ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: Biology
- Creators: Pavlic, Theodore P
- Creators: Creath, Richard
Description
The academic literature on science communication widely acknowledges a problem: science communication between experts and lay audiences is important, but it is not done well. General audience popular science books, however, carry a reputation for clear science communication and are understudied in the academic literature. For this doctoral dissertation, I utilize Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape, a general audience science book on the particularly thorny topic of neuroscientific approaches to morality, as a case-study to explore the possibility of using general audience science books as models for science communication more broadly. I conduct a literary analysis of the text that delimits the scope of its project, its intended audience, and the domains of science to be communicated. I also identify seven literary aspects of the text: three positive aspects that facilitate clarity and four negative aspects that interfere with lay public engagement. I conclude that The Moral Landscape relies on an assumed knowledge base and intuitions of its audience that cannot reasonably be expected of lay audiences; therefore, it cannot properly be construed as popular science communication. It nevertheless contains normative lessons for the broader science project, both in literary aspects to be salvaged and literary aspects and concepts to consciously be avoided and combated. I note that The Moral Landscape's failings can also be taken as an indication that typical descriptions of science communication offer under-detailed taxonomies of both audiences for science communication and the varieties of science communication aimed at those audiences. Future directions of study include rethinking appropriate target audiences for science literacy projects and developing a more discriminating taxonomy of both science communication and lay publics.
ContributorsJohnson, Nathan W (Author) / Robert, Jason S (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Martinez, Jacqueline (Committee member) / Sylvester, Edward (Committee member) / Lynch, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Once perceived as an unimportant occurrence in living organisms, cell degeneration was reconfigured as an important biological phenomenon in development, aging, health, and diseases in the twentieth century. This dissertation tells a twentieth-century history of scientific investigations on cell degeneration, including cell death and aging. By describing four central developments in cell degeneration research with the four major chapters, I trace the emergence of the degenerating cell as a scientific object, describe the generations of a variety of concepts, interpretations and usages associated with cell death and aging, and analyze the transforming influences of the rising cell degeneration research. Particularly, the four chapters show how the changing scientific practices about cellular life in embryology, cell culture, aging research, and molecular biology of Caenorhabditis elegans shaped the interpretations about cell degeneration in the twentieth-century as life-shaping, limit-setting, complex, yet regulated. These events created and consolidated important concepts in life sciences such as programmed cell death, the Hayflick limit, apoptosis, and death genes. These cases also transformed the material and epistemic practices about the end of cellular life subsequently and led to the formations of new research communities. The four cases together show the ways cell degeneration became a shared subject between molecular cell biology, developmental biology, gerontology, oncology, and pathology of degenerative diseases. These practices and perspectives created a special kind of interconnectivity between different fields and led to a level of interdisciplinarity within cell degeneration research by the early 1990s.
ContributorsJiang, Lijing (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, James (Committee member) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / White, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
What makes living systems different than non-living ones? Unfortunately this question is impossible to answer, at least currently. Instead, we must face computationally tangible questions based on our current understanding of physics, computation, information, and biology. Yet we have few insights into how living systems might quantifiably differ from their non-living counterparts, as in a mathematical foundation to explain away our observations of biological evolution, emergence, innovation, and organization. The development of a theory of living systems, if at all possible, demands a mathematical understanding of how data generated by complex biological systems changes over time. In addition, this theory ought to be broad enough as to not be constrained to an Earth-based biochemistry. In this dissertation, the philosophy of studying living systems from the perspective of traditional physics is first explored as a motivating discussion for subsequent research. Traditionally, we have often thought of the physical world from a bottom-up approach: things happening on a smaller scale aggregate into things happening on a larger scale. In addition, the laws of physics are generally considered static over time. Research suggests that biological evolution may follow dynamic laws that (at least in part) change as a function of the state of the system. Of the three featured research projects, cellular automata (CA) are used as a model to study certain aspects of living systems in two of them. These aspects include self-reference, open-ended evolution, local physical universality, subjectivity, and information processing. Open-ended evolution and local physical universality are attributed to the vast amount of innovation observed throughout biological evolution. Biological systems may distinguish themselves in terms of information processing and storage, not outside the theory of computation. The final research project concretely explores real-world phenomenon by means of mapping dominance hierarchies in the evolution of video game strategies. Though the main question of how life differs from non-life remains unanswered, the mechanisms behind open-ended evolution and physical universality are revealed.
