Deborah Gordon,
Professor of Biology at Stanford University, will speak at
ASCB 2015 on
Sunday, December 13, about “The Ecology of Collective Behavior.”
(December 13, 2015) Stanford
biologist Deborah M. Gordon has spent much of the last 30 years studying the
self-organization of ant colonies. Forget about queens ruling their colonies.
With ants, organization is all a matter of who you bump into, what signals you
pick up, and where you are at the moment. All these countless individual
interactions accumulate into the colony’s collective decision-making,
apportioning resources, responding to threats and opportunities, and starting
new colonies, all without top down management. This classic unit-by-unit,
moment-by-moment, from-the-bottom-up self-organization should be familiar to
cell biologists, according to Gordon. It’s what drives many emergent biological
systems—cells into tissue, neurons into nervous systems, and zygotes into
embryos.
Which explains why Gordon, who has a PhD in zoology, but is
not anything like a traditional entomologist, will be speaking at ASCB 2015 in
the Sunday, December 13, morning symposium, “Wisdom of Crowds: Collective
Decision-Making by Cells and Organisms.” Her talk is called, “The Ecology of
Collective Behavior.”
As a model for emergent organization, ants have much in
common with cells, Gordon explained in a recent interview. Take neurons, she
said. Her lab uses a concept borrowed from neural system development to
understand how an ant “counts” interactions. “How does an ant know the rate at
which it meets other ants?” Gordon said. “We were thinking about that by
analogy with a neuron. A neuron adds up its stimuli; from other neurons. It’s a
process called a leaky integrator because each electrical impulse that a neuron
receives has some decay because some charge leaked out. What happens in a
neuron is that it responds to successive stimuli, if the next one happens
before the previous one has decayed, then enough charge has accumulated and a
neuron will fire.”