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Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers

COMPLEXITY

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The Division of Labor in Ants

When I started doing research on ants in the 80s when I was a graduate student, the prevailing idea was that each ant had a task or a function that was genetically determined. But it seems pretty clear that nature doesn't work that way because we see that individual parts change function when what's going on around them changes. That leads us directly into the first of your pieces that I wanted to discuss with you today, which is from division of labor to the collective behavior of social insects.

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