Formations

Concerned with formations, the second chapter is devoted to historical scenes in the development of behavioral biology around 1900. The latter discipline systematized knowledge about swarms by relying on physical instead of then popular social models of interaction, e.g. in mass psychology. It developed a genuinely ‘biological gaze’ that was determined to study animal collectives in terms of the ‘systemic’ nature of their inter-individual behavior. Techniques and media for gathering data thus gained a new degree of relevance, replacing the human sensory apparatus, which perceived little more than noise, and traditional systems for recording information (diaries, hand-written observations), which could not deal with the abundance of data.