Recent Interesting Science Articles (February ’09)

I’ve only noted one science article of any interest this month. Perhaps the financial crisis is taking its toll on scientific research as well? This one is from The Economist and covers how social animals make collective decisions. One study by Christian List of the London School of Economics and Larissa Conradt of the University of Sussex examined how bees choose a site to migrate to and start a new nest. As described, scouts are sent out to find suitable locations and when they get back they perform the bees’ infamous waggle dance to tell the rest of the hive what they’ve found out. The longer the dance goes on, the better the site. The entire hive needs to sort out which site is the best one and make a collective decision to move the queen and the worker bees to it.

The scientists found that the hive manages to make extremely reliable decisions even though there are only minor differences in quality between the sites. In order to find out how they did this, they created a computer model to simulate the results from different variables. They found that two aspects of their decision-making process were crucial towards correctly determining the best course of action: one, freely sharing information between the scouts and the rest of the hive and two, the independence of other bees to confirm the scouts’ findings by following their routes, checking out the site for themselves and then confirming the results to the rest of the hive by performing waggle dances of their own.

The implications for human behavior are obvious, though I think that the attempt by The Economist to link this to the theories of the 18th-century philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, who believed that decisions taken collectively by a large group of people are more likely than those taken by a select few, is a bit of a stretch.

4 thoughts on “Recent Interesting Science Articles (February ’09)”

  1. Very interesting blog. I have subscribed to your feed.

    This is a very interesting article. I imagine that our ancestors would also have had to make similar decisions using collective wisdom. However I feel we are getting more and more individualistic and such group activities are getting harder and harder for humans.

  2. Ouch. I guess you would be miffed that I’m very much an advocate of individualism then. So is The Economist, in case you’re not familiar with the editorial tone of the publication. The point, made by The Economist, in any case, is that collective decision making is improved through individual independence. It is important to freely share information among the group, yes, but it is equally important to be independent-minded and not to blindly trust any source of information within the group but instead confirm and verify the information for yourself.

  3. I have nothing against individualism. However let me explain my point.

    If you notice most of us are dependent on two sources of information…the media and the internet. The people who write in these channels are a small minority writing about a slightly larger minority. In developed societies like the US this is probably not too bad because even this minority is probably a good sample of the majority.

    However, in a society like India this minority is very different from the majority. So what happens is that the information that is shared is biased and not really representative information. In fact there is no information available from a large section of society.

    Now people who form an independent opinion based on this very limited information available to them are doing so with a very limited view of the world. Note I am not saying they are using wrong information to form an opinion, I am saying that the information available to them is coming from a very small world.

    In summary I think free sharing of information occurs in todays world. But the information that is available is only of one type.

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