More than the Sum

The clues keep piling up. ASU biologists think they might be closing in on a goal that some call impossible—the discovery of an underlying order in complex systems.

Dozens of juvenile honeybees toddle across a black workbench like tiny wind-up toys. Graduate students at the “dirt lab” in the Life Sciences A wing drink coffee while they dab the bees’ backs with orange and blue paint. On the other side of the room, leaf-cutter ant queens scurry past one another in thin plastic tubing. Arriving at their respective destinations, one queen hurriedly tends to larvae while the other builds an elaborate food-producing fungus garden.

To a newcomer, the lab at Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences (SOLS) may look like a fantasy play land brainstormed by a curious child. The scientists who work there see something very different.

For them, every ant farm answers a piece of the colossal question that sits at the center of their research. How does a hodgepodge of genes, some nourishment, and a simple plastic structure give rise to a fascinatingly complex society?

In the eyes of the ASU biologists, the buzzing clusters of bees and interactions of passing ants are fresh clues to this knotty scientific mystery.

As the clues pile up, the scientists believe they may be closing on a goal some call impossible—the discovery of an underlying order in complex systems. If they are right, these unassuming insects may change the way science is done. Robert Page, Jennifer Fewell, and a host of other ASU researchers believe they are beginning to understand the basic rules that govern how societies of ants and bees function.

The scientists are taking the study of social groups to a new level. The insect experts are collaborating with mathematicians, geneticists, and social scientists to see how far these rules extend. What they find may shed light on some of the most complex questions of the modern era—questions that underlie everything from neuroscience to urban development.

The Wide World of Social Insects
Bee and ant societies are very complex. That complexity has piqued the curiosity of biologists for centuries. The ability of ants and bees to create and maintain ordered societies have made them immensely successful. Ants live in almost every habitat on Earth. They are found from the arctic forests to the Sahara desert. They outnumber humans by a million to one. Bees are not far behind in terms of ecological success.

However, bees and ants don’t seem to have cultures, at least not in the sense that humans do. Yet in many ways their societies bear a striking resemblance to human communities. The ASU scientists think they are beginning to understand what makes the clockwork of insect societies tick.

“When you look at a colony of social insects they look like a little city,” says Page, an entomologist who also serves as director of the School of Life Sciences. “You sort of get the feeling like there’s some higher level of control. But it’s all local decisions made by individuals. A lot of that came from very simple rules of organization.”

Encouraged by the group’s successes, SOLS is recruiting new faces to join its social insect research team. In 2005, ASU attracted one of the world’s leading experts on the study of social insects, Bert Hölldobler, coauthor of the The Ants. Written with biologist E. O. Wilson, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

“Basically overnight we’re transforming ASU into the center of the universe for social insect study,” Page says. “By building the world’s premier social insect research group we are going to enable ourselves to study social dynamics, social complexity, and social structure in more general terms.”

But to get at these bigger questions, the researchers may be forced to redefine the scope of science.

Uncharted Territory
To date, social insect researchers have amassed a huge amount of information about the rules and genes that affect social insect behavior. As part of a new project, the scientists want to learn how these rules play off one another and genes to create orderly complex societies.

It might seem straightforward, but it’s a task that many scientists have called impossible. Whether complex systems can be predicted, or even effectively investigated for that matter, is a topic of hot debate. And with thousands of individuals and millions of genes, the degree of complexity within a single ant colony is daunting.

The ASU researchers hope to get around this by determining which genes are active in social organization. They then want to combine information about genes with the rules that govern social interaction. In theory, the researchers could then use this information to predict the structure and behavior of entire insect societies.

However, similar attempts to understand aspects of complex systems have had limited success. Studies of the complex phenomenon of global warming have elicited volleys of criticism. Likewise, neuroscientists have notably failed to model some complex functions of the brain.

According to biologist Jennifer Fewell, the trouble in untangling these systems arises because science has never had to focus on the big picture.

“Our traditional scientific methodology teaches us that you do controlled experiments. You hold everything constant and then you change one variable,” Fewell explains. “That’s assuming that variable doesn’t interact with other variables in a system.”

Unfortunately, this assumption doesn’t always hold true in nature. The real world is much more complicated.

In some cases, different variables in a system interact in extremely complex ways. They actually change the system itself in the process. New factors that scientists didn’t expect pop up, while others interact in completely different ways. For a traditional scientist, predicting what will happen in a complex system is like trying to hit a moving target while blindfolded.

As a result, scholars have failed to come to consensus about what will happen in nature on a broad range of issues. Modern science’s inability to understand complex systems has led some to pose an unnerving question: “Has science reached its limits?”

“We must have a theory of organizations,” insists Manfred Laubichler, a member of the ASU group and an expert in the history of theoretical biology. “You don’t have to think about it when you are asking very specific questions in a lab. But when you ask bigger questions, you have to deal with the problems of complexity, interactions, and systems.”

Complex Systems Modeling: “A Whole New Way of Doing Science”
By combining insect societies with a new theory of the mathematics of complex systems, the scientists hope to fill this hole.

The flexibility of insect colonies provides the ASU researchers with a huge advantage over previous efforts. For example, a scientist studying global warming can’t change the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. And a neuroscientist can’t add or remove neurons in the brain that she is studying. But for social insect researchers, changing a system is as easy as moving a few bees to a different hive.

Using this new approach, the ASU researchers are testing a simple, but radical idea. They think that the same basic rules may be behind many complex phenomena. If they are correct, the rules that govern how social insects form a society may also dictate how genes interact in a genome. The rules may also apply to any number of fields that have nothing to do with insects, from neuroscience to meteorology.

The social insect scientists are testing the breadth of their findings with the help of researchers from anthropology, psychology, and family and human development.

Since their beginnings, scholars in these social sciences have debated how human social behavior arose. The social scientists are curious to see whether insect behavior will shed new light on age-old questions of human sociality. They also believe that their ideas might enrich the work on social insects. After years of informal discussions, the researchers have teamed up to form the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity.

“We will look all the way through all kinds of social structures, from insects to human beings. Eventually, we want to summarize both the differences and the similarities in new theories about what social behavior is all about,” says Sander van der Leeuw, director of ASU’s new School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

In the process, van der Leeuw expects to ask questions that extend far beyond the laboratory.

“There will be debates about what a society is, what creates a society, what makes a society hang together,” van der Leeuw continues. “There will also be debates about what it means to be human and what distinguishes human societies from primate societies.”

“There are many open questions here that are fundamental to science, as well as social science,” adds Laubichler. “Even considering this type of work is a function of a broad-ranging, interdisciplinary center.”—Taylor Jackson