Review
Hmm. I worry that, without significant modeling and measurement of relevant variables, the causality is suspect. Neither bee nor bird response is the same dimension as what we usually mean by "smart", and they're very likely optimized for different cost-benefit values (specifically, protection of central hive vs distributed nests or individual birds, and cost-of-replacement of individuals lost in the action).
The leap to humans, with type-2 reasoning in addition to automatic behaviors, is pretty huge.
Ok, I would definitely call the bee response "smart" but thats hard to define. If you define it by an action that costs the bees very little but benefits a lot, then "swarm the scout hornet" is certainly efficient. Another criteria could be if such a behavior was established would it continue? Say the birds developed a "swarm the attacker" call. When birds hear it, they look to see if they can find the attacker, if they see it then they repeat the call. When the call gets widespread, the whole flock switches to attack. Would such a behavior persist if developed? If it would then lets call it efficient or smart.
The leap to humans is meant to be large - something extreme like consciousness and language is needed to break the communication/coordination penalty for larger organisms with fitness more defined by the individual than the hive.
I would definitely call the bee response "smart" but thats hard to define.
I think a solid attempt at defining it is required for this post to make sense. I'd call the bee response "effective", but I can't talk myself into thinking it's "smart" in the way you talk about coordination and individual identity. It's a different axis entirely.
OK for this post. "smart". A response is smart/intelligent if
This fits into the intuitive feeling of what intelligent is also. A characteristic of what people feel is intelligent is to imagine a scenario, then make it real. The bees havn't done that, but the outcome is as if they had. "Imagine if we took out the scout, then there would be no later invasion"
You look at the birds and think "how do they miss this - ant colonies swarm to see off a larger attacker, herding animals do too, why do they miss such a simple effective strategy?" In that situation they are not intuitively intelligent.
I think the rule is not necessarily "smarter units make a worse collective", but rather "it is more difficult to make a collective out of smarter units (but when it succeeds, it can be even better)". Humanity is unparalleled at eliminating larger predators.
Bees sacrifice their lives for their biological closest relatives. Birds have small families, so the cost of sacrificing their life is an important factor. Humans also have small families, but they can use prestige and money to incentivize heroic behavior.
So my proposed analogy would be that smarter populations can win, but they cannot achieve it by merely copying the behavior of stupider populations. They need a new solution that leverages their strengths.
Yes agree, unclear what you are saying that is different to me? The new solution is something unique and powerful when done well like language etc.
I don't think you've highlighted the casual factor here. It's not at all clear that the reason bees and ants have a more effective response to predators than do flocks of birds is that the bees are individually less intelligent than the birds.
There's a very clear evolutionary/game theoretic explanation for the difference between birds and bees here: specifically the inclusive fitness of individual bees is tied to the outcome of the collective whereas the inclusive fitness of the birds is not.
In a game theoretic framework we might say that the payoff matrices for the birds and bees are different, so of course we'd expect them to adopt different strategies.
Neither of these is dependent upon the respective intelligences of individual members of the collectives.
This makes me predict that we should see the effectiveness of group strategies to be more strongly correlated with the alignment of the individuals incentive structure than with the (inverse of) intelligence of their individual members, as your post suggests.
So, for instance, within flocking birds, do birds with smaller brains/body mass ratios adopt better strategies? Within insects, what pattern do we see? I would suggest that the real pattern we'll end up finding is the one related to inclusive fitness. So I'd predict that pack animals who associate with close relatives like wolves and lions will adopt better collective strategies than animals that form collectives with non-relatives.
Once you control for this I might even expect intelligence of individual members to positively correlate with group strategies, as it can allow them to solve coordination problems that less intelligent individuals couldn't solve. This would explain the divergence of humans from the trend you notice. But I'm speculating here.
In a game theoretic framework we might say that the payoff matrices for the birds and bees are different, so of course we'd expect them to adopt different strategies.
Yes somewhat, however it would still be best for all birds if they had a better collective defense. In a swarming attack, none would have to sacrifice their life so its unconditionally better for both the individual and the collective. I agree that inclusive fitness is pretty hard to control for, however perhaps you can only get higher inclusive fitness the simpler you go? e.g. all your cells have exactly the same DNA, ants are very similar, birds are more different. The causation could be simpler/less intelligent organisms -> more inclusive fitness possible/likely -> some cooperation strategies opened up.
Nitpicking at the example, worker bees do not have offspring; the best way for them to spread their genes is to protect the queen and thus, the hive.
Birds can have offspring, so self-preservation instead of risky attacks is optimal for individuals of a flock (of genetically unrelated individuals).
It's not that the group is less intelligent, rather that the individuals of the group have different goals (self-preservation vs hive preservation, though the end goal of maximizing fitness is the same).
But genetic fitness breaks down as a metric when you add culture to the system, so application to humans is limited.
The Hierarchy
There is a hierarchy in life from simple cells to complex cells to multi-cellular creatures to creatures that often live in a groups like birds and bees. As we go up the hierarchy the lower levels have less individual say. For example the mitochondria have no individual life or fitness outside of the cell, and the cells success is not meaningfully measured outside that of the organism in multi-cellular creatures.
Generally as we go up the hierarchy the higher level is more complex and smarter than the lower level. A brain can think, a neuron cannot. A hive of bees or ants is more capable than an individual.
Bird patterns
However you see sometimes see relatively smart creatures such as birds making simple patterns. We are told that this is beautiful, mysterious and presumably smart in some way. However a simple geometric or predictable pattern does not allow intelligence or sophistication. A perfect sinewave contains almost no information and no intelligence.
Is this really the best defense against a larger predator by the birds?
Bee defense
Here is what happens when bees use their best defense against an individually superior attacker. You wonder if the smaller birds could simply swarm the larger attacking bird, as they have vastly superior numbers.
In this case it looks like the flock of birds is less smart than the hive of bees, in spite of an individual bird being a lot smarter than an individual bee. Sometimes it can appear to go even further than that, say a crowd of people panicking is arguably worse than the least capable person in the entire group.
A different rule?
The more complex the pieces the less well they fit together unless there is strong pressure otherwise. Less intelligent units can form a better collective. This is especially true in terms of the relative capabilities. The difference between a single ant and an ant colony is greater than that of an individual wolf compared to a pack of wolves. This is even more extreme when comparing multi-celled creatures to single celled ones. The advantage of the collective is less the larger, more complex the pieces are or greater as the pieces get smaller, such as for cells.
However what about humans? We form very effective collectives, even sacrificing ourselves for the group in spite of our intelligent individuality. Language, consciousness, communication and the imagination to communicate a shared vision enable us to make our complexities all work to create a greater whole. We are an exception to the diminishing collective returns with increasing size/complexity rule.
How about tech?
I first though about this many years ago, and it led me to believe that RISC and GPU based architectures would win out over CISC/Intel. We have seen that play out again with AI design. The simple transformer design overtook the more complex competing AI systems when vast computation power was available. Its not clear if this applies to AGI. Smaller models may be able to outcompete larger ones when organized properly, or larger ones could be able to communicate effectively to overcome these potential problems in a way analogous to humans.
You can also of course draw analogies with large organizations and more agile startups, the small businesses of capitalism vs centralized control.