#804 Deborah Gordon: Ant Colonies, Distributed Intelligence, and Systems Without Central Control

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Dr. Deborah Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. She studies how ant colonies work without central control using networks of simple interactions, and how these networks evolve in relation to changing environments.

In this episode, we talk about ant colonies. We discuss decision-making from an ecological perspective, and distributed problem solving. We talk about the tole of genetics and the environment in ant sociality. We discuss task allocation, and why “division of labor” is not a good term to apply here. We talk about how ants recognize nestmates. We discuss genetic relatedness, kin selection, group selection, and the debate surrounding levels of selection in evolutionary biology. We talk about ant personality. We discuss if there are hierarchies or caste systems in ant colonies. Finally, we discuss if the study of ants can help us understand other systems that work without central control, and if we can extrapolate from ants to humans.

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