The Fluid Task Allocation of Ants

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In the 80s there was some understanding that ants were not merely limited by their body type by like size or size of specific parts you know people think about workers versus soldiers I think in the lay understanding. That was replaced at least temporarily by this polyethism this notion that ants are changing function as they age and that's not adequate to describe what's going on here right so what was it that you and your colleagues found that demonstrated that that was not a sufficient explanation well let's go back to that's per secondright now yeah the colony shifts around the numbers of ants allocated to different tasks as conditions are changing. For example if there's extra food a colony might allocate more ants to

Episode Title and Show Notes:

106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park

Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought you with us for far ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions.

We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify and consider making a donation or finding other ways to engage with SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years.

Follow SFI on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

📚Reading & Videos:

The Lost World
by Michael Crichton

Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton

The Evolution of Syntactic Communication
by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and Vincent Jansen

InterPlanetary Festival 2018 + SFI Science Explainer Animations
by SFI

Complexity Economics
by SFI Press

Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism
by Simon DeDeo (2019 SFI Seminar)

How To Live in The Future, Part 4: The Future is Exapted/Remixed
by Michael Garfield

Artists Misusing Technology
by NXT Museum

The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence
by Melanie Mitchell (2019 SFI Symposium Talk)

The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models
by Melanie Mitchell & David Krakauer