Deborah Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University who “studies how ant colonies work without central control using networks of simple interactions, and how these networks evolve in relation to changing environments.” The Gordon Lab at Stanford researches collective behavior in many forms, “such as emergence, self-organization, superorganism, quorum sensing, artificial intelligence, and dynamical networks.”
Teilhard remarked on one significant difference between collective behavior in human groups and that found in ant colonies: ants, like all eusocial insects, engage in their extraordinarily cooperative behavior because the members of a colony are closely related genetically, so the influence of kin selection binds them into what Teilhard calls a “family structure” in this passage from The Formation of the Noosphere:
“Viewed in this aspect, entirely borne out by experience, the collective human organism which the economists so hazily envisage emerges decisively from the mists of speculation to take its place and assume the brilliance of a clearly defined star of the first magnitude in the zoological sky. Until this point was reached Nature, in her generalized effort of “complexification,” to which I shall return later, had failed for lack of suitable material to achieve any grouping of individuals outside the family structure (the termitary, the ant hill, the hive). With man, thanks to the extraordinary agglutinative property of thought, she has at last been able to achieve, throughout an entire living group, a total synthesis of which the process is still clearly apparent, if we trouble to look, in the “scaled” structure of the modern human world.”
He accurately observes that forces other than kin selection bind the “collective human organism” into cohesive groups, identified here as the “agglutinative property of thought”. However, despite the obvious differences between ant colonies and human groups, there is much about the collective behavior of ants that’s been discovered since Teilhard’s time. And that’s why Science of the Noosphere wanted to have this conversation with Deborah Gordon.
Learn more: https://humanenergy.io/deborah-gordon/
