Vai ter com as formigas, oops, abelhas e aprenda o que é democracia

BOOKS ON SCIENCE

Reports From the Hive, Where the Swarm Concurs

By KATHERINE BOUTON

Published: September 27, 2010

What can we learn from the bees? Honeybees practice a kind of consensus democracy similar to what happens at a New England town meeting, says Thomas D. Seeley, author of “Honeybee Democracy.” A group comes to a decision through a consideration of options and a process of elimination.

The author, on Appledore Island, watching a swarm launch into flight from the vertical board that he uses as a swarm mount. The two feeder bottles on the mount provide sugar syrup to keep the swarm well fed. From the book “Honeybee Democracy” by Thomas D. Seeley

The bees are making a life-and-death decision: where to establish a new hive. Choosing a site that is too exposed, too small or too close to the ground can be fatal. Swarms don’t always do it right, but they do succeed a remarkable amount of the time, with 10,000 or more bees following the advice and signals of a few hundred leaders to re-establish themselves in a new location every spring. Along the way they have to make sure the precious queen, fatter and more sluggish than the others and prone to take a rest stop, is not lost.

Dr. Seeley, professor and chairman in the department of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, makes a good-faith case for the effectiveness of bee-management style as applied to humans, but I couldn’t help suspecting that it might have been at the urging of his publisher. Bees and ants are the management model of choice just now, and books like “The Smart Swarm,” by Peter Miller, a senior editor at National Geographic, are quite admired in the business world. But as Dr. Seeley himself acknowledges, consensus democracy requires a like-minded electorate, and how often do we get that in real life?

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Read more here/Leia mais aqui: The New York Times

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NOTA DESTE BLOGGER:

Li este artigo e me lembrei de uma recomendação de certo livro oriental antigo quase idêntica a esta - de irmos à natureza e ouvir sua resposta sobre como resolver um problema básico de administração e sobrevivência humana: vai ter com as formigas.

Deixa pra lá, quem ainda acredita em mitos...

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