Benji

“The causes of the ant’s behavior are woven into the relations link- ing the ant, the place it is searching, the other ants, the seeds, and the humidity in a web that widens as we learn more. This amounts to a more elaborate and detailed version of Aristotle’s idea that the animal is expressing its nature. The important point is that its nature is not inside it, but instead in how it reacts to and changes its situation.
The view of evolution outlined in this chapter is that the causes and heredity of traits, such as behavior, are generated by the relation of inside and outside, not contained in a packet of instructions carried inside. This perspective on the evolution of collective behavior is emerging in every field of biology and underlies the hypothesis that the dynamics of collective behavior reflect adaptation to the dynamics of the environment in which the behavior evolves. To summarize: The dynamics of collective behavior are generated by how individuals interact to adjust collective outcomes to changing conditions.”
― Deborah M Gordon, The Ecology of Collective Behavior

“Though many early models of collective behavior sought to reveal common, basic principles that would lead to a single general theory of collective behavior, emergence, or self-organization, it is now clear that the processes that generate collective behavior are very diverse. By now many different models have been developed to de- scribe the myriad processes in nature that use interactions to generate collective outcomes.”
― Deborah M Gordon, The Ecology of Collective Behavior

“When we can describe how patterns of encounters among individuals adjust outcomes in changing situations, we have explained collective behavior and it is no longer emergent. Then we can move past emergence to explanations, and abandon the idea that collective behavior is added on top of individual behavior to create something extra”
― Deborah M Gordon, The Ecology of Collective Behavior

“The “modern synthesis” in evolutionary biology brought the tools of population genetics to track the process of natural selection; now the “extended synthesis” adds the insight that organism and environment influence each other.”
― Deborah M Gordon, The Ecology of Collective Behavior