Science as a bee swarm

Perhaps scientific progression could be thought of as a process similar to bee swarming. As Seeley describes in Honeybee Democracy, individual bees seek out new homes, come back to the group and report on their findings. The more intensely they describe their home through waggle dances and repeated dance circuits, the more others bees will go the see the potential home for themselves. After enough bees agree on a particular home, they move into it. Scientists engage in this same sort of behavior. Instead of searching for a new home, scientists investigate new ideas. When they find something promising, they publish it, advertising if the findings are strong or not, and explaining what might be a good direction for future research on the topic to head. In response, other scientists investigate the same question, perhaps from a new angle, or perhaps seeing if they can replicate the exact same findings, and in turn they publish their work, supporting or discrediting the original work. This can be seen as a scientists ‘going to a new home’ (investigating a new idea), then ‘advertising it’ (publishing), and recruiting new scientists to the idea to repeat the process.

In a certain sense, scientists may move in to a new home, or rather a new theoretical structure, such as structuralism or postmodernism. As a new theory or perspective becomes prominent, new scientists are recruited to look at problems from that same viewpoint, and once a theory reaches a critical mass of acceptance, it is considered to be ‘well accepted’ or the norm, similar to the way that a quota of bees decides that they group will move into a particular home. After the theory or school of thought is ‘outgrown’, a new theory or school of thought is proposed and moved in to, often leaving the older scientists behind, much the same way that bees start their swarm to look for a new home, though the initial steps of swarming or proposing a new theory may be different. This happened, for example, when Chomsky proposed Universal Grammar in opposition to Skinner’s behaviorist model of child language acquisition. The strength of Chomsky’s argument swayed scientists to frame their research in a Chomskyan light rather than a Skinnerian light, founding a new ‘home’ for linguistics. Now, Chomsky is considered the father of modern linguistics, having recruited enough scientist-bees to research in the framework of his theories, establishing a new theoretical home for the field.

In addition, bees rely on their numbers to find the best home, each scout bee bringing in a small piece of information. Scientists, in a similar fashion each search for a small piece of information to add to bring back to the group, and offer it to the group. That piece of information is then used by the next scientist or bee to decide what question they will investigate or what potential home they will look for. Bee swarms and the sciences both rely on many individuals to bring diverse information together to be integrated into a whole. In many way scientists search for new knowledge in the same way that bees search for new homes.