7.5 Studying Life
115
How far can swarms and animal communities develop? Stanislaw Lem (1961)
imagined a mighty sentient ocean, but neither he nor his ill-fated astronauts, who
were sent to investigate it but were instead investigated themselves, had any clue of
its nature. “Swarm intelligence” in the literal sense is impossible. Diffuse communication without precise addressing, either chemical or of any kind Lem’s ocean might
possess, cannot imitate an interconnected nerve network. Going a step higher, can
social insects develop a collective conscience similar to human’s – perhaps on some
planet in the galactic depths? Not until members of the colony become distinguishable, as humans are, and individuality requires more internal complexity, sustained
by a larger brain than can be afforded by an ant. The insect community is as poor
an imitation of an intelligent (not necessarily sentient) mammal as a biofilm is of a
multicellular organism.
Humans do possess “swarm intelligence” in a wider sense. Human society knows
and can accomplish much more than any individual – but only because any human
can be addressed individually, and only while a community is properly organized:
when it is literally a swarm, like Facebook “friends”, nothing but chat and fake news
comes out. Even totalitarian societies striving for robotic unity in pursuit of their
great common aims, whatever they are, must distinguish individual people to ensure
that everyone is doing the assigned job and does not deviate from the straight and
narrow path. How would dictators of the mid-20th century enjoy our connectivity!
They couldn’t even dream of ideas of connecting people by internet through chips
inserted in their brains (Chorost, 2011). Ants and bees do not need secret police,
there are no dissidents among them, and neither would there be among us if this
dream came about.
7.5 Studying Life
Bodily communication networks, either electrical, chemical, or mixed, not to mention social interactions that cause us to feel delight or pain, all this on top of the
complex communication webs within cells and among cells aggregated in tissues,
appear at first sight to justify a holistic attitude, going also by the modernized name
of “systemic thinking”. However, real scientists do not think in this way, and not
because they are narrow-minded. They see the abyss of underlying complexity, but
this complexity is waiting to be unraveled rather than admired. This is what is being done day by day, finding out what this or that molecule is doing, and how it is
affected by this or that gene, and how this or that link in the metabolic or signaling
network can be influenced, for good or bad. It is boring to read papers coauthored by
blown-up teams, still less to extract the relevant details from them, but sometimes
they lead to Nobel Prizes for their leaders, and sometimes they lead to novel cures,
and then news, of course, stripped of boring essentials, reach the popular press. This
is the research that gathers the bulk of science funding, and it is thanks to this invisible work that we live on the average about twenty years longer than hundred years
ago, even though some directions may not seem to be practically relevant at all.
But what about deep general insights? We have seen them in the past; even the
nature of heredity was unknown hundred years ago, not to mention the nature of
115
How far can swarms and animal communities develop? Stanislaw Lem (1961)
imagined a mighty sentient ocean, but neither he nor his ill-fated astronauts, who
were sent to investigate it but were instead investigated themselves, had any clue of
its nature. “Swarm intelligence” in the literal sense is impossible. Diffuse communication without precise addressing, either chemical or of any kind Lem’s ocean might
possess, cannot imitate an interconnected nerve network. Going a step higher, can
social insects develop a collective conscience similar to human’s – perhaps on some
planet in the galactic depths? Not until members of the colony become distinguishable, as humans are, and individuality requires more internal complexity, sustained
by a larger brain than can be afforded by an ant. The insect community is as poor
an imitation of an intelligent (not necessarily sentient) mammal as a biofilm is of a
multicellular organism.
Humans do possess “swarm intelligence” in a wider sense. Human society knows
and can accomplish much more than any individual – but only because any human
can be addressed individually, and only while a community is properly organized:
when it is literally a swarm, like Facebook “friends”, nothing but chat and fake news
comes out. Even totalitarian societies striving for robotic unity in pursuit of their
great common aims, whatever they are, must distinguish individual people to ensure
that everyone is doing the assigned job and does not deviate from the straight and
narrow path. How would dictators of the mid-20th century enjoy our connectivity!
They couldn’t even dream of ideas of connecting people by internet through chips
inserted in their brains (Chorost, 2011). Ants and bees do not need secret police,
there are no dissidents among them, and neither would there be among us if this
dream came about.
7.5 Studying Life
Bodily communication networks, either electrical, chemical, or mixed, not to mention social interactions that cause us to feel delight or pain, all this on top of the
complex communication webs within cells and among cells aggregated in tissues,
appear at first sight to justify a holistic attitude, going also by the modernized name
of “systemic thinking”. However, real scientists do not think in this way, and not
because they are narrow-minded. They see the abyss of underlying complexity, but
this complexity is waiting to be unraveled rather than admired. This is what is being done day by day, finding out what this or that molecule is doing, and how it is
affected by this or that gene, and how this or that link in the metabolic or signaling
network can be influenced, for good or bad. It is boring to read papers coauthored by
blown-up teams, still less to extract the relevant details from them, but sometimes
they lead to Nobel Prizes for their leaders, and sometimes they lead to novel cures,
and then news, of course, stripped of boring essentials, reach the popular press. This
is the research that gathers the bulk of science funding, and it is thanks to this invisible work that we live on the average about twenty years longer than hundred years
ago, even though some directions may not seem to be practically relevant at all.
But what about deep general insights? We have seen them in the past; even the
nature of heredity was unknown hundred years ago, not to mention the nature of