Science 1 February 2013:
Vol. 339 no. 6119 pp. 574-576
DOI: 10.1126/science.1225883
ABSTRACT
The capacity for groups to exhibit collective intelligence is an often-cited advantage of group living. Previous studies have shown that social organisms frequently benefit from pooling imperfect individual estimates. However, in principle, collective intelligence may also emerge from interactions between individuals, rather than from the enhancement of personal estimates. Here, we reveal that this emergent problem solving is the predominant mechanism by which a mobile animal group responds to complex environmental gradients. Robust collective sensing arises at the group level from individuals modulating their speed in response to local, scalar, measurements of light and through social interaction with others. This distributed sensing requires only rudimentary cognition and thus could be widespread across biological taxa, in addition to being appropriate and cost-effective for robotic agents.
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Fascinating paper published in February's edition of Science. We often consider intelligence as an emergent phenomena at the scale of individual organisms. Yet, complex social systems and structures may also exhibit behavior reflecting the predispositions of its members as a whole. Perhaps we can view the dynamics of societies from this scaled perspective to better understand the issues facing our modern society.