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COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: CREATING A PROSPEROUS WORLD AT PEACE
Who’s smarter: chimps, baboons
or bacteria?
The power of Group IQ
Howard Bloom1
Figure 1: Bacteria exploring new territory and sharing information
on their finds. Courtesy of Eshel Ben Jacob.2
1
Howard Bloom is the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the
Forces of History ("mesmerizing"—The Washington Post) and Global Brain: The
Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century (“reassuring and
sobering”—The New Yorker). A former Visiting Scholar at NYU and a former core
faculty member at The Graduate Institute, Bloom is the founder of three international
scientific groups—The Group Selection Squad, The International Paleopsychology
Project and the Space Development Steering Committee.
2
Eshel Ben-Jacob is a pioneer in theoretical biological physics. As with green
chemistry and bio-mimicry, science is now discovering the depth of biological
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Which have bigger brains, chimpanzees or baboons? If you guessed chimps,
you’re right. Chimpanzees are our closest relatives on the planet. They share
between 98.6% and 99% of our genes, depending on who’s counting. They are
way up there in animal brainpower. An average chimp’s brain is more than
twice as large as the brain of a baboon.
Now for question number two. Which are smarter, chimpanzees or
baboons? The answer is…baboons. But how could that be? Chimps are
brainier. Shouldn’t they also be, well, umm, brainier? Brighter by far? If
baboons are winners on IQ measures, doesn’t that mean that intelligence is not
just a matter of brain matter? The answer is yes, there’s more to intellect than
the number of neurons in your skull. So what’s the extra ingredient you need to
turn brains into smarts? The answer is a bit surprising. Nimble minds need
more than just a lot of synapses between brain cells. They need the power of
groups. They need a force that pulses from the web of connection between
group members…from the sum that’s bigger than its parts. They need what
Gerardo Beni calls “swarm intelligence,” what Tom Atlee and Robert D. Steele
call “Collective Intelligence” and what I call “Group IQ.”3
What in the world is Group IQ? For a hint, let’s look at the very first
creatures to self-assemble on this planet. Let’s look at our oldest ancestors, the
creatures who pioneered life on the early earth over 3.5 billion years ago,
bacteria. A bacterial species that comes readily to mind is Eschericia coli.
Eschericia coli is one of your most faithful companions. It lives in your gut and
mine. It’s also a bacterial species microbiologists can’t keep their hands off of.
It thrives in petri dishes and shows off its stuff in ways that are easy for a
curious researcher with a good microscope to see. And, like baboons, E. coli
are much, much smarter than most of us think.
E coli are sugar junkies. Their favorite food is glucose. But when times get
tough and the foods they like the most are nowhere to be found, they’ve got
genetic tools they use to reengineer their string of genes, their genome, and
their metabolism so they can eat far less tasty stuff, milk sugar—lactose.
However there’s a substance E. coli have seldom come across in their long
intelligence that human have yet to achieve. See Professor Ben-Jacob’s remarkable art
gallery and substantive science at http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/gallery3.html.
3
“Social IQ” refers to an individual’s ability to interact with others, rather than the
outcome of the collective engagement of many individual IQs in harmonization.
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history on this planet. It’s a chemical from the bark of poplars and willow trees.
Its name is salicin.
We use salicin as a pain killer. It’s the key ingredient in aspirin—a drug we
didn’t begin to crank out in mass quantities until 1897. So in the 1980s and
1990s, several researchers decided to throw E. coli a curve. They gave colonies
of these creatures nothing but salicin to eat. Now this is a bit like asking you
and me to invent a new way to grow our gut and to retool the metabolic
machinery of our cells so we can digest aluminum foil, gobbling it up like
carrot cake, using it as our favorite food.
Solving the salicin problem, the problem of turning salicin into an appetizer
or an entrée, is a tough one. It involves a mutation, a big change, in your
genome, a change that carries you forward a giant step but gets you essentially
nowhere. Then it takes another big step with no payoff—rejiggering your
genome in a way takes you backward—that makes you even LESS capable of
eating and surviving than you were before. Only then can you take the big step
forward in the reengineering of your gene-string that lets you eat salicin with
ease. The odds against pulling off this big step forward, this big step back, and
the final step forward again are huge. The odds against the trick are especially
staggering if you think a bacterial colony is mindless and that it makes all of its
changes using the genie-in-the-bottle of today’s mainstream evolutionary
theory, Neo Darwinism. The Neo Darwinian magic mechanism for change and
upgrade is random chance, random mutation. The odds of reengineering
yourself to make salicin by random mutation alone—without a group brain—
are ten billion trillion to one. Why?
