Collective Behavior From Cells to Societies: Interdisciplinary Research Team Summaries (2015) / Chapter Skim
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Conference Summary
Conference Summary
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Group behaviors are what press their fingerprints into our landscapes, from the Ice Bucket Challenge to wars, from eusocial insects supporting billion-dollar crops to the destruction wrought by fire ants and termites, from having a brain that cracks codes to developing a destructive tumor. Those groups could be clusters of cells, a colony of insects, or humans interacting on a social network.
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"We have the inevitable emergence of team rivalry," steering committee chair Gene Robinson observed wryly, after one team took a playful shot at their (slightly more organized) counterparts during the first set of group presentations.
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But on another level, one human is simply "one." The lines defining "one" and "two" are sufficiently blurry that Team 6 had trouble identifying characteristics of dyads applied to everything from protein dimers to merging corporations. They also wrestled with the question of whether a group of two displays truly collective behavior or is merely cooperative, and questioned whether a dyad really is the building block for larger groups.
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The same could be true for cells in search of energy, the team said, and plotted the positions of various organisms on a three-axis fitness landscape that evolution can act upon. The last group considered this challenge through a more applied computer science lens, and looked how tradeoffs between speed and flexibility allow organisms to evolve.
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But, Team 4B said, in a school of fish comprising dramatically different individuals, maintaining that similar outcome depends on high levels of interactions among the fish. Next, groups that are both highly interactive and include high levels of individual variation have a better chance of performing well on complex tasks in shifting environments.
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Governed by a set of rules, coordinated behaviors can arise from commands coded into robots, from an organism's genetic instructions, and from the chemical gradients that direct signaling molecules to their targets. A better understanding of how these rules allow organisms to interact with their environment should make it possible to translate organic behaviors into inorganic, brainless objects, the team said.
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Using the results of those experiments, the team would ultimately like to develop a model that can predict how organisms cooperate outside the lab. A Fragile Balance Eusociality, as seen in honeybee and termite colonies, is among the more successful behavior strategies, conference steering committee chair Gene Robinson said in a preconference interview.
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Among the mechanisms the team proposed studying are competition for metabolic resources, signaling through excitatory and inhibitory networks, and trauma repair. For each of these areas, the team designed experimental approaches to investigate their contribution to epilepsy at both the whole-brain and cellular levels.
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One might think devising a well-funded research program that could combat anti-vaxxers or mob mentalities would be a fun challenge -- but neither team tackling the challenge seemed to find it particularly easy. Team 2A began by considering various ethical angles involved the research, including privacy, data access, and whether "harnessing networks for the public good" is something that scientists are ethically able to do.
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Ultimately, the group said, they'd like to write a mathematical equation describing how all these variable interact; though that didn't happen at this conference, the team mentioned plans to submit a paper on the topic soon.
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