School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287.
Department of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Nov 26;121(48):e2420078121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2420078121. Epub 2024 Nov 22.
Emergence is a fundamental concept in biology and other disciplines, but whether emergent phenotypes evolve similarly to nonemergent phenotypes is unclear. The hypothesized process of emergent evolution posits that evolutionary change in at least some collective behaviors will differ from evolutionary change in the corresponding intrinsic behaviors of isolated individuals. As a result, collective behavior might evolve more rapidly and diversify more between populations compared to individual behavior. To test whether collective behavior evolves emergently, we conducted a large comparative study using 22 ant species and gathered over 1,500 behavioral rhythm time series from hundreds of colonies and isolated individuals, totaling over 1.5 y of behavioral data. We show that analogous traits measured at individual and collective levels exhibit distinct evolutionary patterns. The estimated rates of phenotypic evolution for the rhythmicity of activity in ant colonies were faster than the evolutionary rates of the same behavior measured in isolated individual ants, and total variation across species in collective behavior was higher than variation in individual behavior. We hypothesize that more rapid evolution and higher variation is a widespread feature of emergent phenotypes relative to lower-level phenotypes across complex biological systems.
涌现是生物学和其他学科的一个基本概念，但涌现表型的进化是否与非涌现表型的进化相似尚不清楚。涌现进化的假设过程认为，至少一些集体行为的进化变化将不同于孤立个体的相应内在行为的进化变化。因此，与个体行为相比，集体行为可能会更快地进化，并在种群之间更加多样化。为了测试集体行为是否会涌现进化，我们使用 22 种蚂蚁进行了一项大型比较研究，从数百个殖民地和孤立个体中收集了超过 1500 个行为节律时间序列，总共超过 1.5 年的行为数据。我们表明，在个体和集体水平上测量的类似特征表现出不同的进化模式。与在孤立个体蚂蚁中测量的相同行为的进化率相比，蚁群活动节律的表型进化估计速率更快，并且集体行为的种间总变异高于个体行为的变异。我们假设，与复杂生物系统中较低层次的表型相比，更快的进化和更高的变异是涌现表型的一个普遍特征。
