The Portuguese Man O'War and the Individual

Available for over a year

Strange things dwell out in the open ocean. Bobbing atop the waves, Becky Ripley and Emily Knight meet one such creature, the Portuguese Man O’War. With its bulbous air-sacs and trailing tentacles you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a jellyfish, but you’d be wrong. It’s a colony, a society of tiny individual animals, who work together to eat, hunt and reproduce as one. In the Age of the Individual, we humans like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient little nodes who don’t need nobody. But that perspective gets called into question when you consider where we live. Thanks to some complex maths and some incredible data-crunching, we’re beginning to see the cities we inhabit in a different light. They grow, move, breathe, and die, just like a living organism, according to strict mathematical principles. Just like polyps in a Man O’ War, are we really any more than cogs in a machine? Featuring: * Marine Biologist, Dr John Copley from the University of Southampton * Geoffrey West, Theoretical Physicist from the Santa Fe Institute. Produced and presented by Becky Ripley and Emily Knight. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 2019.