Through this and other work, we know something about the uncanny murmurations of starlings.

ENGADGET: Editorial: Tech is a flock of starlings

Clouds of flocking starlings as natural memes is a viable analogy, but there is a crucial difference.

ENGADGET: Editorial: Tech is a flock of starlings

Responsiveness within a flock of starlings is fast, but not in fact instantaneous.

ENGADGET: Editorial: Tech is a flock of starlings

He told the TEDsters, as delegates at the conference are known, that institutions needed to act more like starlings.

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You've seen the videos -- thousands of starlings flocking in the sky to swirl and surge across wide, cloudless backdrops.

ENGADGET: Editorial: Tech is a flock of starlings

In contrast, starlings apparently enjoy an influential equality in which any one of them can start a concentric cascade in a new direction.

ENGADGET: Editorial: Tech is a flock of starlings

If ornithologists told us that starlings were imitating the group behavior endemic to tech-adoption culture, it would be easy to see the similarity.

ENGADGET: Editorial: Tech is a flock of starlings

Small clouds of starlings charge onto the scene from offstage as if bent on collision, then integrate perfectly and instantly with the larger formation.

ENGADGET: Editorial: Tech is a flock of starlings

The starlings and sparrows that Europeans brought to North America may one day evolve sufficient differences from those left behind in Europe that they will constitute separate species.

WSJ: Matt Ridley on the Possible Formation of a Species | Mind & Matter

We are talking about breeding starlings here rather than wintering starlings, many of which are migrants from the North and East and still flock to the South West in huge numbers: as attested to by the spectacular roosts of a million birds or more on the Somerset Levels.

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