蚂蚁分工--原文求鉴定

清飞扬

看到有一篇很像JJ的描述，可惜翻不了墙！只能看到网页快照的部分内容，贴上来给大家分享。

有条件的CDer能否帮个忙把整篇文章内容传上来，大家一起分享看看，谢谢！

Adam Smith, in his famouspin factory description, wrote that labor specialization improves productivity. He should have specified which species he was referring to.
Anew paperfinds that ants that specialize are no more productive than ants that don’t. The author, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona namedAnna Dornhaus, studied how efficiently rock ants completed their tasks of brood transport, collecting sweets, foraging for protein and nest-building. An ant was considered more specialized the more it concentrated its work on one particular task.
She found that the ants that specialized in these tasks did not perform them more efficiently than ants that remained “generalists,” and in some cases performed their tasks less efficiently. Her conclusions:

My results indicate that at least in this species, a task is not primarily performed by individuals that are especially adapted to it (by whatever mechanism). This result implies that if social insects are collectively successful, this is not obviously for the reason that they employ specialized workers who perform better individually

泾渭不凡

google搜的电子书就给试读到这。。。

suntao0209

ding

tracyxuyang

貌似就是这篇

hattiehh

Adam Smith ... wrote in 1776 that specialized labor provides benefits to human industry, and similar benefits have been suggested to explain the world-wide success of ants, and other social insects which live in colonies. Ants are found on every continent besides Antarctica, and their success has been attributed to the evolution of specialization – it has been theorized that this increases the efficiency of individual workers - but has rarely been measured. However, a new paper by Anna Dornhaus, published in this week's issue of PLoS Biology, shows that individual rock ants (Temnothorax albipennis) specializing on one task are no more efficient than those that perform multiple tasks.

Rock ants are not physically specialized for any particular task. Dornhaus ... measured how often and how readily individual ants performed certain tasks and considered an ant more specialized the more it concentrated its work on one particular task. She expected rock ants that specialized to work more efficiently, but that's not what she found. Dornhaus explains, "It turns out that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job."...

Although the specialists were not more efficient, they did put in more hours of work. Even though putting in longer hours might seem like the way to success, it wastes colony resources. Dornhaus found that specialists and generalists work equally fast. "Speed does matter because every minute they spend outside is dangerous and energy costly," she said. "They burn fuel, and they risk dying."

It's not known why ants choose the jobs they do, or why some are slow to begin work. She said it might be explained by how quickly an individual detects work to be done, like noticing dirty dishes in the sink. A person with a lower threshold will notice and wash the dishes as soon as there are one or two in the sink. However, a person with a higher threshold doesn't notice the dishes until there are at least 10 piled up. The dishes will still be washed, just not as frequently.

Dornhaus concludes that, at least in this species, a task is not primarily performed by individuals that are especially adapted to it. How much these results apply to the other tasks performed by these ants, or other ant species, or even social insects more generally, remains to be verified. Dorrnhaus's next step is investigating "switching costs," such as the time it takes to walk from one side of the nest to the other or the break in concentration when switching between tasks. Dornhaus suggests specialization might minimize such costs.

Adam Smith cited three benefits from specialization:

1. The worker would become more adept at the task.
2. The time saved from not changing tasks.
3. With specialization, tasks can be isolated and identified, and machinery can be built to do the job in place of labor.

Thought there are plans to look at Smith's second reason for an increase in productivity due to specialization, time saved from staying at one job all day, so far this research only looks at the first reason, dexterity. However, dexterity may not be the most important of the three reasons, and I think that Smith was thinking more about an individual's ability to learn by doing rather than inherent differences across workers. But to the extent that there are differences across workers, and to the extent that it matters for the job, humans may use a different selection mechanism than ants. As to the third reason, I'm not expecting ants to build much capital, so their long-run productivity - the wealth of the ant nation - may be quite limited.

I should note that Smith also thought there was a downside to specialization, i.e. that doing the same task over and over day in and day out dulls the mind
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泾渭不凡

泾渭不凡

若雪

这两篇大意类似但是都不是。
先讲完Adam Smith之后直接讲Dornhaus做蚂蚁实验

清飞扬

你考完了若雪？

宣小妞妞妞

LZ的那篇 有题是出到里面内容的，但是原文是没有的 估计是Infer