The art of co-operation

Consider the lowly slime mould.

Slime moulds are neither plant, nor animal nor fungus but belong to a Kingdom all of their own, the Protista. They spend most of their lives as independent, single cells, invisible to the naked eye, dining on fungi and bacteria. However, when times are hard they swarm and aggregate into an enormous multi-nucleated single cell or a mass of individual cells which moves slowly across the ground in an organised and cooperative fashion. Eventually, as here, they sporulate and produce millions of spores, which go on to produce more slime moulds. This they do without a single neurone between them.

Consider Homo sapiens.

A highly intelligent ape, with a complex brain. Considers itself as being at the top of the evolutionary tree. They have a special day, known as Black Friday, when they gather in their Temples of Commerce and fight like demons for possession of large screen televisions.

Worse still, these apes have a tendency to wage war and to slaughter their innocents. Yesterday I read an account by the BBC of the effects of one of their latest conflicts, still raging in Syria, which chilled me to the very core. It deals with number of displaced people in Syria and what that would mean if we in the UK suffered the same fate, scaled as percentages of the population.

The 2.5m people who live in the huge conurbation of Greater Manchester would have fled from the UK as if their life depended on it. They would be followed by the entire populations of Tyne and Wear, Merseyside and Glasgow, and then about half the population of greater London.

And those are just the Syrian refugees who have fled to other countries. Then there are the millions more displaced within Syria itself. For a UK equivalent of these, add to our earlier total: the rest of greater London, Birmingham, Belfast, every person in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, all Norfolk, Suffolk, plus the entire remaining population of Scotland, the entire population of Wales, and then throw in Sheffield, Bristol, Brighton, Swindon, Plymouth, Coventry, Leicester, Leeds.

The UK equivalent of Syria's refugees and displaced would be about 30 million people, on the move.