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THE HYPOTHESIS GRADIENT. “The statistical character of the transient perturbation field means that doing so is not a simple matter of swarms of termites migrating “up the gradient” to the site of injury. Rather, there is a complex swarm decision-making process at work, where different groups of termites each generate a multiplicity of “hypotheses” for where the site of damage is. A “hypothesis” is “posed” when a termite is exposed to a transient perturbation of some threshold intensity, which prompts the termite to deposit a dollop of wet clay.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

INJURY TEST. “A breach in the mound also alters the shape of the mound’s AC perturbation field. Whereas the undisturbed mound has a field that is distributed roughly uniformly with respect to the mound surface, the field in a damaged mound now has a focus at the site of injury, where wind-induced transient perturbations will be most intense. Once an unexpected AC perturbation has drawn a termite swarm from the nest into the mound, the distorted AC field must be interpreted so that repair efforts are ultimately focused at the site of injury.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

INTERPRETING THE MULTITUDE. “Thus, what would normally be considered clear physiological adaptations in a single organism can, in a superorganismal context, blur into clear evolutionary adaptation, the link being the ability to interpret the multitude of memories that permeate any living system.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS OVER TIME. “Because the lifespan of an individual worker is on the order of a few months, this makes it a certainty that the workers that left the scar cannot be the same ones that remodel it. Thus, the mound contains signs and symbols that are a form of heritable memory.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

COMPLEX REPAIR. “The Macrotermes mound illustrates this argument in a compelling way. The aftermath of mound repair is the superorganismal equivalent of scar tissue: disordered and disorganized structure with compromised function. Behind the plug is the ragged and tortuous spaces where the spongy build merges into the broader spaces of the mound reticulum. There is also the residue of the many sites of aborted stigmergic building: pillars, walls, incomplete spongy build and partially blocked tunnels. Once mound repair is complete, these are gradually dismantled and the tunnels returned to their smooth condition prior to the injury, which also restores the mound to full functionality.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

FITTEST MEMORY RACE. “Evolutionary adaptation and physiological adaptation are therefore no longer distinct, but are fundamentally one and the same process. Adaptation is not the selection of object memories, but a competition between a multiplicity of interpretable memories. Those interpretable memories that enable a function to persist for the longest will be the fittest memories. Fitness is now no longer replication of code, but persistence of function.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

MEMORY PHYSICALITY. “Nucleotide sequence memory is a kind of object memory: the gene is a thing, embodying a code that must only exist for it to qualify as memory. This makes little biological sense, however: memory, to be useful at all, must be interpretable memory. This renders the Neodarwinian presumption of the supremacy of the gene insufficient to its supposed task, because a gene has no meaning except in a cognitive, and therefore a physiological, context. The gene cannot be a simple specifier of function, it must be a participant in function, and therefore must be a function itself, embedded in broader suites of function that can be forms of hereditary memory themselves.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

GROOMING SIGNAL. “The sharing of water is usually the culmination of an extensive period of grooming of one termite by another. This is quite an involved ritual, with painstaking manipulation and licking of all parts of the groomed termite’s body, including scrupulous attention to the legs, antennae, and inter-segmental joints. At the end of this extended ritual, the groomer will “beg” from the groomed termite, with the groomer assuming a characteristic subordinate posture as it manipulates the groomed termite’s mouthparts. Sometimes, this elicits the regurgitation of material from the groomed termite’s crop, which the groomer imbibes. Groomers also elicit the excretion of feces from the groomed termite’s anus (trophallaxis), but this is far rarer than oral solicitation.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

THE WHY. “One must ask: why should termites build a spire in the first place, if there is a one in three chance of having to do it all again? Cognitive exuberance might indeed be the apt word to describe this phenomenon, but it could be put more prosaically thus: it is the reflection of a species, M. michaelseni, that puts more “meaning” into a surfeit of water than does the other.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn