My friend Dymphna sent me this pdf, (one of her irish cousins is a co-author), on Constructing an Animat Mind Using 505 Sub-Minds from 234 Different Authors. Coolio. Animat looks like an excellent paradigm for growing a hive mind on the internet. Perhaps the Singularity is already underway. ;)
And then I looked at the bibliography.

I was struck by the ubiquitous presense of Sir Richard's Blind Watchmaker. This probably is the book that has inspired more genetic algorithm design than any Cos Sci text. In this article from Wired,

NaturalMotion, a startup founded by former Oxford researchers Torsten Reil and Colm Massey, is ushering in a new age of digital animation. The company's sole app, Endorphin, employs neural networks and artificial evolution to produce self-animating software robots that walk and run and fly with startling verisimilitude.
Two years before enrolling at Oxford, Reil read The Blind Watchmaker, the evolutionary biologist's recasting of Darwin for the information age. "It was a turning point," Reil says. "From then on, I was fascinated with biology."

FYI, most of the 15,000 horses in LOTR:Return of the King were generated by Natural Motion, which is especially good at modelling cg horses. If we can now use the strong paradigms of evolutionary biology to create excellent cg horses, can excellent hive minds and brains be far behind?