We are dumber than a colony of ants

Yesterday I was listening to an archived episode of Radiolab. It's a really neat show on WNYC (podcast downloadable via iTunes) about all sorts of curiosities in life. For example, I listened to one a while back about the War of the Worlds phenomenon. Did you know that the Orson Welles radio broadcast was not the only one to cause mass hysteria? Basically to find out if they could recreate the situation, radio stations in Santiago, Quito, and Buffalo gave it a shot. And they all succeeded! And we're not in the 1930s anymore, Toto.

But I digress. That is just one example. The show I was listening to yesterday was about emergence, or the idea that order can come out of totally unplanned and uncoordinated actions. And even though it totally does not contribute to my ultimate question, I will tell you about this, because it's interesting. Did you know that there are fireflies in Thailand who, without any guidance from any sort of leader, will all start blinking in sequence? It's true!

Similarly, though, and relating to my question, are ants. As individuals, they are stupid. The scientist they interview said she would watch ants fighting over a twig, because ant A wanted to go one direction, and ant B wanted to go the other direction. So they both went nowhere, and just played tug-of-war with the twig. So, they were stupid. The whole group of ants, on the other hand, was amazing. They appeared totally organized and set up a colony. (Think of each individual ant like a neuron in your brain. No single neuron contains the blueprint for an entire thought, but somehow all the neurons come together, and there is your brilliant idea. As with ants, no single ant creates the blueprint for the entire colony, but somehow all the individual ants come together, and a colony is born.)

The same is true for bees. Even though there is a queen, she's not like the Queen of Hearts, giving orders and shouting at subjects and throwing people out of Wonderland. No, the queen bee's job is basically just to make baby bees. And the job for the male drones is to be flying sperm missiles. They mate mid-air with the queen and then fall out of the sky, dead. But the point is, there is no one directing traffic, telling the queen when to fly or telling the drones which one is the queen, or telling them how to do their business. They just each do their own thing, and then - BAM! - they have a colony. Totally on their own.

Then there's the adage "a person is smart, people are dumb." Except that sometimes the exact opposite is true. Like the college class which was asked to guess the number of jellybeans in a bowl. No one, not even the smartest student, was terribly close to the actual number. But the average of everyone's guesses? Pretty darn close. The same is true when people were asked to guess the weight of an ox. No one was terribly close. But the group average: 1987 pounds. Actual weight: 1988 pounds. Not bad. So what have we learned from this? An individual may be way out there, but a lot of way-out-there individuals might actually be pretty close to right.

And this, folks, is the genius of Google. (Yes, I just linked to Google. Again.) The Google guys harness the power of the totally random, stupid, out-there website inquiries made by individuals. Every time you do a Google search and then click on a link to a web page, that page gets a vote. It moves higher in the list. Pages that have a lot of votes have, in turn, increased voting power for their outbound links. That is to say, an outbound link to Website X from the highly-rated Website A is better for Website X (counts as more votes) than an identical outbound link to Website X from the poorly-rated Website Z.

But this is where we differ from ants. And where my question FINALLY shows up! People learned how Google works, and started to manipulate it -- we are cheats and spoilers. Individuals wanting to improve their own ranking will "advertise" by posting a link to their own page in the comments section on a highly-rated website (news websites, popular blogs, etc.). People are only out for themselves, and don't really care that they are mucking up the collective wisdom of the group, mucking up Google's ability to return accurate results to our search inquiries, and mucking up our ability to mine the Internet for information.

But what's worse, is that sometimes people don't even have the motivation to benefit themselves (e.g. for advertising). Sometimes, people just do this to make a statement or to mess up everyone else, with no greater goal in mind.

Ants don't do that. Even though sometimes they do stupid things like fighting over a twig and going nowhere, they don't do destructive things that totally muck up the works just for the sake of doing destructive things.

I propose this: let's collectively, all of us, try to be ants.