Our irresistible tendency to see things in human terms ― that we are often mistaken in attributing complex human motives and processing abilities to other species ― does not mean that an animal’s behavior is not, in fact, complex. Rather, it means that the complexity of the animal’s behavior is not purely a (a) product of its internal complexity. Herbert Simon’s “parable of the ant” makes this point very clearly. Imagine an ant walking along a beach, and (b) visualize tracking the trajectory of the ant as it moves. The trajectory would show a lot of twists and turns, and would be very irregular and complicated. One could then suppose that the ant had equally complicated (c) internal navigational abilities, and work out what these were likely to be by analyzing the trajectory to infer the rules and mechanisms that could produce such a complex navigational path. The complexity of the trajectory, however, “is really a complexity in the surface of the beach, not a complexity in the ant.” In reality, the ant may be using a set of very (d) complex rules: it is the interaction of these rules with the environment that actually produces the complex trajectory, not the ant alone. Put more generally, the parable of the ant illustrates that there is no necessary correlation between the complexity of an (e) observed behavior and the complexity of the mechanism that produces it.

* parable: 우화 ** trajectory: 이동 경로