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A queen without power, a body without a head — the miracle of collective intelligence
Cooperation, along with competition, is the driving force of evolution. Is it immodest to say that Homo sapiens is the best example?
In the fall of 1906. Francis Galton went to the Plymouth country market in England. He witnessed a contest in which participants estimated the weight of meat from an ox after it was killed, and wrote their predictions on pieces of paper. The 85-year-old scientist did not have a good opinion of people. He was convinced that no one would predict the correct weight. He was surprised when he analyzed the predictions collected from 787 people. The arithmetic mean weight of the ox was 1197 pounds, and it differed by one pound from the actual weight! Galton published the results in the journal Nature.
How was it possible for a group of random people — experienced butchers, farmers, merchants, but also casual customers at the market — to predict the weight of an ox so accurately?
When the queen disobeys
The collective ability to estimate the weight of an ox is an example of a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds. This is the title of James Surowiecki’s book in which he describes the Plymouth event. It was published in 2004, when the world had been enthralled by the Wikipedia…
