Swarms
Not smart but effective
We humans look at ourselves and others as autonomous creatures. We have projects. We strive to stay alive.
Many of the mammals who are our companions in the world seem to be like that and we assume that it's the most effective way of living - as if we were some sort of peak of evolution.
Most living things are not like us. They don't have projects. They just live and prosper if conditions are right and otherwise they die and their material gets recycled.
One very successful evolutionary strategy is the swarm. A swarm is very many identical units that fan out into the environment and exploit whatever resources they find. The units that don't find resources die off and the ones that do multiply until the resource is consumed.
Covid19 isn't very smart but it managed to get all over the world in a matter of months. The virus just replicated whenever it could and people spread it before they knew that they were infected.
Ants are an example of a sort of meta-swarm. The flight of new queens is one level of swarm behavior but then the behavior of the ant colony itself is at a higher level.
I've been looking at murmurations of starlings lately with an eye to simulating the behaviour. It seems that the behaviour is the result of several fairly simple rules. The birds want to fly in the same direction as their neighbours and avoid colliding with neighbours and also tend to steer towards the center of the flock and away from any predators
I ponder the evolutionary arms race between starlings and falcons - I can see the starling genotype thumbing it's nose at the falcons - nya nya nya - catch me if you can and then we get a balance
And of course the falcons also propagate like other swarms - a seed floats on the wind and the lucky ones land on fertile ground
a few years ago I read about robotic swarms - little robots that could link together - they could link together to climb over a wall and break apart or swarm through small holes.
Swarms can explore a space of possibilities without being smart. And that's what evolution does.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.