Division of labor is not a process or a misleading concept

Abstract

Deborah Gordon (Behav Ecol Sociobiol. doi:10.1007/s00265-015-2045-3, 2016) advocates abandoning the term “division of labor” (DOL) on the grounds that it implies a process by which individual colony members become persistent specialists by virtue of their “essential internal attributes.” She claims that there is little evidence for such links, and that continued use of the term distracts us from focusing on how distributed processing leads to task allocation (TA) in the colony, which she considers to be sufficient explanation of how colonies organize work. I argue instead that the term DOL as understood by most social insect researchers today is descriptive, useful, and carries no such implications of process or links to internal attributes. I suggest that the confusion can be addressed by recognizing the distinction between the ontogenetic causes of DOL, which set individuals’ response thresholds (RT) during their development, and the behavioral and physiological mechanisms that act in the moment to determine TA via distributed processing. I further suggest that the term “specialization” as applied to social insects should be understood to mean simply “to concentrate on,” without requiring that it be accompanied by increased performance efficiency.