Information flow in the social domain: how individuals decide what to do next

Abstract

The contributions in this section, in common with the entire theme of this book, address the question, how are social insect colonies organized? This is a major question because it is part of one of the most enthralling scientific quests—to understand how evolution by natural selection has built complexity and sophistication. This is a universal quest because organisms are the most complex and sophisticated organizations of all. The words, organization and organism, have an obvious common root. This surely indicates that the deep fascination of organisms (of all kinds, e.g. individualistic organisms or superorganisms) is associated with their organization. Indeed, the Concise Oxford Dictionary [1] presents as a key clause in its definition of an organism the following—an “organized body with connected interdependent parts”. The coherent behaviour of organizations and organisms is a property of how their interdependent parts interact, how the parts communicate, and more specifically, how reliable information (from both signals and cues) flows among the parts of the whole. Thus the topic here is a fundamental one.