The Gordon Lab

Deborah M. Gordon

Paul S. and Billie Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology
Dept of Biology, Stanford University

dmgordon at stanford dot edu

Collective behavior takes many forms, such as emergence, self-organization, superorganism, quorum sensing, artificial intelligence, and dynamical networks.

We use ant colonies to investigate systems that operate without central control, and explore analogies with other systems, such as the internet, the immune system, and the brain.

Questions about collective behavior:

  1. How it works:

    How local cues used by individuals add up to the resilient response of the group

  2. How it functions ecologically:

    How the organization responds to a changing environment

  3. How it evolves:

    Which kinds of collective behavior work best in particular conditions

Books

Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized

Ants at Work
How an Insect Society is Organized

Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior

Ant Encounters
Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior
Primers in Complex Systems

Book cover for The Ecology of Collective Behavior

The Ecology of Collective Behavior
Available October 2023 from Princeton University Press

Amazon

Amazon

Introduction