possible to explain task allocation in a similar way, as the consequence of simple decisions by individuals.

Though ant colonies must respond to changing conditions, the response does not have to be perfect. It is not like clockwork, or an army, each unit snapping into place so the whole system ticks on without a hitch. There must be enough ants to collect food, often enough for the colony to survive and grow. The appropriate range of numbers should be allocated over a set of similar occasions. If the colony did not get enough food today, perhaps it will tomorrow. The process results in more or less the right number of ants engaged in the appropriate task, often enough for the colony to carry on.

Maximizing the number of ants that perform each task may not always be best for the colony. A task allocation problem for a human city is how to get the right number of firefighters to the scene of a fire. It may be a waste to have too many firefighters on the city payroll. Too many ants allocated to each task may be expensive for a colony if the excess ants could be doing something more useful than waiting around when they are not needed.

The most difficult thing to grasp about task allocation is that it is not a deterministic process even at the individual level. An ant does not respond the same way every time to the same stimulus; nor do colonies. Some events influence the probabilities that certain ants will perform certain tasks, and this regularity leads to predictable tendencies rather than perfectly deterministic outcomes. The ant is jostled in a stream of events that send it sometimes into one task, sometimes another. Task allocation is not a system in which each ant awaits the crucial event that defines its status forever. Like a twig in a turbulent river, an ant may tend to go in one direction, but there are many places it could get washed ashore, to be picked up and then swept in another direction altogether.

Stories about totalitarian societies, inexorable armies, and voracious monsters are often told as stories about ants. But ants have no dictators, no generals and no evil masterminds. In fact, there are no leaders at all.

In short, the basic mystery about ant colonies is that there is no management. A functioning organization with no one in charge is so unlike the way humans operate as to be virtually inconceivable. There is no central control. No insect issues commands to another or instructs it to do things in a certain way. No individual is aware of what must be done to complete any colony task. Each ant scratches and prods its way through the tiny world of its immediate surroundings. Ants meet each other, separate, go about their business. Somehow these small events create a pattern that drives the coordinated behavior of colonies.¹⁵

Elements of Collective Intelligence¹⁶

More is different. This old slogan of complexity theory actually has two meanings that are relevant to our ant colonies. First, the statistical nature of ant interaction demands that there is a critical mass of ants for the colony to make intelligent assessments of its global state. Ten ants roaming across the desert floor will not be able to accurately judge the overall need for foragers or nest-builders, but two thousand will do the job admirably. Individual ants do not know that they are prioritizing pathways between different food sources when they lay down a pheromone¹⁷ gradient near a pile of nutritious seeds. In fact, if we only studied individual ants in isolation, we’d have no way of knowing that those chemical secretions were part of an overall effort to create a mass distribution line, carrying comparatively huge quantities of food back to the nest. It is only by observing the entire system at work that the global behavior becomes apparent.

Ignorance is usually useful for ants. The simplicity of the ant language-and the relative stupidity of the individual ants-is, as the computer programmers say, a feature but not a bug. Emergent systems can grow unwieldy when their component parts become excessively complicated. Better to build a densely interconnected system with simple elements, and let the more sophisticated behavior trickle up. That is why an ant does not respond to all stimuli around her, namely she ignores until she decides that the stimulus is strong enough to be responded to.

Encourage random encounters. Decentralized systems such as ant colonies rely heavily on the random interactions of ants exploring a given space without any predefined orders. Their encounters with other ants are individually arbitrary, but because there are so many individuals in the system, those encounters eventually allow individuals to gauge and alter the state of the colony itself. Without those haphazard encounters, the colony would not be capable of stumbling across new food sources or of adapting to new environmental conditions.

Look for patterns in the signs. While the ants do not need an extensive vocabulary and are capable of syntactical formulations, they do rely heavily on patterns in the semiochemicals they detect. A gradient in a pheromone trail leads them toward a food source, while encountering a high ratio of nest-builders to foragers encourages them to switch tasks. This knack for pattern detection allows meta-information to circulate through the colony mind: signs about signs. Smelling the pheromones of a single forager ant means little, but smelling the pheromones of fifty foragers imparts information about the global state of the colony.

Pay attention to your neighbors. This may well be the most important lesson that the ants have to give us, and the one with the most far-reaching consequences. You can restate it as “Local information can lead to global wisdom.” The primary mechanism of swarm logic is the interaction between neighboring ants in the field: ants stumbling across each other, or each other’s pheromone trails, while patrolling the area around the nest. Adding ants to the overall system will generate more interactions between neighbors and will consequently enable the colony to solve problems and regulate itself more effectively. Without neighboring ants stumbling across one another, colonies would be just a senseless assemblage of individual organisms-a swarm without logic.

