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In article <6536@uceng.UC.EDU>, dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) writes:
> In article <26353.2729bf22@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> kuento@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:

[Good commentary and communication and "mind" at the group level]

> Getting back to the hive-mind possibility:
>
> I suspect that any "Mind" emerging from a community of bees might not
> develop much of an IQ. The problems:
> 
> 1. The maximum practical size of a hive is limited. The human brain
> has about 1e+11 components. A single bee is more complex than a single
> neuron, of course. However, in terms of its interaction with the hive,
> it is probably not vastly more complex. For the small system of
> a few thousands of bees to become "Mind", each bee would have to 
> embed a comsiderable degree of intelligence. This brings us to the
> next problem.

Bee colonies can reach into the hundreds of thousands, and Army Ants
and Termites can attain numbers in the millions, which is not too 
shabby, really. All three exhibit distinctive "epiphenomena" whereby
complex physical or behavioral structures can result from some rather
simple individual-entity "rules of thumb" (very nice work by Thomas
Seeley on honeybees, and Nigel Franks on Army ants). I think we'd have
to know a lot more about neurons to claim that these insects are NOT
vastly more complex. Multiply the number of neurons in *their* brains
by the number of individuals, and you may well come close to your
"1e+11 components", as well. Each one of those tiny brains embeds a
good deal of intelligence, too - maybe not by our vertebrate-biased
standards, however. It depends on whom you ask.

> 2. Intra-bee communication is by neural pathways. This is several
> orders of magnitude faster than inter-bee communication, which is
> by tactile, visual, and chemical pathways. Unless bees can come up
> with a way to "talk" faster, the overall performance of the hive-mind
> will be very slow. If it is too slow, it will only be able to respond
> to environmental phenomena that operate with slow characteristic times.
> For example, the hive-mind can track changes in the location of the
> best pollen fields. 

The hive-mind can also respond instantly to intrusion (just try poking
your hand into a hive of African Bees or an Army Ant column), and can
respond to other rapid environmental changes (flowers opening and
closing over the course of the day, temperature and humidity changes).
It does not take long for the hive-mind to learn, either - a beehive
can be trained to forage in place X at time Y within a few days,
depending on factors such as proximity and value of the resource. What
environmental phenomena (aside from artificial ones humans can devise)
do you think ARE too fast for the hive to respond to appropriately? Is
your point that the evolution of a "higher" intellectual state would
require the ability to respond *faster* than any environmental factor
could change?

> The slow inter-bee communication also probably limits the extent to
> which the hive subsumes each individual bee. For example, each bee
> is capable of existing in the real world (to some extent) independently 
> from the hive. This is not possible at all for a neuron in the brain.
> The hive-mind simply isn't fast and powerful enough to safeguard the 
> momentary existence of each bee. Thus each bee must be a self-contained
> survival machine. This gives each bee a self-interest and identity 
> apart from the hive. To the extent that each bee can stand on its
> own six feet, the hive-mind must be limited.
>
> Dan Mocsny			

Individual worker bees/ants/termites have *very* limited ability to
survive independently from their colony. As for "self-interest", in an
evolutionary sense, "self-interest" is essentially synonymous with
"capacity to reproduce"; only to the extent that each worker is able
to produce her own offspring is "self-interest" an obstacle to the
evolution of the hive-mind (yes, this includes inclusive fitness, for
those kin-selectionists out there). An organism which produced sterile
offspring *truly* parthenogenetically ("clonal reproduction") would be
a better candidate. After all, that *would* be a closer parallel to
the organization of a metazoan (multicellular) entity.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Doug Yanega        (Snow Museum, Univ. of KS, Lawrence, KS 66045)
My card: 0 The Fool                        Bitnet: Beeman@ukanvm
"This is my theory, such as it is....which is mine. AAH-HEM!"