Because according to Neo Darwinian evolutionary theory, a big step
backward like the one in the salicin two-step will kill your species off. Any
bacteria who try it will be goners. They won’t live to reproduce and pass their
new mutation on. So no way should a chain of mutations happen in which one
step cripples something as basic as your ability to eat.
Yet E. coli can reliably pull off the trick of reengineering their genes so
they can eat salicin. How in the name of heaven or hell do they do it? The
answer comes from one of my partners in crime, Eshel Ben Jacob, head of the
Israeli Society of Physicists, former head of the Physics department at the
University of Tel Aviv, and a man whose close to 20 years of breakthrough
research in microbiology have landed in the queen of the science journals,
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Nature, and on the cover of The Scientific American. Ben-Jacob is also kind
enough to tolerate me.
A colony of bacteria the size of the palm of your hand is populated by more
citizens than all the human beings who have ever lived. The number of bacteria
in that colony can vary from one to seven trillion. Each one of these trillions of
bacteria has its own equivalent of a brain. It has what Ben Jacob calls a
computational engine. That computational engine is its genome.
Computer scientists discovered something interesting back in the 1980s. If
you wanted to make a supercomputer for a lot less money than the ones that
used to come at huge cost from the Cray Computer Company back in those
ancient days, you had to abandon linear processing. You had to ditch the notion
of threading all your information just one step at a time through one central
microprocessor. You had to hook up a few dozen or a few hundred
microprocessors and let them take their crack at the problem simultaneously. If
you let your swarm of microprocessors operate in parallel, the “parallelprocessing” gizmo you produced was a supercomputer. And it cost one tenth
the price of a Cray Computer…or less.
Bacteria use the same trick. They use parallel distributed processing. And,
frankly, so do you and I. We do it in our brains—communities of 100 billion
nerve cells working on problems simultaneously. And we do it in our
cultures—collective-thinking frameworks that pool our thoughts with those of
our ancestors. But bacteria use parallel distributed processing in even more
powerful ways than us human beings. Remember, there are over a trillion
citizens, a trillion one-celled organisms, in a normal bacterial colony. Those
bacterial cells spread out like members of a search party looking for a lost kid
in a meadow. The object of their search? Territory rich in food. They talk to
each other constantly, gossiping about their woes and their big scores, their
discoveries of groceries, of enemies, of disasters, and of poisons. Their
language of their chatter is chemical. They send out biochemical gradients of
attraction and repulsion signals—chemical come-hithers and go-aways. When a
high-priority problem hits, no single bacterium works on it by herself. The
whole colony pitches in. That means between one trillion and roughly seven
trillion microprocessors mull over a problem simultaneously. It also means that
a trillion or more microprocessors spread out on the terrain are sending their
reports in.
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Together, those trillion nano-processors make something utterly beyond the
power of any single individual. They make something no single individual can
even sum up or see. They generate what Eshel Ben-Jacob calls a creative web.
They make a collective intellect capable of formulating problems, testing
solutions and then, of all the amazing things, literally retooling, upgrading, and
reinventing their own central string of genes—their own genome.
Now that is collective smarts. That is collective intelligence. And it began
3.5 billion years ago when bacteria first evolved on this brand new planet earth.
And I do mean that this earth was brand new when the first collective intellects
emerged. This planet-in-the-making was still being smacked by comets and
planetesimals. With each asteroid that thwomped it, the earth woggled like a
pudding. And bacteria apparently outwitted the thwompings. The earth was a
tricky and a challenging place when the first bacterial colonies got their group
brains up and running. In other words, the earth was an intelligence tester par
excellence. And bacteria passed the tests.
The number of really big problems bacteria have solved since then is
staggering. They’ve rejiggered their genomes so they can eat sulfur and rock.
They’ve reengineered their genome so they can live two miles below the
surface of the earth where the pressures are beyond belief and the food—
granite—is on a par with driveway gravel. They’ve retooled themselves so they
can live in a flood of radioactive particles that would kill off you and me. And
there’s speculation that they’ve even learned to survive two miles above the
ground in clouds and that they’ve learned to manipulate the weather so that the
rains and sun give them the saunas and the food they love the most.
What’s more, we’ve picked the brain of the bacterial mass mind more than
we care to confess. We’ve stolen invention after invention from our singlecelled sisters. Our antibiotics are the weapons of mass destruction, the chemical
weapons, with which two colonies of bacteria or more make war. Our genetic
engineering kits are made of the tools bacteria use to reengineer their own
genome. The tools behind our genetic engineering are plasmids, phages, and
transposons. And we stole every one of them from the tool belt that bacteria
wear. What’s more, our gherkin, herring, and sauerkraut processors recruit
massive teams of bacteria to pickle food. Our cheese makers seduce vast armies
of bacteria to make our cheese.
