Transitions in Levels of Organization: Lessons from Social and Colonial Spiders
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the origin of multicellular organisms or social groups, a dichotomy emerges between systems where the parts retain some autonomy, referred to as modular, and more integrated unitary systems. I explore the critical roles of ecology and geometry in determining whether groups form and the degree of integration they develop. I argue that these are essential considerations above and beyond whether groups originate from a single cell or a single inseminated female. I consider these points through the lens of social and colonial spiders, which represent early transitions to either unitary or modular systems, respectively. By allowing or constraining cooperation, I suggest that the geometry of their webs—irregular tridimensional versus orbicular—determines the degree of integration of their groups, their scaling properties, their population structure, and their long-term evolutionary fate. Ecology, on the other hand, determines the need or opportunity for groups to form. I extend these lessons to other social systems and levels of organization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it