Superorganism

A superorganism is an organism consisting of many organisms. This is usually meant to be a social unit of eusocial animals, where division of labour is highly specialised and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods of time. Ants are the most well known example of such a superorganism. Naked mole rat is a famous example of the eusocial mammal. The technical definition of a superorganism is "a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective," [cite book |author=Kelly, Kevin |title=Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world |publisher=Addison-Wesley |location=Boston |year=1994 |pages=98 |isbn=0-201-48340-8 |oclc= |doi=] phenomena being any activity "the hive wants" such as ants collecting food or bees choosing a new nest site.

The Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock ["Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth", James Lovelock, Oxford University Press, 1979] and the work of James Hutton, Vladimir Vernadsky and Guy Murchie, have suggested that the biosphere can be considered as a superorganism. However, strict ecological studies reveal little or no self control inside organism communities, and such communities usually easily go off balance or change into entirely different ones. This view is countered and balanced by Systems Theory and the dynamics of a complex system.

Superorganisms are important in cybernetics, particularly biocybernetics. They exhibit a form of "distributed intelligence," a system in which many individual agents with limited intelligence and information are able to pool resources to accomplish a goal beyond the capabilities of the individuals. Existence of such behavior in organisms has many implications for military and management applications, and is being actively researched. [cite book |author=Kelly, Kevin |title=Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world |publisher=Addison-Wesley |location=Boston |year=1994 |pages=251|isbn=0-201-48340-8 |oclc= |doi=

If Col. Thorpe [of the US DARPA] has his way, the four divisions of the US military and hundreds of industrial subcontractors will become a single interconnected superorganism. The immediate step to this world of distributed intelligence is an engineering protocol developed by a consortium of defense simulation centers in Orlando Florida ...

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uperorganic in social theory

Nineteenth century evolutionist Herbert Spencer coined the term "super-organic" to focus on social organization (the first chapter of his "Principles of Sociology" is entitled "Super-organic Evolution" ["The Principles of Sociology", Vol. 1, Part 1. "The Data of Sociology", Herbert Spencer, 1876] ), though this was apparently a distinction between the organic and the social, "not" an identity: Spencer explored the holistic nature of society as a social organism while distinguishing the ways in which society did not behave like an organism. ["The Principles of Sociology", Vol. 1, Part 2, Chapter II, "A Society Is an Organism" (sections 222 and 223), Herbert Spencer, 1876] For Spencer, the super-organic was an emergent property of interacting organisms, that is, human beings. And, as has been argued by D. C. Phillips, there is a "difference between emergence and reductionism." ["Holistic Thought in Social Science", D. C. Phillips, Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 123]

Similarly, economist Carl Menger expanded upon the evolutionary nature of much social growth, but without ever abandoning methodological individualism. Many social institutions arose, Menger argued, not as "the result of socially teleological causes, but the unintended result of innumerable efforts of economic subjects pursuing 'individual' interests." ["Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics", Carl Menger, Louis Schneider (translator), New York University Press, 1985]

Spencer and Menger both argued that because it is individuals who choose and act, any social whole should be considered less than an organism, though Menger emphasized this more emphatically. Spencer used the organistic idea to engage in extended analysis of social structure, conceding that it was primarily an analogy. So, for Spencer, the idea of the super-organic best designated a distinct level of social reality above that of biology and psychology, and not a one-to-one identity with an organism.

Nevertheless, Spencer also argued that "every organism of appreciable size is a society," which has suggested to some that the issue may be terminological. ["The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer", Tim S. Gray, 1996, p. 211]

The term "superorganic" was adopted by anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber in 1917 ["Patterns of Culture", Ruth Benedict, Houghton Mifflin, 1934, p. 231] . Social aspects of the superorganism concept are analysed in Marshall (2002) [Marshall, A. (2002). " [http://www.icpress.co.uk/books/histsci/p268.html The Unity of Nature] ", Imperial College Press, London.] .

Problems and criticisms

The concept of a superorganism is in dispute, as many biologists maintain that in order for a social unit to be considered an organism by itself, the individuals should be in permanent physical connection to each other, and its evolution should be governed by selection to the whole society instead of individuals. While it's generally accepted that the society of eusocial animals is a unit of natural selection to at least some extentFact|date=August 2008, most evolutionary scientists believe that the individuals are still the primary units of selection.

The question remains "What is to be considered "the individual"?". Some Biologists like Richard Dawkins suggest that the individual selected is the selfish gene. ["The Selfish Gene", Oxford University Press, 1976] Others believe it is the whole genome of an organism. E.O. Wilson has shown that with ant-colonies and other social insects it is the breeding entity of the colony that is selected, and not its individual members. This could apply to the bacterial members of a stromatolite, which, because of genetic sharing, in some way comprise a single gene poolFact|date=December 2007. Gaian theorists like Lynn Margulis would argue this applies equally to the symbiogenesis of the bacterial underpinnings of the whole of the Earth.

It would appear, from computer simulations like Daisyworld that biological selection occurs at multiple levels simultaneously.

Some scientists have suggested that individual human beings can be thought of as "superorganisms"; as a typical human digestive system contains 10¹³ to 10¹⁴ microorganisms whose collective genome ("microbiome") contains at least 100 times as many genes as our own [Gill S. R., et al. "Science", "312", 1355-1359 (2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1124234] (see also Human microbiome project).

Timothy Leary suggested that there is really only one organism on Earth: the DNA. He described all species and physically independent lifeforms as limbs of this organism, and their ultimate purpose as growth beyond the planet. He also claimed that DNA had previously grown to settle on Earth, not originated here (see panspermia).

See also

* Social organism
* Symbiosis
* Collective intelligence
* Cybernetics
* Naked mole rat

References

External links

* [http://www.conceivia.com Conceivia.com] - Creating a new super organism based system of society.
* [http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,65252,00.html People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid, Wired Magazine, October 11, 2004]