What ants and bees can teach us about the benefits of a free society.

The July issue of the National Geographic contains a great article entitled "The Genius of Swarms." It presents scientific findings on the behavior of swarming animals such as the movement of shoals of fish, herds of caribou, and flocks of birds. None of these groups has a leader coordinating the response to a predator, yet the groups respond with movements that confuse the attacker, giving a better chance of escape. It seems that each individual, while unaware of the "big picture," moves in response to those around it according to certain simple ingrained rules.

Even more amazing is the swarm behavior of social insects such as ants and bees. Without leaders giving commands, the hive or hill functions efficiently through the choices of each member. While an individual ant or bee is not smart, the group behaves in an intelligent way.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all--at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

Scientists are creating mathmatical/computer models of swarm behavior and finding fruitful applications. For example, a large company in Texas uses a computer model based on ant behavior to schedule delivery routes for its trucks--the money savings has been significant. Southwest Airlines is testing a similar model to manage plane traffic at the Phoenix airport.

Even more interesting, for the point of this blog, are the applications for human society. For example, bees choose a new hive during swarming based on the choice of a critical number of scouts: a bottom-up not a top-down decision making structure. One bee researcher has applied bee decision making methods to human choices.

The bees' rules for decision-making--seek a diversity of options, encourage free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices--so impressed [the researcher] that he now uses them at Cornell as chairman of his department.

So perhaps those who wish to create a command-economy and a society led by elites in a top-down manner, are the ones fighting nature. Free societies and free economies may be naturally more intelligent than elite managed ones.