From division of labor to the collective behavior of social insects从分工到社会昆虫集体行为.pdfVIP

Behav Ecol Sociobiol (2016) 70:1101– 1108 DOI 10.1007/s00265-015-2045-3 REVIEW From division of labor to the collective behavior of social insects Deborah M. Gordon 1 Received: 12 August 2015 /Revised: 11 November 2015 /Accepted: 18 November 2015 /Published online: 2 December 2015 # The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at S Abstract ‘Division of labor ’ is a misleading way to describe and Fire, describes his investigation of a forest fire in Montana the organization of tasks in social insect colonies, because there in which many firefighters died. The official explanation for is little evidence for persistent individual specialization in task. why the firefighters died had been that they could not escape Instead, task allocation in social insects occurs through distrib- because they could not run past a wall of rocks. But when uted processes whose advantages, such as resilience, differ from MacLean went to the site, he found that there was no wall; those of division of labor, which are mostly based on learning. instead, there were only scattered rocks. This led to a The use of the phrase ‘division of labor’ persists for historical completely different explanation of what happened in the fire. reasons, and tends to focus attention on differences among in- MacLean tried to figure out why so many people held on to dividuals in internal attributes. This focus distracts from the the wall-of-rocks version of what happened, despite all the main questions of interest in current research, which require evidence against it. an understanding of how individuals interact with each other It seems to me that the history of the use of ‘division of and their environments. These questions include how colony labor ’ to describe the organization