Gordon Deborah M
Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020 USA.
Behav Ecol Sociobiol. 2016;70(7):1101-1108. doi: 10.1007/s00265-015-2045-3. Epub 2015 Dec 2.
'Division of labor' is a misleading way to describe the organization of tasks in social insect colonies, because there is little evidence for persistent individual specialization in task. Instead, task allocation in social insects occurs through distributed processes whose advantages, such as resilience, differ from those of division of labor, which are mostly based on learning. The use of the phrase 'division of labor' persists for historical reasons, and tends to focus attention on differences among individuals in internal attributes. This focus distracts from the main questions of interest in current research, which require an understanding of how individuals interact with each other and their environments. These questions include how colony behavior is regulated, how the regulation of colony behavior develops over the lifetime of a colony, what are the sources of variation among colonies in the regulation of behavior, and how the collective regulation of colony behavior evolves.
“分工”是描述社会性昆虫群体中任务组织的一种具有误导性的方式，因为几乎没有证据表明存在持续的个体任务专业化。相反，社会性昆虫的任务分配是通过分布式过程进行的，这些过程的优势（如恢复力）与主要基于学习的分工优势不同。“分工”这一表述的使用因历史原因而持续存在，并且往往将注意力集中在个体内部属性的差异上。这种关注点偏离了当前研究中主要感兴趣的问题，而这些问题需要理解个体如何相互作用以及它们与环境的相互作用。这些问题包括群体行为是如何调节的，群体行为的调节在群体的生命周期中是如何发展的，行为调节在不同群体间变化的来源是什么，以及群体行为的集体调节是如何演变的。
