This is really cool. When bees scout for a new nest, each potential site is visited by a few scouts - the scouts don't all go to the same places, they spread out. Then when they meet up they have a dance off and the busiest, most determined scouts win the day and all the bees swarm to that one preferred site.
Now, when a monkey is trained to turn to the direction that most dots on a screen move towards, the neurons in their brain do exactly the same thing - some neurons say, look left! Others say, look right! And the busiest, most determined neurons win the day.
Organisms are a functioning assembly of cells seeking the survival of the being. Organisms are, in a sense, a swarm.
There's a similarly cool fact about ants - when they move across a forest from A to B, the always choose the most efficient path - through utilising a kind of group mind - as well as by some ants forming 'bridges' for other ants across difficult terrain. Scientists have used the ant method to determine the best routes for delivery drivers - and they have found that without complicated maths and so on, the ant method is quicker in resolving such problems.
Then there's the way that ecosystems work - like the trees passing carbon to each other, as I wrote about before - as though the ecosystems, too, function like single organisms.
If we analogise the other way, then what effect akin to cells in a body are humans having on the planet's ecosystem? We are like an autoimmune disease. We are, as some environmentalists argue, like a cancer. We truly are. Or a virus.
If you have a virus that proliferates very quickly in cells, it kills its host and thereby itself. So virus strains that do not proliferate too quickly have an evolutionary advantage in one sense. But if you have different groups of hosts and viruses coming into contact with each other, then the fast proliferating strains may still do well as they reproduce so quickly and can then take over the hosts of slower proliferating strains. There ends up being a balance between the faster and the slower strains. But what if there were only the fast strains that killed off their host?
Where's the vaccine to protect the planet?
But then, in the grand scheme of things, who ever said that this planet's ecosystem mattered? Sure, it matters to us... but we are vastly outnumbered by bacteria and they will certainly out-survive us.
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