The Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA.
Trends Ecol Evol. 1997 May;12(5):188-93. doi: 10.1016/s0169-5347(97)01048-3.
Self-organization was introduced originally in the context of physics and chemistry to describe how microscopic processes give rise to macroscopic stuctures in out-of-equilibrium systems, Recent research that extends this concept to ethology suggests that it provides a concise description of a wide range of collective phenomena in animals, especially in social insects. This description does not rely on individual complexity to account for complex spatiotemporal features that emerge at the colony level, but rather assumes that intractions among simple individuals can produce highly structured collective behaviours.
自组织最初在物理学和化学领域被引入，用于描述非平衡系统中微观过程如何产生宏观结构。最近将这一概念扩展到动物行为学的研究表明，它为动物，尤其是社会性昆虫中的广泛的集体现象提供了简洁的描述。这种描述不依赖于个体的复杂性来解释出现在群体水平上的复杂时空特征，而是假设简单个体之间的相互作用可以产生高度结构化的集体行为。
