In "The Genius of Swarms" in the July 2007 issue of National Geographic Magazine, Peter Miller attributes swarm intelligence to groups of insects, schools of fish and herds of caribou. Individual ants, fish or bees are not good problem solvers but, as part of a colony, they can find the shortest route to food, allocate workers efficiently or defend the herd from predators.

Concepts from swarm intelligence have human applications as well. Companies in Italy and Switzerland use ants' foraging rules to find the best routes for delivering dairy products, heating oil and groceries. Telephone companies mimic the ant behavior of leaving pheromones (chemicals produced by an animal that serve as stimuli to others of the species). Virtual pheromones at switching stations show prime trails to ensure calls take the fastest routes. Pari-mutuel betting at a racetrack can apply principles from swarm intelligence to pick winners and losers.

Researchers believe that the methods used by insects are relatively simple. First, no one is in charge. Instead, the process relies on self-organizing as a management system. Self-organizing is the sum of countless interactions between numerous individual ants, following simple rules. For example, in an ant colony, patrollers are sent out early in the morning. When they return to the hive, they use their antennae to touch the antennae of forager ants, providing a stimulus. A forager must have contact with a certain number of patrollers in a period of time before it will go out. In other words, foragers can tell whether it is safe to go out by the rate of their encounters with patrollers. When foraging begins, other ants join the process based on the rate at which they encounter returning foragers.

Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University, describes it this way:

A forager won't come back until it finds something. The less food there is, the longer it takes the forager to find it and get back. The more food there is, the faster it comes back. So nobody's deciding whether it's a good day to forage. The collective is, but no particular ant is. No individual sees the bigger picture and no ant tells another ant what to do. Each ant is stimulated by local information and follows simple rules.

Bees' choices of new nest sites demonstrate rules for decision-making. According to Thomas Seeley, a Cornell University biologist, because bee colonies often contain up to 50,000 workers, they must have ways to work through individual differences to make decisions that are best for the colony. Seeley and others developed tests to determine how bee scouts collect and transmit information. Scouts were observed performing waggle dances to indicate their preference for a new site and the directions to it. As scouts gathered at various potential nest sites, a quorum system was used. The first site with the threshold number of fifteen scouts at its entrance was the new nest.

Seeley decided to employ bees' rules to run faculty meetings: "seek a diversity of options, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices."

Miller's article ends with thoughts about ingredients of smart group behavior, including decentralized control, response to local cues and simple rules that result in useful strategies for coping with complex situations.

As a student of Bowen theory, I was especially interested in the author's conclusions about collective intelligence:

Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.

Differentiation of self, a key aspect of Bowen theory, is the ability for people to make fact-based decisions based on principles and to separate thinking from feeling. An individual at a higher level of differentiation would not be swayed by a crowd or influenced by a best friend when making decisions. He or she would be able to decide for self based on principles developed over time, even when anxiety is high and the pressure to conform is strong. Fusion is the emotional pull to be like the other, to be governed by the group's anxiety and to wait for others to act, thereby abdicating one's own responsibility. Fusion is fueled by anxiety and is a multi-generational process.

Murray Bowen spent his career working toward a science of human behavior that viewed human beings as part of all life. I believe the patterns described in Swarm Intelligence support the concepts in Bowen theory and underscore human connection to all life.

What's Happening in Your Garden?

For summer gardening fun, check out research published by Susan Dudley, associate professor of biology at McMaster University. Dudley and her student, Amanda File, report that when plants were forced to share their pots with others of the same species, they could recognize their own family.

"The ability to recognize and favour kin is common in animals, but this is the first time it has been shown in plants," Dudley reports. She and File observed that when sharing pots, plants usually became competitive and started growing more roots, giving them an advantage in reaching water and nutrients before pot mates. Plants sharing pots with family did not increase root growth, possibly offering cues for kin recognition through root interactions. Dudley sees this response as evidence that plants are capable of complex social behaviors, including altruism toward relatives, even though they lack cognition and memory.

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Science Friday

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