The concept of stigmergy has currency in biology, computer science, and organizational design. When they talk about stigmergy, they’re talking about some forms of collective control.
The OED says it’s from the French stigmergie, coined in 1959 by the French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé to describe the decentralized, mound-building behavior of termites. There’s more in Wikipedia and in this “Brief history of stigmergy” published in Artificial Life (Theraulaz & Bonabeau 1999).
Here is an AI summary of its meaning and applications.
Stigmergy (/ˈstɪɡmərdʒi/ STIG-mər-jee) is a mechanism of indirect coordination where agents (like ants or robots) communicate by modifying their environment. A trace left by one action stimulates a subsequent action, allowing complex, self-organized behavior to emerge without central planning, such as termites building nests or ants following pheromone trails.
- Examples:
- Termites/Ants: Pheromone trails for foraging or material placement for nest construction.
- Human Systems: Wikipedia editing, where one user’s edit triggers another’s correction, or open-source software development.
- Robotics: Swarm robots leaving virtual “pheromone” trails to coordinate and move objects, as described in research published in Nature.
- Benefits: It enables highly scalable, robust, and adaptive collective behavior, as the system does not depend on a central leader.
It is quite irrelevant that this description is for obvious reasons couched in stimulus-response terms. We’re in process of changing that thoughtless consensus. The reframing in PCT terms is not difficult. Where it says “A trace left by one action stimulates a subsequent action” understand that the ‘trace’ is a perceptual variable controlled by others after its ‘placement’ has been controlled. The road is paved, and then a person whose work it is drives a specialized line-painting vehicle on it ‘placing’ the centerline. Subsequently, other drivers control their perceptions of the center line, with observable effects on their ‘subsequent actions’.
Why do termites control perceptions of pheromones and humans control perceptions of roadway markings? Presumably the control functions are genetically inherited in termites. In humans many other control loops have to exist in order for control of things like road markings to matter, control of many variables amounting to what has been diversely studied as culture, education, family dynamics, politics, history, and so on. PCT has barely done more than glance in the general direction of these variables. But there is good evidence of some genetically inherited control systems. Control of relationships with conspecifics appears to be quite early in evolution, in vertebrates especially but not exclusively.