Emergent Behavior

Throughout the essay "The Myth of the Ant Queen" Johnson focuses on the term emergent behavior. He starts off with his experience at Deborah Gordon's lab. Gordon's work is related to the connection between the behavior of each individual and to the collective behavior of the colonies as a whole. This is also known as an emergent, self organizing system. The idea of the ant queen is a myth because as Gordon explains: "The queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by workers. She does not decide which worker does what." (Johnson 194). Nobody needs to tell the ants how to organize themselves, each ant contributes to the patterns and organization of the colony collectively.  Without a clear leader, the ants were able to determine a specific spot for the cemetery and the garbage dump. This proves that complex organizations emerge from the contributions of each individual, not the leadership of a person or a social institution. Similar to the ant colony, Manchester, the city located in northern England, came to exist without the aid of any government or public authorities. In fact, it was considered a manor and was run like a feudal estate even though its population had increased significantly. Due to its unorthodox origin and unplanned development, the town was both chaotically and peculiarly built. There was no government supervising the structure and expansion of the town, but it was built in a way in which the middle class could live there without having to interact or even see the working class. As Engels, the well known documentarian said, " I cannot help feeling that the liberal industrialists, the Manchester "bigwigs", are not so altogether innocent of this bashful style of building." This quote let's the reader know that the development of the town was not as unplanned as it seemed; the middle class was wisely choosing where to  settle down. However, it is such a complex and long time span that it could not have been planned before hand; it just happened. This is exactly what a society with an emergent behavior is, "a mix of order and anarchy" that composes one community. (Johnson 198). Each person on Manchester chose where to settle, what to work on, and contributed to the development of the city. Johnson also explained that these emerging behaviors can not only be seen on societies as a whole, but in specific groups too. Individuals who demonstrate a collective conduct exemplify emergent behaviors. Such is the case of the Oxford Street in Manchester, now known as Gay Village. Homosexual men were known to walk down this street in search for lovers. Eventually, men followed this conduct and it became a trend that persists nowadays. One of these men was Alan Turing, the code-breaker. Turing also brought into light that emergent behaviors were actually present in the software language. He was on the right track to understanding emergent behavior in code-breaking patterns, but he died before he could accomplish it. Finally, after explaining Weaver's theories on organized complexity, Johnson talks about Selfridge's model for teaching a computer to recognize the alphabet. It is a complicated process, but the main idea is that many small components work individually to find out the message as a whole. This is a clear example of emergent behaviors because each component works as a single agent to bring out a complex, complete result.