The Less Intelligent the Elements, the More Intelligent the Whole. Or, Possibly Not?

We dare to make use of a possible analogy between neurons in a brain and people in society, asking ourselves whether individual intelligence is necessary in order to collective wisdom to emerge and, most importantly, what sort of individual intelligence is conducive of greater collective wisdom. We review insights and findings from connectionism, agent-based modeling, group psychology, economics and physics, casting them in terms of changing structure of the system's Lyapunov function. Finally, we apply these insights to the sort and degrees of intelligence of preys and predators in the Lotka-Volterra model, explaining why certain individual understandings lead to co-existence of the two species whereas other usages of their individual intelligence cause global extinction.