Comments on: Birds Of A Feather

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:18:35 +0000

Well, I was thinking of the “intelligence”, for example, of ant colonies; the colony certainly seems far smarter than any particular ant.

By: Horace Jeffery Hodges

Horace Jeffery Hodges — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:45:02 +0000

“Indeed, it can seem that the group taken as a whole exhibits a kind of emergent intelligence that is present in none of its mindless constituents.”

I’d have to disagree on this point. I would perhaps refer to “emergent behavior” of the flock, rather than “emergent intelligence,” and I wouldn’t consider the individual birds to be mindless, though I’d agree that they probably don’t have a concept of “flock.”

Jeffery Hodges

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By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:33:26 +0000

Yep — just amazing.

By: Charles

Charles — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:12:24 +0000

That was beautiful. Ot Moor is now on my list of places to visit the next time I’m in England.

By: Kevin Kim

Kevin Kim — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:32:16 +0000

I highly recommend Michael Crichton’s Prey to you, if you haven’t already read it. One of the major topics in the book is swarming behavior. The back of the novel contains a long bibliography representing the research Crichton had done for the story. Those sources might be of interest as well.

(In fact, I may have mentioned Prey to you once or twice before; I’m over 40 now, so I tend to repeat myself even more than I used to.)