And here’s something even more surprising. You use bacterial powers all
the time. You are a collective intelligence of 100 trillion cells. As we’ve seen, a
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hundred billion of those cells participate in the collective intelligence you think
of as just one thing—your brain. But here’s a bigger surprise. Half of your
hundred trillion cells don’t even claim to be you. They’re huge bacterial
colonies living in your throat, your gut, and on your skin. Without them you’d
be dead. In your pores bacteria turn what you exude into the sweet or sour smell
that folks who’ve fallen in love with you have been attracted to…or that have
made other folks edge away on those days when you’ve forgotten to use
deodorant.
More important, in your gut, bacterial colonies take things you can’t digest
and finish the digestion process off for you. Their deal is that you feed them
their favorite foods and they will munch them, they’ll shit out what they can’t
digest, and their excrement will be on a par with honey and ambrosia to you.
They’ll crap out the raw fuels that power you. What’s more, other bacterial
colonies in your gut make your vitamin P, your vitamin K, and some of your B
vitamins for you. Without your interior bacterial support team you couldn’t
survive. To the bacteria inside of you, you are just a convenient self-guiding
transport vehicle, a terrific food-gathering, and food-grinding machine. So next
time you eat a chocolate éclair, remember there’s a lot of it that you can’t do
much more than chew. You’re relying on bacterial teams to do the real
digesting for you.
I already mentioned that bacteria adapt to radioactivity. They’ve invented
ways to thrive in the water pools used in nuclear reactors. Radioactivity
periodically shatters their entire genome. Without a genome, you can’t survive.
But these bacteria—the Deinococcus radiodurans —have built compression and
storage systems that allow them to hold on to their critical data and reconstruct
their genome over and over again. Now think about that for a second. That is
the work of high IQ. That is research and development on a scale we can’t
imagine. That’s the working of a collective intelligence and more, a collective
innovation-and-breakthrough machine.
OK, so I’m claiming there have been collective intellects since life began
on this planet 3.85 billion years ago. This might easily make you wonder, if I’m
so smart, and if all this is true, can we give group intellects an IQ test? The
answer is yes. Here’s the proof:
The ultimate test of intelligence is adaptability—how swiftly you can solve
a complex problem, whether that problem is couched in words, in images, in
crises, or in everyday life. The arena where intelligence is most important is not
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the testing room, it’s the real world. When you measure adaptability by the
ability to turn disasters into opportunities and wastelands into paradises,
bacteria score astonishingly high. But how do big-brained chimpanzees and
small-brained baboons do? Or, to put it differently, how adaptable, clever,
mentally agile, and able to solve real-world problems have chimpanzees and
baboons proven to be?
You can tell by the number of appeals made on TV, radio, and print made
to save these primates’ tails. Jane Goodall has toured the world alerting us to a
simple fact. The environment that allows chimps to live is rapidly disappearing.
To save the chimps, we must save the environmental niche that gives them life.
How many activists have you seen pleading with you to save the environment
of baboons? None. Is there a reason? Yes. Baboons have been called “the rats
of Africa.” No matter how badly you desecrate their environment, they find a
way to take advantage of your outrage. One group, the Pumphouse Gang, was
under study for years by primatologist Shirley Strum. When Strum began her
baboon-watching, the Pumphouse Gang lived off the land in Kenya and ate a
healthy, all-natural diet. They ate blossoms and fruits when those were in
season. When there were no sweets and flowery treats, the baboons dug up
roots and bulbs.
Then came disaster—the meddling of man. Farmers took over parts of the
baboons’ territory, plowed it, built houses, and put up electrified fences around
their crops. Worse, the Kenyan military erected a base, put up homes for the
officers’ wives and kids, and trashed even more of the baboons’ territory by
setting aside former baboon-land for a giant garbage heap. If this had happened
to a patch of forest inhabited by chimps, the chimpanzee tribes would have
been devastated. But not the baboons.
At first, the Pumphouse Gang maintained its old lifestyle and continued
grubbing in the earth for its food. Then came a new generation of adolescents.
Each generation of adolescent baboons produces a few curious, unconventional
rebels. Normally a baboon trip splits up In small groups and goes off early in
the day to find food. But one of the adolescent non-conformists of the Pump
House Gang insisted on wandering by himself. His roaming took him to the
military garbage dump. The baboon grasped a principle that chimps don’t seem
to get. One man’s garbage is another primate’s gold. One man’s slush is
another animal’s snow cone.
