At the heart of Deborah Gordon's fascinating new book, Ants At Work is a mystery about how ant colonies develop -- a mystery that has implications that extend far beyond the Arizona desert where Gordon studies native harvester ants. Gordon's work focuses on the connection between the micro-behavior of individual ants and the overall behavior of the colonies themselves, and part of that research involves tracking the life-cycles of individual colonies, following them year after year as they scour the desert floor for food, competing with other colonies for territory, and -- once a year -- mating with them. Over the course of her decade-long study, Gordon, who teaches Behavioral Ecology at Stanford when she's not excavating colonies in Arizona, began to realize that the colonies themselves change over time in a way that uncannily mimics the development life-cycles of individual organisms: they have a clearly defined infancy, adolescence, and mature phase over their 15-year existence. (For instance, a three-year-old colony is less stable, and more aggressive than a 10-year-old colony.) And here lies the mystery of colony behavior: While the overall colony appears to evolve and adapt over 15 years, the ants that make up the colony only live for a year. How does the whole develop a life cycle when the parts are so short-lived?

It's a question that relates directly to any study of complex systems, where low-level agents produce higher-level activity that can seem remarkably coordinated, despite the fact that the system itself lacks any sort of command hierarchy. Gordon's book keeps the ants themselves in tight focus, but it's clear she's energized by these cross-disciplinary questions. When I ask her what got her into ants in the first place, she replies, "I was interested in systems where individuals who are unable to assess the global situation still work together in a coordinated way -- using only local information." The world is filled with these bottom-up systems, and thanks to Gordon's work, we have an important new foothold in understanding one of the most puzzling -- not to mention entertaining -- examples of such systems. And despite the seemingly arcane nature of the subject-matter, Gordon seems to be hitting a popular nerve with Ants At Work, and she seems well on the way to becoming the most celebrated entomologist since E.O. Wilson. (The Times Magazine ran a profile that hyped up a squabble of sorts between the Harvard scholar and Gordon, though she denies the existence of a personal dispute.) I met with Gordon at her office at Stanford, and after a brief tour of her lab, we sat down to discuss ants and colonies, and what -- if anything -- they can teach us about people.

-- Steven Johnson