Saturday, September 10, 2011
Smart Swarm
Peter Miller
Avery £12.99; Kindle £2.99
PETER MILLER wrote Smart Swarm to expand upon his National Geographic Magazine article concerning the lessons we may learn from the behaviour of animals. A senior editor at National Geographic, he has a PhD in critical theory. The book expounds complicated behavioural theory and analysis in a US-flavoured ‘popular’ writing style.
For the naturalist, Smart Swarm delivers fascinating insights into the organisational capacity of insect swarms, bird flocks, fish schools and animal herds.
For the systems and behavioural analyst, or personnel manager, it offers information which may provide a new approach to corporate decision making, cost-cutting and teamwork. The target readership is the latter: the focus is to demonstrate to decision-makers how certain creatures have evolved organisational methods and communal solutions to problems which are demonstrably more efficient for the tribe or "corporation" than the hierarchical structures enshrined in human interaction.
Coming to the book as an observer of nature, I was intrigued by the explanations and scientific findings regarding the synchronised behaviour I’ve often seen in ant colonies, honeybee swarms, bird flocks and fish shoals.
However, the extrapolations which followed vis-à-vis the application of such behaviour to communal human interaction was, at times, too technical, mathematical and jargon-rich for me.
They may well appeal to professionals in this field but I believe the ‘vernacular’ style may be off-putting. A serious scientific study should not read like a detective story or a breathless whodunit.
Miller’s ideas are interesting but the text too often deviates into superfluous background detail presented as ‘reportage’ so as to, presumably, make it more readable. The result is a work which, irritatingly, is neither fish nor fowl. Its tone and diction reminds me of Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock in 1970. It was a ‘novel’ approach at the time.
In a discussion of the reasons behind the spectacular flocking of more than a million starlings turning, wheeling or reversing the direction of their flight above a roost, Miller’s introductory paragraphs begins: "The security guards were suspicious at first. They didn’t understand why Andrea Cavagna needed to take so much equipment onto the roof of the museum. The Palazzo Massimo ... holds priceless collections of ancient coins and jewellery" etcetera.
That nobody knew what the scientist-on-the-roof was doing and the reaction of security guards to the statistical physicist is a distraction, even if it is true. The passage sounds like fiction — a page from The Da Vinci Code? It is, at best, condescending, giving interesting science a window-dressing that leaves this reader irritated rather than intrigued.
A page detailing the project history then follows before we reach the real subject, the bird flock behaviour which Edward Selous, a widely respected naturalist writing in 1919, said was "as though all the individuals composing them had been competent parts of one individual organism".
Where Miller confines himself to what is relevant, he is very good, and very clear. The human psychology by which we find space, relative to our neighbours, on a crowded beach, is well outlined. Here, he draws parallels between a rare example of human self-organisation and distributed problem-solving and the behaviour of insects.
His theory about the useful adaptation of animal behaviour to human situations is convincing and the book is replete with example of "smart swarms". We learn the process by which an ant colony saves time and energy when it "decides" to exploit one particular food source rather than another. The colony’s forager ants leave the anthill each morning and set off in numerous directions. Those that find food first are soonest to return with their findings and to return to the source for more. Somehow, the foragers learn from one another and those that have gone to the less productive sources abandon them and take the path to the most productive.
Honeybees do the same: the bee foragers do a bee-dance at the mouth of the hive which informs other foragers of the distance and fecundity of the source they have found. But the ant model is less complicated: they do not dance. Scientists mounted a simple experiment to find out how the ‘knowledge’ is transmitted between them.
In a laboratory, a path was made from an ant colony to a food source. At some point on its length, the path split into two routes, one route twice as long as than the other. The ants that took the shorter path returned to the nest with food in half the time it took the ants that took the longer path; they had gone and returned twice in the time it took their "colleagues" to go and return once. Forager ants always deposit pheromones at intervals as they move. Thus, the tr ack of pheromones laid down by those that came and went quickly was strongest. A third ant, arriving at the junction, would follow it, so, also, would the ants that had previously taken the longer route. As Dr Deborah Gordon who supervised the study said, "the ants aren’t smart. The colony is."
This behaviour was subsequently successfully used for research into finding the shortest and fastest routes for telephone networks, internet routings, delivery trucks and travelling salesmen.
The author’s thesis is that wild creatures have been surmounting nature’s challenges for millions of years and that mankind can profit hugely from observing their solutions. Those interested in behavioural science and who don’t mind the extraneous diversions will enjoy this book.
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