The individual at the core of information management

Abstract

Most of the chapters in this book treat colonies of social insects as superstructures whose inner workings are governed by self-organizing processes. It is also in the abiotic world that many patterns, such as windblown ripples of sand, the form of liquids in motion, spirals, spots and stripes are woven by self-organization through simple, local interactions among their component parts. In all these cases global properties are not imposed upon the system by overarching blueprints, templates or other forms of instruction from outside, but emerge solely from numerous lower-level interactions. However, if we move from physical to biological systems, an extra dimension is added. Now the superstructures become “adaptive” the component parts and the rules governing their interactions are finely tuned by natural selection. Whereas the patterns formed by, say, Bénard convection cells can be regarded as merely incidental by-products of the interactions of their elementary subunits [1], biological superstructures are the product of group-level adaptations [2, 3]. Natural selection is the driving agent of the interactions among the subunits of a biological system. In evolutionary terms, a functional higher-order unit can be viewed as a vehicle built by the replicating genes to improve their survival and reproduction [4].