[LINK] "Can Social Insects Have a Civilization?"

[rfmcdonald]

In the past, I've blogged about the idea of swarm intelligence, the sort that might emerge from social insects or other highly social if individually simple-minded creatures. Centauri Dreams features a guest post from one Michael Chorost in which he imagines a trajectory for a social insect species to evolve to high civilization, even sentience.

[H]ere’s the idea I want to test on you all. I asked myself, “Would it be possible for social insect colonies on some other planet to evolve to have language and technology – in other words, a civilization?”

Of course, the idea of swarm intelligence, or hive-mind intelligence, has been around forever in science fiction. To give but one example, Frank Schatzing’s The Swarm posits an undersea alien made of single-celled, physically unconnected organisms that collectively have considerable intelligence. But I need to examine the idea with much more rigor than can be done in fiction.

I refined the question by deciding that, as on earth, the individual insects would have brains too small for serious cognition. The unit of analysis would not be individual bugs but colonies of bugs. The intelligence would have to emerge from their interaction.

After much thought, my answer to the question is “No – but…”

Let me explain both the No and the but. It is these explanations on which I want your feedback.