The House of Representatives is too small. Here is one way to fix it.

435. That's how many people are in the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the legislative branch of the United States government. The country's founders expected the House to expand along with the country. But that number, 435, hasn't changed in about 100 years, even though the US population has tripled in that time frame. Some scholars think that imbalance helps explain why many Americans feel like Congress is disconnected from them.

Elas são fundamentais para os ecossistemas: aeram o solo, dispersam sementes, reciclam nutrientes e servem de alimento para inúmeros outros animais.

Here's the thing that you really care about, which is, you know, whether you can get the ear of somebody who represents you, whether you can find that person in your district. The more people that person represents, the less likelihood you can get the attention of that person.

Algumas espécies cultivam fungos. Outras criam pulgões. E algumas até constroem pontes vivas com seus próprios corpos.

>> But this one congressman thinks it's time to think bigger than 435. >> If you were going to make government more democratic, what would that look like? Why don't we continually expand the House? It's something that would make us more representative. It's something that would give more representation to the parts of the country where people actually live.

O sucesso das formigas se deve em grande parte à sua organização social. Uma colônia de formigas funciona como um superorganismo, com diferentes castas cumprindo diferentes papéis.

>> Representative Sean Casten of Illinois has presented a bill that would continuously expand the House as the country's population grows.

A rainha bota os ovos. As operárias buscam comida, constroem e defendem o ninho. E os machos... bom, os machos basicamente só existem para acasalar.

But will adding more seats to the House actually be a good balance of effective governance and representation, or will it only add more chaos and gridlock?

Mas essa divisão de trabalho permite que as formigas realizem feitos incríveis de engenharia e logística que nenhuma formiga individual poderia.

So 435 isn't in the Constitution. It actually says this, "The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every 30,000, but each state shall have at least one representative." But we got rid of this idea pretty quickly.

É por isso que as formigas dominaram praticamente todo habitat terrestre por mais de 100 milhões de anos.

>> That seems crazy today. We would have a house that would be astronomically large if we kept that number in place. It was thought of as a guideline and the Constitution is in many ways an aspirational document. Now, what the framers did enshrine was that the census would determine the number of representatives for each state. As long as the house was aortioned or divided off of that, it was constitutional. So, for over a 100 years, we did that modestly adding seats through aortionment acts as the new states joined the union. But after World War I, the population shifted to urban centers.

Elas eram aqui antes de nós e provavelmente estarão aqui depois de nós.