The distributed intelligence of forests

[Magical Realist]

Nonconscious intelligence consisting totally in relationships...

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1901501547529733

[C C]

Nonconscious intelligence consisting totally in relationships...

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1901501547529733

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: There's a form of intelligence operating in a natural world that dwarfs anything human civilization has built. In 2009, scientists published research revealing something that changed how biologists understand forests entirely. Trees, which we had assumed were passive individual competing organisms, were communicating through vast underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi, what scientists now call the wood wide web.

Trees share nutrients with neighboring trees that are struggling. Old trees, the largest, oldest members of a forest, function as what researchers called mother trees, hubs in the network that distribute carbon and nutrients to seedlings and struggling neighbors. When a mother tree is dying, it increases the flow of resources to the trees around it.

It gives away what it has on the way out. This raises a question that should deeply unsettle every assumption that we have about what intelligence is. Is a forest intelligent? Not in the way we are, or at least not in the way that we have learned to categorize intelligence, but it is solving problems, resource allocation, threat detection, community resilience, long-term sustainability with a sophistication that most of our advanced organizational systems consistently fail to match.

Distributed intelligence emerging from relationship rather than residing in an individual. Murmuration of starlings, thousands of birds moving as a single fluid entity, each one responding only to the seven birds immediately around it. No leader or choreographer or algorithm, but pure collective intelligence emerging from a simple local relational responsiveness.

And here is the principle that connects all these: the intelligence is in the relationships, not in the individual decisions. The forest is not intelligent because the trees are intelligent. It is intelligent because what is happening between the trees. And the implication for human organization, for how we build communities, companies, families, societies is profound.

The most intelligent human systems will not be the ones with the smartest individuals. They will be the ones with the most genuine, most honest, most interconnected relationships. That is intelligence that the forest has been demonstrating for four million years, and we are just beginning to understand what it has been trying to show us and how it can completely transform our civilization if we let it.

This was episode 10 of Beyond IQ. Follow for more.