Societal leadership and swarm behaviour

In this earlier post I discussed what Ants can tell us about Society. I talked about the synchronisation of behaviour and drew parallels with human behaviour on the Millenium bridge which cause it to sway alarmingly, at least until the movement was damped. Swarms behave differently, their behaviour isn't synchronised, but it exhibits elements of synchronicity none the less. Peter Miller in this article on Swarm Theory in National Geographic Magazine goes into much more, and fascinating detail. It also reference Deborah Gordon's work in Arizona in relation to Ants. I was particularly taken by this paragraph in the article:

But the bottom line, says Iain Couzin, a biologist at Oxford and Princeton Universities, is that no leadership is required. "Even complex behavior may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions," he says.

Another example of swarms are both fish and birds where masses of the animals can come together in order to provide protection for the swarm. Starlings can create amazingly large groups which swirl and shift shape without leadership. Each Starling is reacting to the movements of its near neighbours, the impact is that the swarm stays together, and quickly reforms if it is split up by a predator. For the predator though the job is made harder, they can't focus on a single individual in such a massive group and they are effectively distracted by the swarm intelligence. So, how does this affect the societal web, are we, humans, perhaps a swarm, acting on the web to a set of fairly simple set of (as yet unidentified) rules with our behaviour and activities modified by a relatively few individuals in our close network? If we find ourselves uncertain what to do, do we revert to simple rules that enable us to exist in the society without a knowledge of it all, yet through the application of those simple rules do we create a swarm that has intelligence and performs better than any of us could as individuals in particular ways? If that is the case, then what benefits does that bring, what makes it the fittest survivor of the models for the web that we have developed?

Twitter this... Click here >>