ContributorsAdams, Alyssa M (Author) / Walker, Sara I (Thesis advisor) / Davies, Paul CW (Committee member) / Pavlic, Theodore P (Committee member) / Chamberlin, Ralph V (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Systems biology studies complex biological systems. It is an interdisciplinary field, with biologists working with non-biologists such as computer scientists, engineers, chemists, and mathematicians to address research problems applying systems’ perspectives. How these different researchers and their disciplines differently contributed to the advancement of this field over time is a question worth examining. Did systems biology become a systems-oriented science or a biology-oriented science from 1992 to 2013?
This project utilized computational tools to analyze large data sets and interpreted the results from historical and philosophical perspectives. Tools deployed were derived from scientometrics, corpus linguistics, text-based analysis, network analysis, and GIS analysis to analyze more than 9000 articles (metadata and text) on systems biology. The application of these tools to a HPS project represents a novel approach.
The dissertation shows that systems biology has transitioned from a more mathematical, computational, and engineering-oriented discipline focusing on modeling to a more biology-oriented discipline that uses modeling as a means to address real biological problems. Also, the results show that bioengineering and medical research has increased within systems biology. This is reflected in the increase of the centrality of biology-related concepts such as cancer, over time. The dissertation also compares the development of systems biology in China with some other parts of the world, and reveals regional differences, such as a unique trajectory of systems biology in China related to a focus on traditional Chinese medicine.
This dissertation adds to the historiography of modern biology where few studies have focused on systems biology compared with the history of molecular biology and evolutionary biology.
This project utilized computational tools to analyze large data sets and interpreted the results from historical and philosophical perspectives. Tools deployed were derived from scientometrics, corpus linguistics, text-based analysis, network analysis, and GIS analysis to analyze more than 9000 articles (metadata and text) on systems biology. The application of these tools to a HPS project represents a novel approach.
The dissertation shows that systems biology has transitioned from a more mathematical, computational, and engineering-oriented discipline focusing on modeling to a more biology-oriented discipline that uses modeling as a means to address real biological problems. Also, the results show that bioengineering and medical research has increased within systems biology. This is reflected in the increase of the centrality of biology-related concepts such as cancer, over time. The dissertation also compares the development of systems biology in China with some other parts of the world, and reveals regional differences, such as a unique trajectory of systems biology in China related to a focus on traditional Chinese medicine.
This dissertation adds to the historiography of modern biology where few studies have focused on systems biology compared with the history of molecular biology and evolutionary biology.
ContributorsZou, Yawen (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Newfeld, Stuart (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Variation in living systems and how it cascades across organizational levels is central to biology. To understand the constraints and amplifications of variation in collective systems, I mathematically study how group-level differences emerge from individual variation in eusocial-insect colonies, which are inherently diverse and easily observable individually and collectively. Considering collective processes in three species where increasing degrees of heterogeneity are relevant, I address how individual variation scales to colony-level variation and to what degree it is adaptive. In Chapter 2, I introduce a Markov-chain decision model for stochastic individual quorum-based recruitment decisions of rock-ant workers during house hunting, and how they determine collective speed--accuracy balance. Differences in the average threshold-dependent response characteristics of workers between colonies cause collective differences in decision-making. Moreover, noisy behavior may prevent drastic collective cascading into poor nests. In Chapter 3, I develop an ordinary differential equation (ODE) model to study how cognitive diversity among honey-bee foragers influences collective attention allocation between novel and familiar resources. Results provide a mechanistic basis for changes in foraging activity and preference with group composition. Moreover, sensitivity analysis reveals that the main individual driver for foraging allocation shifts from recruitment (communication) to persistence (independent effort) as colony composition changes. This might favor specific degrees of heterogeneity that best amplify communication in wild colonies. Lastly, in Chapter 4, I consider diversity in size, age, and task for nest defense in stingless bees. To better understand how these dimensions of diversity interact to balance defensive demands with other colony needs, I study their effect on colony size and task allocation through a demographic Filippov ODE model. Along each dimension, variation is beneficial in a certain range, outside of which colony adaptation and survival are compromised. This work elucidates how variation in collective properties emerges from nonlinear interactions between varying components in eusocial insects, but it can be generalized to other biological systems with similar fundamental characteristics but less empirical tractability. Moreover, it has the potential of inspiring algorithms that capitalize on heterogeneity in engineered systems where simple components with limited information and no central control must solve complex tasks.
