Post #3786339

2026-07-13 13:55 UTC

behavior obsolete. For millions of years, maintaining a fixed angle to a distant celestial light source, the moon and the stars, proved to be a vital navigational heuristic across the animal world. It is efficient, reliable, and requires minimal neural hardware. Once humans invented artificial illumination, a strategy that had worked for eons became suicidal. A moth spiraling into a candle flame is not failing to navigate, it is using a time-tested rule-of-thumb rendered catastrophically wrong by a change in context. Intelligence and stupidity turn out to be chronometrical. A brilliant heuristic and a fatal one can be the same heuristic, separated by an unexpected shift in the world. Sea turtles have followed moonlight to the ocean for 100 million years and now they orient toward the artificial illumination of mushrooming beachfront condos. Albatross have evolved to scoop fish from the ocean surface and now unknowingly collect floating plastic and feed it to their chicks.

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@anna_lillith@mas.to 2026-07-13 13:57

The fungus Ophiocordyceps infects carpenter ants and coopts their behavioral circuitry. An infected ant climbs to a precise height on a plant stem, clamps its mandibles onto the underside of a leaf, and dies, ideally positioned for the fungus to disperse its spores. The ant’s behavioral program has been hacked. The ant is performing a sophisticated sequence of actions, including climbing, orienting, and gripping in the service of another organism. This is an ant perfectly captured by Bonhoeffer’s idea of competence co-opted by a malicious agent to solve the wrong problem. Perhaps specialization produces local intelligence that when overextended can generate global stupidity. This would be a change in scale and domain that corresponds to the moth’s change of environment. The physicist Lord Kelvin marshaled all his physics knowledge to prove that heavier than air flying machines are impossible less than a decade before the Wright brothers flew a heavier than air

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