We’ve once again fallen rather silent for over two weeks, yet throughout the past month or so, our devoted readership has sent us a steady supply of premier ant content. Below, we present you a list of seven interesting items we almost allowed you to miss!
Are you interested in the phrase “dangling ant asses”? Of course you are. Thus, you will now use […]
We wish all of our readers a simply thrilling 1st World Ant Day!
Myrmecologist Dr. Mike Kaspari, in a flash of inspiration, realized that World Ant Day did not yet exist. Thus, on April 21st, he announced a date for a new holiday:
On July 23rd, Dr. Kaspari proposed a special way to celebrate World Ant Day, for those on Twitter:
The Daily Ant hosts a weekly series, Philosophy Phridays, in which real philosophers share their thoughts at the intersection of ants and philosophy. This is the fifty-ninth contribution in the series, submitted by Dr. Andrew Moon.
Do Ants Doubt?
Do ants doubt? I will argue that they probably don’t.
Some might think that ants don’t have doubts because they don’t have any mental states. They are just mindless robots.
Those people might be right. However, there are some reasons to think that ants do have mental states. Suppose an ant is walking along a path, and you put a Lego in front of it. The ant stops. If I said, “The ant knows that there is something in front of it,” this would seem like a correct thing to say. Or if I said, “The ant thinks that there is something in front of it,” that would also seem correct to say. In contrast, suppose you rolled a marble and it stopped because of the Lego in its path. If I said, “The marble knows/thinks there’s something in front of it,” this would be incorrect to say. The fact that we attribute knowledge and thinking to the ant (but not the marble) is some evidence that we categorize ants (but not marbles) into the group of things with minds.
Paula Poundstone, the host of NPR’s Live from the Poundstone Institute and a regular Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! panelist, included ants in a bit about her asexuality in a 2006 standup special.
The Daily Ant hosts a weekly series, Philosophy Phridays, in which real philosophers share their thoughts at the intersection of ants and […]
We hear that today is something called “World Emoji Day“. It kind of seems like a soft promotional […]
Our Film Critic Derek Langston shared with us a jarring though realistic anime clip posted to Facebook two years […]
The Daily Ant hosts a weekly series, Philosophy Phridays, in which real philosophers share their thoughts at the intersection of ants and philosophy. This is the fifty-seventh contribution in the series, submitted by our editor-in-chief, Benjamin Blanchard.
Northwestern Prison Education Program
The ant content in this (Saturday!) post is far less than usual for the series, but the natural affinity between social insects and social justice warrants little explanation. Plus, as soon as I heard about program that serves as the topic for this post, I became increasingly antsy to feature it in the Philosophy Phriday series. What is the program you may ask? None other than that stated in the title: The Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP).
Basically, we just like the name of Xymmer, an ant genus with two known species found mostly in Africa but also reported from Southeast Asia.
An inspiring Hong Kong political party of the 90’s: the United Ants. Here’s a great bit on the […]
If you must choose car advertising as a career path, please follow the tire tracks of General Motors. The […]