ContributorsNavas Zuloaga, Maria Gabriela (Author) / Kang, Yun (Thesis advisor) / Smith, Brian H (Thesis advisor) / Pavlic, Theodore P (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The flexibility and robustness of social insect colonies, when they cope with challenges as integrated units, raise many questions, such as how hundreds and thousands of individual local responses are coordinated without a central controlling process. Answering such questions requires: 1. Quantifiable collective responses of colonies under specific scenarios; 2. Decomposability of the collective colony-level response into individual responses; and 3. Mechanisms to integrate the colony- and individual-level responses. In the first part of my dissertation, I explore coordinated collective responses of colonies in during the alarm response to an alarmed nestmate (chapter 2&3). I develop a machine-learning approach to quantitatively estimate the collective and individual alarm response (chapter 2). Using this methodology, I demonstrate that colony alarm responses to the introduction of alarmed nestmates can be decomposed into immediately cascading, followed by variable dampening processes. Each of those processes are found to be modulated by variation in individual alarm responsiveness, as measured by alarm response threshold and persistence of alarm behavior. This variation is modulated in turn by environmental context, in particular with task-related social context (chapter 3). In the second part of my dissertation, I examine the mechanisms responsible for colonial changes in metabolic rate during ontogeny. Prior studies have found that larger ant colonies (as for larger organisms) have lower mass-specific metabolic rates, but the mechanisms remain unclear. In a 3.5-year study on 25 colonies, metabolic rates of colonies and colony components were measured during ontogeny (chapter 4). The scaling of metabolic rate during ontogeny was fit better by segmented regression or quadratic regression models than simple linear regression models, showing that colonies do not follow a universal power-law of metabolism during the ontogenetic development. Furthermore, I showed that the scaling of colonial metabolic rates can be primarily explained by changes in the ratio of brood to adult workers, which nonlinearly affects colonial metabolic rates. At high ratios of brood to workers, colony metabolic rates are low because the metabolic rate of larvae and pupae are much lower than adult workers. However, the high colony metabolic rates were observed in colonies with moderate brood: adult ratios, because higher ratios cause adult workers to be more active and have higher metabolic rates, presumably due to the extra work required to feed more brood.
ContributorsGuo, Xiaohui (Author) / Fewell, Jennifer H (Thesis advisor) / Kang, Yun (Thesis advisor) / Harrison, Jon F (Committee member) / Liebig, Juergen (Committee member) / Pratt, Stephen C (Committee member) / Pavlic, Theodore P (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Eusocial insect colonies have often been imagined as “superorganisms” exhibiting tight homeostasis at the colony level. However, colonies lack the tight spatial and organizational integration that many multicellular, unitary organisms exhibit. Precise regulation requires rapid feedback, which is often not possible when nestmates are distributed across space, making decisions asynchronously. Thus, one should expect poorer regulation in superorganisms than unitary organisms.Here, I investigate aspects of regulation in collective foraging behaviors that involve both slow and rapid feedback processes. In Chapter 2, I examine a tightly coupled system with near-instantaneous signaling: teams of weaver ants cooperating to transport massive prey items back to their nest. I discover that over an extreme range of scenarios—even up vertical surfaces—the efficiency per transporter remains constant. My results suggest that weaver ant colonies are maximizing their total intake rate by regulating the allocation of transporters among loads. This is an exception that “proves the rule;” the ant teams are recapitulating the physical integration of unitary organisms.
Next, I focus on a process with greater informational constraints, with loose temporal and spatial integration. In Chapter 3, I measure the ability of solitarily foraging Ectatomma ruidum colonies to balance their collection of protein and carbohydrates given different nutritional environments. Previous research has found that ant species can precisely collect a near-constant ratio between these two macronutrients, but I discover these studies were using flawed statistical approaches. By developing a quantitative measure of regulatory effect size, I show that colonies of E. ruidum are relatively insensitive to small differences in food source nutritional content, contrary to previously published claims.
In Chapter 4, I design an automated, micro-RFID ant tracking system to investigate how the foraging behavior of individuals integrates into colony-level nutrient collection. I discover that spatial fidelity to food resources, not individual specialization on particular nutrient types, best predicts individual forager behavior. These findings contradict previously published experiments that did not use rigorous quantitative measures of specialization and confounded the effects of task type and resource location.
ContributorsBurchill, Andrew Taylor (Author) / Pavlic, Theodore P (Thesis advisor) / Pratt, Stephen C (Thesis advisor) / Hölldobler, Bert (Committee member) / Cease, Arianne (Committee member) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022