The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

As the system's complexity reaches a certain critical mass, it achieves a newly coherent state, sometimes dramatically, in a process known as emergence.27 A powerful example of emergence can be seen in an ant colony. When ants discover a food source and carry some of it back to the nest, they leave a trail behind them of a chemical called pheromone, which evaporates after a while. If another ant discovers the pheromone trail, it will follow it to the food source and add its own pheromone to the trail when it brings back the food. If only a small number of ants are foraging, the pheromone trail of a successful ant is likely to evaporate before being discovered by the others, and so their collective efficiency is no more than the sum of each individual ant's efforts. However, when the number of ants reaches a critical mass, the likelihood of a pheromone trail being discovered goes up exponentially, and the colony becomes superefficient at collecting the best food sources. A cohesive group intelligence emerges out of a simple chemical signaling system.28

Social media and humans. Emergence but failure?