This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 15 May 2008, by Todd Suomela.
-
15 May 08
-
-
According to most biological theories of evolution, individual members of a group tend to gravitate towards specialist tasks. These models describe some societies very well, such as ant and bee colonies where distinct worker and soldier classes exist and individuals are either one or the other, but not both. These classes serve the ongoing survival of the society.
However, new research by scientists at Ohio State University suggests that societal duties do not need to be assigned by a division of labour (DoL) where every individual has a specific role. Researchers Anthony D'Orazio and Tom Waite argue that generalists have a definite role to play and that this holds true for environments as varied as a single cell, an ocean colony of sea anemones or even a small cookie business.
-
- The inefficiency of a worker, who is not specialised to the task, was made less costly;
- Generalists were allowed to make mistakes without substantial penalty.
The model developed by D'Orazio and Waite relaxed two assumptions of existing DoL theory:
By relaxing the first assumption, the researchers showed that generalists, despite paying some extra costs, can coexist with specialists. Relaxing the second assumption showed that this coexistence can hold even when generalists often perform the wrong task. They conclude that error-prone generalists persist most commonly in situations in which their mistakes do little to jeopardize group success.
-
-
14 Mar 08
patrick andrewsthere are conditions under which it actually helps to have some generalists, especially for fairly small groups, some individuals that you might think of as Jacks- or Jills-of-all-trades or multitaskers," said Waite
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.