By protocols, I mean the mechanisms by which the parts interact. What we surmise to be control might have nuances that make the whole model or concept of controller-controlled inadequate or at least significantly incomplete. And yes, delineating those and/or confirming your hypothesis on the relation between the preferred method of decision-making and the maturity of purpose would require more detailed empirical data. Your idea is certainly clever and interesting but needs more detailed evidence and an identification of mechanisms to be satisfying. In my experience as a scientist and engineer, clever and elegant models have often turned out wrong though they are always pleasant to have.
As for the ‘single’ brain, single nucleus in a cell being associated with effectiveness, that again is too hasty. There may be other reasons for one brain (aside: we do have two lobes/brains, like two eyes and the rest you mentioned but the two lobes are integrated via the corpus callosum but severing that does lead to two separate thinking entities in one body - read ‘The man who mistook his wife for a hat’). In any case, reasons for the one brain may be the energy cost or the need for short communication distances and not the need for one-ness of control. After all, bacteria is more successful than the animal kingdom and doesn’t have a nucleus. Furthermore, plants who have no central nervous system are the most successful living things. If you insist on animals, then ants are also social animals and more successful by numbers or by total weight than humans and their societies have no central control.
As for militaries and corporations, decentralization can be a big benefit. Armies that have almost autonomous units at every level are much, much harder to defeat. You cannot defeat such armies by destroying one top “command and control” because the rest of the army would keep working. Furthermore, the top leadership is easily and quickly replaced because the intention and not the plans are centralized. The highest level of command in such an army, ideally, needs only impart intention and a few if any commands and not detailed orders and commands. Communication would still be very important but it has lots of redundancies and at all levels.
In the end, you may be right in the thesis of your article but I don’t think so. I think it may be more difficult to design or socially evolve effective distributed systems with a multitude of brains and this, rather than the intrinsic effectiveness of dictatorships is why those thrive in situations that you identify as having a single function. A wheel is much more effective and efficient than legs. The reason animals don’t have them is not due to legs being more effective but in the difficulty of evolving and maintaining such appendages. To support a world where more people can be philosophers, the search for wheels that support distributed decision-making is quite worthwhile.
