Traffic Life : Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies
Edited by Stephan Wehner
An Anthology
 
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172 Traffic Zoology Preamble. In his introduction to The Extended Phenotype (Dawkins, 1982) enthusiastic evolutionary biology cheer- leader and Commodore-hacking pop-science guru Richard Dawkins invites us to consider the Necker Cube Illusion (Necker, 1832): a two-dimensional image of interlocking lines representing a three-dimensional block in which the foreground and background can seem to flip back and forth as the brain fruitlessly seeks the 'true' interpretation of the ambiguously de- picted space. This is Dawkins' starting point for a thought experiment in which he blurs the lines be- tween species, their genes and the envi- ronment, calling into question the tradition- Figure 1: The Necker Cube al boundaries drawn through biological sys- tems to identify the relevant level of study. To wit, to wank: We look at life and begin by seeing a collection of interacting individual organisms. We know that they contain smaller units, and we know that they are, in turn, parts of larger composite units, but we fix our gaze on the whole organisms. Then suddenly the image flips. The individual bodies are still there; they have not moved, but they seem to have gone transparent [...] In other words, if you are able to de-emphasise the or- ganism itself you are free to appreciate the idea of beaver ponds as artificial lakes generated by beaver genes, or to see a spider's web as an arrangement of silk drawn by DNA. By extending the lines with which we bound the traditional phenotype, we define new organisms, merging technology and individuals into communities the same way that an-
  
Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming 173 cient micro-organisms interacting inside bilipid membranes fell into symbiotic lockstep dances to found the first stable cells (Tien, 2000). Organelles, cells, bodies, herds: at which level we dis- cern the animal is purely a matter of focus. This idea of the emergent animal or 'super-organism' is hardly particular to Dawkins: William Morton Wheeler remarked on the idea in his breakthrough paper 'The Ant Colony as an Organism' (Wheeler, 1911) with a treatment that is every bit as cogent but with considerably less otaku chic than Kevin Kelly's printed-soundbyte manifesto on hive complexity, Out of Control (Kelly, 1994). In the words of Kelly: There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive. So too can you examine a driver in a car and know noth- ing about the greater animal in which they both participate when the circumstances are right. Some of the applica- ble forces can be seen most clearly in the rarified environ- ment of the professional race course, as explored by David Ronfeldt, a senior social scientist at RAND, in his paper 'Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Super- speedways' (Ronfeldt, 2002), where fleeting moments of co- operation between rivals are necessary in order to win. Ron- feldt focuses in particular on the phenomenon of draft line formation, which is similar to the way flocking birds can share aerodynamic advantage. Like iron filings in a mag- netic field, the large-scale distribution of opportunistically partnering cars are drawn into predictable macro-scale pat- terns across the speedway: Once the racers sort themselves out-after ten to twenty laps-it is common to see a single draft line of four to seven cars running in front, pur- sued a hundred or so yards back by a second line of cars, all another hundred or so yards ahead of a large pack of cars that may still be running

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