Thursday, May 1, 2008

Complex Hive builders or Free Entities?

One of my favorite folks on these here internet tubes, Thoreau, who writes over at Unqualified Offerings, linked to an abstract and an article about the discovery of the similarity between leaf veins and city road systems.

I found these especially interesting because I have long wondered whether cities are hives, or something more. Now, don't get me wrong, I love urban living like nobodies business. I truly believe that the modern urban environment actually represents a difference on an evolutionary, or at least the beginning of one for human beings. I can't find the link, but there was a discovery of an ancient city, I believe in Pakistan, nearly 9,000 years old, that suggested that they were advanced enough to have dental sciences. I have long suspected that human cities, human hives, are quantitatively more advanced than smaller groups of humans based on the "coming together", a sort of gestalt system.

Items like this research revealing the similarity between biological systems, like leaf veins, and road systems, indicate to me, the possibility, however distastefull to some, that we are evolved ants. Or something like it, and much more tied to the biology that gave birth to us than might be comfortable to admit.

Well, perhaps I'm seeing something that isn't there, but check them out for yourself.
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Content by Lawrence Richard Johnson Jr. unless otherwise attributed.