Animals cooperate in various ways to condition their environments and thereby achieve jointly beneficial economies or efficiencies. One example is heat-sharing. As Ecclesiates noted (in the biblical quote that was cited in the introduction to this blog), humans are only one among many animals that huddle together in cold weather, thereby reducing each individual’s energy expenditures. One of the most famous examples is the emperor penguins (recently made famous in the movie “The March of the Penguins”). Many years ago a French scientist, Yvonne LeMaho, documented that, when these animals huddle together in large colonies (sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands) during the bitterly cold Antarctic winters, they are able to reduce their energy expenditures by 20-50 percent – literally a life-saving advantage. Likewise, humans have been sharing beds for warmth in cold weather for as long as records have been kept. In colonial America, for instance, “bundling beds” were a common practice. With a board down the middle, they were intended to protect the chastity of young females (at least in theory).
Of course, animals huddle together for other reasons as well. For instance, there is a species of Mexican desert spiders that huddle together during the summer heat to prevent dehydration. And honeybee workers cooperate either by sharing body heat in winter or engaging in fanning activities with their wings during the summer to maintain the internal temperature of their hives within about 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
What these and many other examples illustrate is the fact that cooperation in animals, as in humans, is commonplace but also highly situational; it is most likely to occur when there are mutual advantages. Thus, heat sharing in animals is generally avoided in warm weather; desert spiders disperse during the rainy winter season; and honeybee workers busy themselves with other tasks when the internal temperature of the hive is satisfactory. As always, synergy can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the context. (I’ll talk about negative synergy in a future blog entry.)
Thought for the day: If our teachers were paid as much as our lawyers, or professional athletes, we’d have the best school system in the world. Imagine the result.
An Introduction
In his path-breaking book, Beyond Reductionism (1969), the famed novelist and polymath Arthur Koestler remarked that "true innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." He was talking about synergy, of course, a phenomenon that is still greatly underrated and vastly more important even than Koestler imagined. I call it "nature's magic."
Synergy is in fact one of the great governing principles of the natural world; it ranks right up there with such heavyweight concepts as gravity, energy, information and entropy as one of the keys to understanding how the world works. It has been a wellspring of creativity in the evolution of the universe; it has greatly influenced the overall trajectory of life on Earth; it played a decisive role in the emergence of humankind; it is vital to the workings of every modern society; and it is no exaggeration to say that our ultimate fate depends on it. Indeed, every day, in a thousand different ways, our lives are shaped, and re-shaped, by synergy.
All of these grandiose-sounding claims are discussed in detail, with many hundreds of examples, in three of my books: The Synergism Hypothesis (McGraw-Hill, 1983), Nature's Magic (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Holistic Darwinism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as in many of my articles for professional journals. Some of these publications are available at my website: http://www.complexsystems.org/
The purpose of this blog is to provide a continuing update on synergy and an opportunity for some dialogue on this important and still underappreciated phenomenon, along with commentaries on various topics - political, economic, and social -- from a synergy-monger's perspective. The tag-lines for each entry, with a "thought for the day," are the unregulated firecrackers that go off in my mind from time to time.
Peter Corning pacorning@complexsystems.org
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Synergy is in fact one of the great governing principles of the natural world; it ranks right up there with such heavyweight concepts as gravity, energy, information and entropy as one of the keys to understanding how the world works. It has been a wellspring of creativity in the evolution of the universe; it has greatly influenced the overall trajectory of life on Earth; it played a decisive role in the emergence of humankind; it is vital to the workings of every modern society; and it is no exaggeration to say that our ultimate fate depends on it. Indeed, every day, in a thousand different ways, our lives are shaped, and re-shaped, by synergy.
All of these grandiose-sounding claims are discussed in detail, with many hundreds of examples, in three of my books: The Synergism Hypothesis (McGraw-Hill, 1983), Nature's Magic (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Holistic Darwinism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as in many of my articles for professional journals. Some of these publications are available at my website: http://www.complexsystems.org/
The purpose of this blog is to provide a continuing update on synergy and an opportunity for some dialogue on this important and still underappreciated phenomenon, along with commentaries on various topics - political, economic, and social -- from a synergy-monger's perspective. The tag-lines for each entry, with a "thought for the day," are the unregulated firecrackers that go off in my mind from time to time.
Peter Corning pacorning@complexsystems.org
__________________________________________________
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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