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I don't know if anyone saw this on BBC 1 at 9pm last night:
Swarm: Nature's Incredible Invasions One Million Heads, One Beautiful Mind: A look at swarm intelligence, including free-tailed bats exchanging information in a living tornado and fire ants invading computer equipment.
I switched on to a tired old shot of frenzied wilderbeast attempting to cross a crocodile infested river and then, in disbelief, I heard the narator say something like:
...even thought the wilderbeast are not as intellegent as the zebra they act with "one mind" and all crossed safely unlike the zebras, which are individually much more intelligent...
My first response was to say what a load of b*******, but then I though: "your reaction is coming from the neo-darwinianist orthodoxy!" Then I realised this is about bringing radical new theories of consciousness into the living room; how communities of organisms cooperate to become a super organism and somehow (no one knows how) exhibit more and more intelligent behaviour. This is not just in "swarms," "herds" and colonies of ants for example but the super organism that we are: a community of billions of living cells that each have their own "simple" consciousness.
Kids will watch this film and go on to college and then go on to do research. The writing is really on the wall for the outdated orthodoxy of "survival of the fittest" and nature "red in tooth and claw."
One clip showed the way diversity of behaviour in a flock of African finches enabled them to learn strategies, as a flock, to evade the stoops of a lanner falcon. An unashamed example of group selection where diversity creates a team rather than an opportunity for the selection to weed out the "unfit" in a population.
I have never seen such a "revolutionary" BBC wildlife programme. The neo-darwinianists thought they had well and truely debunked the "peace and love" theory of "group selection." Poor old Dawkins, he must be pulling his hair out.
However, this film didn't just demostrate that this debate is re-emerging (at this time when the idea that...
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
John Meynard Keynes
...is being shown to be not just astounding but untenable) but, more than this, it talked about complexity in communities of animals (cooperative behaviour exhibited by very large numbers of individuals of lesser intelligence) in terms of a "biology of mind"; a heresy so heinous it is almost unutterable in the post enlightenment world (post Descartes split of mind and body).
What kind of a super organism do we become when we cooperate? What kind of a "one mind" could we be?
Norbu
Systems biology
I've posted these quotes before but thought they deserved another airing with a slightly different analysis.
In his recent book, the music of life, Denis Noble, Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University, places an interested twist on Richard Dawkins lines, showing that Dawkins is using opinion, not empirical science to drive his argument.
Dawkins uses the following analogy:
Now they [genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots [humans], sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. they are in you and me; they creted us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.
Noble adapts this quote from Dawkins with metaphores that support a sytems biologist's opinions but without changing any of the empirically established elements ("facts") of the argument:
Now they [genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings [humans], moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. they are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy we experience in reproducing ourselves. we are the ultimate rationale for their existence
There are two important points:
One is that Richard Dawkins' view is a partial reductionism; that there are many more complex process that can be identified that show that evolution is not merely acting on genes and cells are not built by the genes but build themselves using genetic information, like a library.
The other is that the complexity that arises out of this complete reductionist picture demostrates that the whole cannot be built from the parts.
Then there is "mind!"
Norbu