Animal behaviorists today do tend to study hive insects as mega-intelligences, with behavior of the whole being much greater than the the sum of the parts, and exhibiting clear features that don't make sense by themselves, or in the individual biology. The architectural sophistication of hive construction, the way they handle ventilation, drainage, internal reinforcement, even traffic management, doesn't seem to reside in the mind of each member, but somehow emerges from their collective behavior. The same can be said for foraging strategies and military tactics, and other aspects of the group mind. How much do the alleged similarities in the behavior of human communities arise from analogous emergent structures?

When I studied geography, I was exposed to an entire school of 19th century geographers who claimed they could see evidence of this sort of higher-level organization in the spatial distribution of transportation networks, land use, settlemnt patterns, regional development and hierarchy etc. Look up Central Place Theory, The Propagation of Innovation Waves, and Mackinder's Heartland Theory for some examples. One of these guys, Mahan, still is taught in the US Naval Academy as self-evident truth. The Nazis were notorious for using this kind of academic wool-gathering and navel-gazing to justify their own racial and political theories. They published enormous quantities of nonsense, studded with footnotes of course, to give an air of legitimacy to their superstitions and prejudices. This is just one of the reasons why this kind of speculation is now officially frowned upon in academia, even though it is as common now as ever.

How much of this is just the result of our ability to detect patterns in nature that don't really exist, and how much of it comes from true hidden structures and processes revealing themselves, is a matter of debate--or even of ideology.

Still, there is no doubt that extremely complex systems seem to arise naturally from just a handful of a basic rules. It certainly happens in the hard sciences. The individual components of social systems may be able to suspect this, but are they really in a position to truly understand it? Individual ants and termites seem totally ignorant of their group behavior. The Queen doesn't consciously run the hive, but without her it soon falls apart.

There are all-encompassing theories (many of them competitive and contradictory!) in Anthropology, Sociology, History, Political Science and Economics that make the same sort of claims. It could be argued that all the social sciences are an attempt to formalize and define patterns that can just barely be glimpsed by those who make up the individuals of a collective. Who's to say how much of it is real, and how much an artifact of our own minds? This is not the sort of question that can be settled by assembling a few footnotes and factoids or appealing to "scientific method". (One of my pet peeves on this board, remember?) And come to think of it, isn't the human brain itself a complex unity based on the interaction of very simple components?

Civilizations, whether of ants or men, are complex structures which share, at least superficially, many of the characteristics of living organisms. There's a gold mine of ideas here for science fiction writers, just waiting to be worked. And perhaps fiction is the appropriate place where ideas of this sort can be explored. It may be a bit premature yet to call this "science".