Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist: This is the third of a trio of reviews in which I take a brief detour into ants and collective behavior more generally. I previously reviewed The Ant Collective, a graphical introduction to ant behavior, and entomologist Deborah M. Gordon’s Ant Encounters, a primer on how collective behavior in ants comes about. The Ecology of Collective Behavior is the second book by Gordon that I will examine. It proposes a research program to figure out both how collective behavior responds to changing environmental conditions, and how it evolves. Though squarely aimed at professional biologists, this brief and interesting book is nevertheless accessible to a wider interested audience and makes its case with nary an equation in sight.
One of the most familiar examples of collective behavior is swarming, where large numbers of animals move in a coordinated fashion, whether flocks of birds or schools of fish. However, collective behavior can take many different forms and it has proven incredibly tricky to develop a general theory that successfully captures the diversity of processes generating it.
As far as Gordon is concerned, one habit of thought that is holding us back is reductionism: “it is not possible to learn how natural systems function collectively by considering the components separately and independently of the world they inhabit [as it] severs the relations that matter” (p. 2).
A brief tangent here, as the limitations of reductionism have been a recurrent theme in recent reviews. Gordon’s book thematically sits smack in the middle of several others I have covered lately. Safina made exactly this observation (that reductionism overlooks relational dynamics) in Alfie & Me. Also, this is the second book in short order that mentions panta rhei (“everything flows”) and refers to Nicholson & Dupré’s book. But where I gave Slijepčević‘s Biocivilisations a mixed review for, amongst others, dunking on reductionism, Gordon is intellectually honest enough to admit that without centuries of reductionist research: “we could not have arrived at the recognition that all of this knowledge is not enough” (p. 34). Her book is far more grounded and presents an actionable framework.
More here.
