The Mythical Man-Month

Biological Parallel

Brooks's Law: adding people to late projects makes them later. Biology's parallel: ant colonies solving navigation problems—adding more ants creates congestion and confusion, slowing solution time. The mechanism: communication overhead scales quadratically with participants. A 10-ant problem requires 45 interactions (n(n-1)/2); a 100-ant problem requires 4,950. Coordination costs overwhelm productivity gains. Evolution's solution: modularity and stigmergy (indirect coordination through environment). You can't speed up gestation by adding mothers.