Conclusion

Ants, first of all, have something to teach us about how nature works. Any system whose behavior arises from the interactions of its components has something in common with ant colonies. Using ants and other social insects as models, computer scientists have developed software agents that cooperate to solve complex problems, such as the rerouting of traffic in a busy telecom network or internet. Another example, the famous traveling salesman problem, in which a salesman tries to find the shortest and fastest route between many cities, is almost impossible to solve definitively. But with the methods inspired by ants the problem can be solved at least approximately, because ants are very good at finding the shortest path between the food and the nest collectively. Collective robotics borrowed from collective intelligence in ant colonies is being used to manage systems composed of lots of robots in synchronization.

Nature is a book to be read by the people who approach it to live in harmony, not to dominate. We are not the owners of the beautiful things around us, but observers searching for signs which reveal the wisdom behind them.

Footnotes

1. Haskins C.P., Of Ants and Men, Prentice-Hall Inc., 1939.
2. Huxley J., Ants, AMS Press, 1969.
3. An ecosystem is a grouping of plants, animals, and other organisms interacting with each other and with the environment in such a way as to perpetuate the grouping more or less indefinitely.
4. The scientific discipline in which ants are studied is called myrmecology and it is one of the branches of the study of insects, entomology.
5. Biomass is the total weight of all living organisms in a biological environment.
6. Holldobler B. and Wilson E.O., Journey to the Ants, Harvard University Press, 1994.
7. The word Genera is the plural of genus. Genus is a taxonomic category ranking below a family and above a species and generally consisting of a group of species exhibiting similar characteristics.
8. Fauna (Flora) is the animals (plants) of a particular region or period, considered as a group.
9. http://www.savenature.org/images/pdfs/ecoandinsects.pdf
10. Holldobler and Wilson, ibid.
11. Bonabeau E., Dorigo M., and Theraulaz G., Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial System, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Oxford University Press, NY:1999.
12. Holldobler and Wilson, ibid.
13. Heylighen, F. “Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web: Algorithms to Develop a Collective Mental Map,” Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory. 1999, Vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 253-280.
14. Bonabeau et al, ibid.
15. Gordon D., Ants at Work, W. W. Norton. 1999.
16. Johnson S., Emergence Simon & Schuster. 2001.
17. The pheromone is the semiotic chemical ants use to communicate with each other and with other colonies. Every colony has its own odor. That is why ants can recognize their sisters from the same colony easily.

According to the author, Islams response to modernity has passed through three stages: revivalism, reform (including nationalism), and fundamentalism. Each has emerged from the former ones failure: the inability to achieve true independence, self-sustaining economic and scientific infrastructures, and a realistic alternative to a now-globalized system that marginalizes and ignores the Muslim world.

Lawrence builds his book around several arguments. First, Islam and being Muslim are not synonymous with being Middle Eastern Arabs, who are a minority within the fold of Islam. Second, the Islamic world is not a unified bloc, as shown by failures at attempts to unify individual countries or even to agree on what constitutes real Islam. Thus there is no basis for the Wests fear of a so-called clash of civilizations. Lawrence maintains that the likelihood of this happening is as remote as Canada, the United States, and Mexico uniting because they profess Christianity.

Third, fundamentalism has surged since the 1970s because of the failure of Arab nationalism, the use of oil money to create dependent rentier states, and the success of the Iranian revolution (1979). Other reasons include an omnipresent nation-state structure that blocks all outlets of legitimate protest, as well as the practices of every party trying to justify itself in terms of Islam because that is the most effective rallying cry.

Fourth, fundamentalists are mainly educated urban or newly urbanized young men who have little hope of finding a job after graduation, instead of the stereotypical types often presented in the media. Frustrated and angry, yes; but far from being uneducated, illiterate, and easily swayed by demagogues. What attracts them to fundamentalism is its black-and-white nature and its promises of a better and more just future. Unfortunately, fundamentalism preaches idealism and utopia, is destructive instead of constructive, and offers no viable alternative (Iran being the sole exception).

Throughout this book, Lawrence maintains that Iran is worth watching, for it is the social laboratory in which Islam is grappling with modernity on a daily basis. Another Muslim country worth watching is Malaysia, which has moved jihad from the battlefield to the economic and development plane by striving to become a fully modern industrialized nation by 2020. It appears to be the first Muslim country actively trying to disprove the assertion that Islam precludes such a transformation.

The author also discusses the role of women, a favorite media topic. Basing himself on several geographically distinct Muslim countries, he concludes that attempts to restrict women to the home, while often justified in Islamic terms by a patriarchal sociopolitical order, reflect the fact that there are not enough jobs to go around even for men. As long as the army remains one of the few ways of social and economic advancement, economies do not develop and expand, modern technical education remains beyond reach for most young people, and skilled foreign workers are hired because there are not enough trained local workers, this problem will persist.

Lawrence has done the reading public a great service by reaching beyond stereotypes and lazy scholarship to give us a much more realistic view of the Muslim world and its inhabitants.