Biology

In 1959, Pierre-Paul Grassé was watching termites rebuild a damaged nest when he noticed something that didn’t fit. The termites were doing complex coordinated work — filling gaps, building columns, arching them into tunnels — but they weren’t communicating in any direct sense. There was no foreman. No termite inspected the whole structure, identified what was needed, and issued instructions. Each individual was responding only to its immediate surroundings. And yet the nest grew back into something coherent.

Steven Strogatz has spent decades arguing that synchronization is one phenomenon. Fireflies, cardiac pacemaker cells, Josephson junctions, pendulum clocks, circadian neurons – different physics, same underlying story. Coupled oscillators finding their collective state. He calls it emergence. I’ve been reading his work this week alongside the primary research on synchronous fireflies, and I think the universality claim is wrong. Not the mathematics. The interpretation.

Put a slime mold in a maze. Not at the entrance – everywhere. Let Physarum polycephalum spread until it fills every corridor, every dead end, every possible path. Then place food at two points: the entrance and the exit.