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When you get a bunch of small and simple things together and give them simple commands, clear patterns of behavior begin to emerge. This is true for ant colonies, computer program logic and even cities full of people. We are finding more and more that we need more simple and basic programming and planning to achieve greater and more complex results.

Interesting tidbit: Queen ants do not direct the actions of the colony, in fact no ant is “in charge”. Instead, each individual ant lays down and detect pheromone trails that indicate what is going on in the colony. If an ant detects too many pheromones from harvesting activities it will go check on the nursery.  If the nursery is full of “happily taken care of” pheromones then it will check on the gardens. Using this system of pheromones, the ants can quickly adapt to the changing needs of the colony. Additionally, the system is self healing because no single ants (or small collection of them) calls the shots.

Good murder mystery. An unknown stranger gathers together ten people onto an island for a weekend getaway. One by one, each of the patrons get voted off the island through their mysterious death. The remaining patrons band together to find the killer, but fail in their attempts. In the end, we learn that each member has committed so crime that they were not successfully tried for thus justice has finally been served.

Gould is a notable researcher in the fields of paleontology and natural history. He also has really good analogies to  describe his arguments. In Full House, Gould discusses how the human form is not evolution’s ultimate goal, but that the goal of evolution is to try every possible variation at least once. He notes that if we track evolving life we see that once a new species is created, it tries a myriad of variations and then stabilizes on an average. Though his arguments sometime get repetitive, he is thorough and sure to cover as many counter arguments that he can think of.

Interesting tidbit: Bacteria, by quantity and and variations, is by far the most dominate life form on earth. Also, the horse (which is often epitomized as the finest example of evolution because of its nearly straight line succession) is actually a bad example of evolution because where the history of the horse resembles a branch most other species look like a bush (think of rodents: where there is one kind of horse, there are dozens of kinds of rodents).