Key Term: "behavior"

I have always been aware that the patterns of popular culture and governing influences shape my thoughts and actions. For instance, I began dressing in skinny jeans many years ago because the world of fashion saw it stylish. I bought an iPhone because all of my friends had one. Even now, when I drive, I adhere to the right side of the road simply because it is the law and every other person in the country follows the same law. I did not make these rules up; I hardly decided for myself what principles I should construct my life upon. My behavior simply followed the patterns of the world I was surrounded by.

Because of my own experience, my reaction when I read about the ant colony’s cohesive behavior was they they were each simply following the natural order that the colony had in itself adopted. As I read further, however, I found myself viewing behavior not as a pattern to adopt, but increasingly as a two-way street. When the reading asked the question of why an evening primrose opens when it does, and how a seed knows which plant it should become, I asked myself, where does the community learn a pattern of behavior in the first place? Each discussion that followed the introduction of the ant colony allowed me to understand more deeply that the group learns from the individuals themselves. Patterns of behavior do not simply appear at the top and spontaneously begin to mold each level below—they begin from the very bottom, with a single individual, and work their way up. This is what the reading refers to as bottom-up learning.

“The Myth of the Ant Queen” has shaped my perception of behavior in a way that relates to Davidson’s description of crowdsourcing. One of the fundamental principles of crowdsourcing is that “the community most served by the solution should be chiefly involved in the process of finding it” (51), which parallels Johnson's idea that a community learns patterns of behavior from its individuals. I also find it interesting to apply a second principle of crowdsourcing—that difference and diversity, not expertise, solves problems—to the concept of how a society adopts a certain behavior. The individual at the bottom that happens to construct a certain pattern of behavior does not have to be an expert in any particular field. Sometimes ordinary people are able to bring about extraordinary changes.