Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre, Site Marcelin Berthelot
Open to all
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Abstract

The beetle is an insect that feeds on the excrement of animals much larger than itself, from which it extracts the appropriate substance to produce the carapace we know and love. In the same way, there is a form of writing that feeds on the waste products of the world : toil, drudgery, submission, material misery and social deserts, a form of writing that manages to metabolize them in order to make them visible and convey them. Bringing them out of the shadows. How do you write about reality ? How do you look at the suffering part of a society ? How do we approach it, and what can entomology teach us about the way we observe ourselves ?

Abstract from Jean Louis Deneubourg's presentation

The study of collective behavior in animal societies seeks to understand how coordinated functions (choice, consensus...) emerge from individual interactions. Invertebrates (mainly insects) have been successfully used in experimental and theoretical studies of these collective phenomena. These studies show how collective decisions emerge from simple exchanges of information between individuals.
Underlying the general question of the individual-collective, a number of issues will be addressed, such as the conditions of emergence of collective choices and memories, or the role of system history. The elementary and widespread behaviors of gregariousness and recruitment will serve as a basis for discussion of these issues.

Jean Louis Deneubourg

Jean Louis Deneubourg
  • Doctor of Science in 1979 (Faculty of Science, ULB)
  • 1990-2016 : scientist at the Fonds national de la recherche scientifique (FNRS)
  • 1991 : professor at ULB (from 2021 visiting professor)

Jean Louis Deneubourg's research focuses on collective behavior in animal societies, and in particular on how the group deploys cognitive capacities that go beyond the scope of isolated individuals. Combining theoretical and experimental approaches, he and his collaborators have studied how interactions or communications between individual units lead to global organizational patterns. The results of his research have been published in some three hundred scientific publications.

Speaker(s)

Florence Aubenas

Journalist and writer

Jean Louis Deneubourg

Ethologist, self-organization and dynamics of biological systems, visiting professor, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

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