Jane Jacobs famously took on Adam Smith’s notion that specialization leads to growth. She countered basically that specialization can and does lead to doing the same thing better, but that it does not lead to creating new things and the new industries and work that go with it. For that, a social collectivity called the city was required.  Over at the NYT Economix, Catherine Rampell points to a new paper which finds that

ants that specialize are no more productive than ants that don’t. The author, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona named Anna Dornhaus, studied how efficiently rock ants completed their tasks of brood transport, collecting sweets, foraging for protein and nest-building. An ant was considered more specialized the more it concentrated its work on one particular task.  She found that the ants that specialized in these tasks did not perform them more efficiently than ants that remained “generalists,” and in some cases performed their tasks less efficiently. Her conclusions: “My results indicate that at least in this species, a task is not primarily performed by individuals that are especially adapted to it (by whatever mechanism). This result implies that if social insects are collectively successful, this is not obviously for the reason that they employ specialized workers who perform better individually.”