[frikk]

This also reminds me of the Radio Lab episode that tracks bird migration, including one bird (that they were actively tracking) that simply peeled off the group and settled down somewhere else that wasn't part of the historic migration path. Feels like the same idea.

In the book A Mote in God's Eye, they have a concept of the Crazy Eddie (presumably named after the 'eddies' in fluid dynamics), which is a mythical social phenotype where the member disagrees with the status quo and believes there is an unknown solution to their thus-far unsolved generational problem. Simply believing in a solution that is worth searching for denotes the member as 'insane'.

Kind of seems like we, as natural beings and members of natural systems, absolutely have some kind of pattern-breaking behavior built in at a systemic level. A master-level emergent behavior that can exploit local maxima but still succeed in finding other local maxima to ensure the survival and adaptation of a species.

[lazide]

In the ‘mote in god’s eye’, the crazy Eddie’s were a bad thing because they inevitably destabilized the system (or were symptoms of the system destabilizing), and inevitably resulted in apocalyptic consequences if they found something of note (and had dozens of times or something). Which I believe was also what ended up happening in the book, wasn’t it?