“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.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Cookie Caldwell told me about this in his visit early today. Definitely looks interesting. He has some grand ideas that Friends organizations might look at this model—idealistic, I’d say, but maybe post-organizational Quaker networks might run with it.
