I’ve been on a National Geographic Magazine binge; so many of their feature articles are fascinating investigations of society through the lens of science, conservation or travel. One, entitled The Genius of Swarms, takes a look at the ability of certain groups to be smarter than their individual components.

“Ants aren’t smart,” Gordon says. “Ant colonies are.” A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

The tendency manifests itself in diverse species who seem to act as one even though no one is giving orders.

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.

Instead, ant colonies, caribou herds and bee hives all rely on the signals and actions of their peers. Relying on local information and simple principles, groups exhibit the capacity to solve complex problems.

Businesses and governments are taking note. Firms with complicated logistical challenges, say delivering expensive, flammable gas in the least expensive and safe manner, are learning from ants and reaping the rewards of facsimile. The military is having success with “Centibots project, an investigation to see if as many as a hundred robots could collaborate on a mission.”

Wikipedia, everyone’s favorite example, has used swarm intelligence to create a resource of immense value and seen through biological understandings, it is clear why principles like NPOV have come to be enshrined in Wikipedian policy: they are the simple rules of thumb which help shape collective action.

The NGM article is really only a small piece of the growing literature on what James Surowiecki calls the “Wisdom of the Crowds” and what Cass Sunstein investigated in “Infotopia.” I’d be interested in seeing some research into the methods of governance for swarms: although they are distributed actions, what are the norms and principles which govern them? How do these come into being? How are wild mobs without reason replaced by thoughtful decision-making groups? The article passes briefly over this,

Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part. For those of us who sometimes wonder if it’s really worth recycling that extra bottle to lighten our impact on the planet, the bottom line is that our actions matter, even if we don’t see how.

But the answer to avoiding fads or market bubbles remain elusive.