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The baboon rebel found a way through the military garbage heap’s barbed
wire fence, set foot in the trash heap, and tasted the throwaways. Pay dirt. He’d
hit a concentrated source of nutrition. When they came back to their home base
at the end of the day, the natural-living baboons, the ones who had stuck to
their traditional food-gathering strategies, to their daily grind digging up tubers,
came home dusty and bedraggled, worn out by their work. But the adolescent
who invented garbage raiding came back energetic, rested, strong, and glorious.
As the weeks and months went by, he seemed to grow in health and vigor.
Other young adolescent males became curious. Some followed the nonconformist on his daily stroll into the unknown. And, lo, they too discovered
the garbage dump and found it good.
Eventually, the males who made the garbage dump their new food source
began to sleep in their own group, separated from the conservative old timers.
As they grew in physical strength and robustness, these Young Turks
challenged the old males to fights. The youngsters’ food was superior and so
was their physical power. They had a tendency to win their battles. Females
attracted by this power wandered outside the ancestral troop and spent
increasing amounts of time with the rebel males—who continued to increase
their supply of high-quality food by inventing ways to open the door latches of
the houses of the officers’ wives and taught themselves how to open kitchen
cupboards and pantries and who also Invented ways to make their way through
the electrified fences of farmers and gather armloads of corn. The health of the
males and females in the garbage-picking group was so much better than that of
the old troop that a female impregnated in the gang of garbage-pickers and
farm-raiders was able to have a new infant every eighteen months. The females
in the old, conservative, natural-diet group were stuck with a new infant only
every 24 months. The innovators were not only humiliating the conservatives in
pitch battles, they were outbreeding them.
Why were the baboons so much smarter than chimpanzees? Why were they
able to innovate and to surf the waves of change and the currents of the strange?
Because they didn’t just think as individuals, they thought as a group. Their
individualistic, curious adolescents were antennae, probing the possibilities of
the unknown. These explorers and innovators sometimes went off on their own
while the main troop broke up into small groups to do their wandering. But at
night the small groups and individualists gathered to sleep together in crowds of
from a hundred to seven hundred. And in the morning, through body-language
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arguments between the males about where to go during the day, these groups
and rebels shared information, they compared notes.
Chimps are not wanderers. They are stick-in-the-muds and stay at homes. They
patrol their existing territory. And they live in groups of a mere fifteen to 35.
They don’t get together in nightly multi-group conventions to compare notes.
The result? When the old environmental slot of chimps wears out or is
wiped away, they have no options, no fallback, or, more important, no fallforward positions. Baboons have smaller brains. But they have smarter Group
IQs. And they can turn any environmental challenge you toss their way from
disaster into opportunity. Chimps cannot.
Here’s an additional guess about why the group IQ of baboons is higher
than the group IQ of chimps. When chimps fission, when one group of chimps
separates and becomes two groups, those two groups eventually replace
peaceful competition with war. And I mean a war in which the losing group is
exterminated…in which its adult males are murdered down to the last one and
in which only the most delicious females, the fertile ones, are kept alive. When
baboon groups fission, the groups compete with a far less genocidal form of
violence. They have fights, brawls, gang bangs, and bullying sessions. They use
their might and hurt each other. But they don’t wipe each other out. They don’t
kill each other. They don’t pursue systematic genocide.
The result is that the alternative strategies pursued by each baboon group—
the alternative hypotheses—live on in the baboon mass mind.
The bottom line? Baboons are on the increase in Africa. Chimps—despite
their relatively humongous brains—are on the path to extinction. And that
increase or shrinkage is a direct measure of adaptability, a measure of
intelligence, a numerical indicator of group IQ.
Another lesson, especially for the group of thinkers represented in this
book—to have a high collective IQ, it’s not enough just to have a group and to
parcel out the job of thinking in a nice, egalitarian manner.
Structure makes all the difference in the world.
Especially structure that uses individuals, small groups, and the collection
of those groups into larger units, units that can share information. Structure that
harvests the force of both competition and cooperation. Baboons have this sort
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of competitive-cooperative-individualist-mall-group-plus-big-alliance structure.
Chimps do not.
And there’s another bottom line. Our social and psychological sciences
have utterly ignored the study of collective intelligence, of Group IQ. Eshel
Ben Jacob’s pioneering work on bacteria, for example, has appeared primarily
in physics journals, not the journals that explore the secrets of the social body
and of the psyche. And swarm intelligence has been largely relegated to the
artificial intelligence, robotic, and computer communities. That’s a mistake. To
raise our own Group IQ, it’s time for us humans to dig a little deeper and to
study the inner secrets of social organization among our fellow organisms on
this planet—bacteria, chimps and baboons.
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