  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.
