Copy, Adapt and Die

Human beings may not be completely mimetic and adaptive creatures, but they show strong -possibly dominant -characteristics of these behaviours. Sometimes this intrinsic adaptation and mimesis leads to our following a path which takes us in a direction which is less than useful. Like ants following pheromone trails, we have to build on what we already know.

Now there is an apparent syllogism here. Everyone knows that there is nothing new under the sun because human beings are mimetic. So, if you come up with something completely new you are (a) lying (b) plagiarising or © crazy.

So, like ants, we keep plodding on, holding bits of (information) leaf between our (metaphorical) mandibles to take back to the nest. And the trails that we use become saturated with the pheromones we use. Only our pheromones are called economics, psychology, computer science, philosophy, marketing, HRM and so on.

And as the trail we follow becomes more worn and breaks, we also search for another existing trail, by using a greedy search algorithm. A recent paper by Deborah M. Gordon at Stanford (Local Regulation of Trail Networks of the Arboreal Turtle Ant, Cephalotes goniodontus, The American Naturalist [2017]) has shown that at least one genus of ant does precisely this.

But wouldn’t our chances, at a species — or even global — level be better if we broke completely new information paths?

Shouldn’t we find and set aside funding for crazy ideas and new approaches outside traditional academic settings- which are themselves facing significant pressure. . The taxonomic approach to classification seems to have failed in both machine learning and phylogeny. It seems to me that our situation as a species is now so parlous that we must begin to clutch at intellectual straws. And make courageous decisions.

Oh, and no, the picture isn’t of the arboreal turtle ant. Sorry! You can find the paper at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/693418