National Geographic’s Swarm Behaviour is a thoroughly interesting article on insect behaviour. It discusses how research into insect behaviour is leading to new techniques in problem-solving, management, and artificial intelligence.
It even could shed light on humans and our behaviour.
“A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do,” says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert. “None of us knows what society as a whole needs, but we look around and say, oh, they need someone to volunteer at school, or mow the church lawn, or help in a political campaign.”
Very often, we don’t try to see intelligence elsewhere. We’ve created a definition of intelligence based on what we know.
I like to think that us humans are pattern recognition and replication machines with vastly more soft-wiring than other creatures. Even so, there’s still a lot of hard-wiring and hormonal influences, much more than we would like to believe.
We certainly swarm, drawn to volunteering to mow church lawns or queue for iPhones. Whatever we do, we love to believe we can justify it.