A review by archytas
The Ecology of Collective Behavior by Deborah M Gordon

challenging informative slow-paced

4.0

"In living systems, unlike physical ones, change goes both ways: change in any living system alters its surroundings, which in turn change the living system. Newton’s laws describe how an object changes position when it is subject to certain forces. These laws for inanimate objects are deterministic; the relation of mass and acceleration is sufficient to predict how an object will move, and the surroundings are independent of the action of the objects. This is never true in living systems; instead, every living entity is busy modifying its surroundings."

This is written clearly as a primer in an approach to understanding life - or biology - that Gordon has been part of pioneering. Rather than viewing elements of life in isolation, she argues, we should understand it as part of a living system. Whether you are discussing cells, individuals or species, each is shaped by their interactions and can only be understood in the context of them. Gordon eschews a more philosophical approach, however, if favour of mapping distinct ways that interaction occurs and the impacts it can have, for example, centering around how resource fluctuations affect ant behaviour (Gordon is an ant specialist; there are a lot of ant examples) or how modal networks will differ in interaction mechanics to hierarchical ones. She also focuses almost entirely on her case, declining to allocate space to debunking other approaches. The result is surprisingly accessible, and if, like me, you are already inclined to be in agreement with this more collective and dazzlingly intricate view of evolution, it provides sensible ways to think about it and some good examples of how interactions might work.

I also did like that she had moved from being an emergence enthusiast to being "ready to replace its mystical glow with something more substantial". She uses an iceberg analogy as if we can currently see only what is above the waterline, the emergent behaviour, but that doesn't mean that the process underneath is mystical, just not what we can really yet see. "let’s figure out how to explain collective behaviour, and then there will be no need to invoke emergence." This book is a long way from that - and criticism could be that there are oversimplifications here too - but it is a step towards thinking differently to approach the problem.