Fish vote with their. fins
Stickleback fish vote with their fins
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Thursday, 13, Nov 2008 05:00
If the US presidency was decided by stickleback fish, rather than the US electorate, we might have had a very different outcome.
Fish, of course, have very different requirements from the American people. They don't need a commander-in-chief. They don't even have an executive. Fishes just want another to follow when they're swimming together in a school.
How they decide which fish to plump for has fascinated a group of Swedish, Australian and British scientists, whose work is published in today's Current Biology publication.
The key is that fish prefer good-looking leaders. When presented with a choice - an ugly fish going one way and an attractive one going the other - they'll always follow the better-looking one.
What interests the scientists is the way they reach this decision - through consensus.
This is defined, of course, by the French 18th century philosopher Condercet who showed that the probability that a majority of independent-minded jurors is correct in a decision between "guilty" and "not guilty" increases with group size.
The same is true of stickleback fish. As group size increased, the fish made more accurate decisions in working out which of the fish are more attractive.
"Our results show that submission to peers and occasional cascades of incorrect decisions can be explained as a by-product of what is usually accurate consensus decision-making," the researchers write.
They argue volatile global markets demonstrate this logic transfers to humans effortlessly.
"A good example here is the stock exchange," David Sumpter of Uppsala University, one of the study's authors, said.
"Just now there is a lot of discussion about traders unable to make their own assessment and panic selling because others are selling.
"In these instances, this behaviour seems somewhat irrational. But in lots of other scenarios, such behaviour is perfectly rational. Watching others and copying them if enough individuals seem to be doing the same thing is generally a good behavioural strategy."
As a result, we can sadly conclude, connecting sticklebacks' leadership selection with the US election is a bit more difficult than initially seems the case.
For while Mr Obama might not have been elected on good looks alone, at least the US electoral system enjoys a private voting system. Nothing fishy there.