Collective minds

摘要

In 1905 the field naturalist Edmund Selous, a confirmed Darwinian and meticulous observer of bird behaviour, wrote of his wonderment when observing tens of thousands of starlings coming together to roost: "they circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net...wheeling, rending, darting...a madness in the sky".