In other words, the fascinating thing about ants, at least for me, and from an emergence perspective, is: given just how stupid and arbitrary individual ants are, how is it possible that they accomplish such amazing things together? How is the hive mind so smart when the individuals' minds are so dull? By what dynamics does the super-organism become greater than the individual?
You see this everywhere in nature. Science has been so reductionist up until now. We want to dissect everything into its individual parts, to try to deduce how the system works. But that's missing the forest for the trees. Complexity, emergence, and chaos theory address this from the other end: how might we understand nature by examining it holistically?
Take, for example, the leap from single-celled organism to multicellular organisms: what governing principles of nature are responsible for that? Where else are they present in nature? How do they manifest?
http://www.scienceda...41106113334.htm
There was an NPR program I heard a while back where, at a town fair, attendees were asked to guess the weight of a bull. Closest person won a prize. Over a thousand guesses were made. No one guessed the right amount him or herself, but when a researcher got ahold of the data and averaged everyone's guess, the average was literally the exact weight of the bull. How that's possible is a fascinating question to think about.
Edited by prettycode, December 22 2014 - 7:14 AM.