Linus's Law

Biological Parallel

Linus's Law: 'Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.' Biology's version: social learning and collective problem-solving. Bee colonies use waggle dances to aggregate foraging information across thousands of individuals—errors are corrected through redundancy. Ant colonies solve maze problems faster than individual ants because multiple paths are explored simultaneously. The mechanism: parallel processing and error correction through diversity. But Linus's Law has limits: too many observers create noise (groupthink in primates). Optimal group size balances coverage and coordination.