Fish Prove Ignorance Important for Democracy or Something

I had this one filed away for a while, but I never found the hook I was looking for.  I even let a Ann Althouse beat me to to it.  Anyway, some scientists trained some bait to seek certain colored targets, and then mixed different groups of fish, and looked at who won out when the fish schooled together:

The team, led by Iain D. Couzin, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, carried out its work with a type of fish known as golden shiners. The group trained some of the fish to associate food with a blue target and trained a smaller number of the fish to associate food with yellow, a color the fish more naturally prefer.

Placed together, most fish pursued yellow targets, suggesting the smaller group’s more intense desire for yellow overwhelmed the larger group’s numerical advantage, Mr. Couzin reported. But as fish without any training were added, the group increasingly favored the blue target, he said.

“A strongly opinionated minority can dictate group choice,” the research team wrote in its report, published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science. “But the presence of uninformed individuals spontaneously inhibits this process, returning control to the numerical majority.”

As Mark Twain once said:

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.