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Superorganism

February 15, 2024

For other uses, see Superorganism (disambiguation).

A superorganism, or supraorganism,[1] is a group of synergetically-interacting organisms of the same species. A community of synergetically-interacting organisms of different species is called a holobiont.

A mound built by cathedral termites
A coral colony

Concept edit

The term superorganism is used most often to describe a social unit of eusocial animals in which division of labour is highly specialised and individuals cannot survive by themselves for extended periods. Ants are the best-known example of such a superorganism. A superorganism can be defined as "a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective",[2] phenomena being any activity "the hive wants" such as ants collecting food and avoiding predators,[3][4] or bees choosing a new nest site.[5] In challenging environments, micro organisms collaborate and evolve together to process unlikely sources of nutrients such as methane. This process called syntrophy ("eating together") might be linked to the evolution of eukaryote cells and involved in the emergence or maintenance of life forms in challenging environments on Earth and possibly other planets.[6] Superorganisms tend to exhibit homeostasis, power law scaling, persistent disequilibrium and emergent behaviours.[7]

The term was coined in 1789 by James Hutton, the "father of geology", to refer to Earth in the context of geophysiology. The Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock,[8] and Lynn Margulis as well as the work of Hutton, Vladimir Vernadsky and Guy Murchie, have suggested that the biosphere itself can be considered a superorganism, but that has been disputed.[9] This view relates to systems theory and the dynamics of a complex system.

The concept of a superorganism raises the question of what is to be considered an individual. Toby Tyrrell's critique of the Gaia hypothesis argues that Earth's climate system does not resemble an animal's physiological system. Planetary biospheres are not tightly regulated in the same way that animal bodies are: "planets, unlike animals, are not products of evolution. Therefore we are entitled to be highly skeptical (or even outright dismissive) about whether to expect something akin to a 'superorganism'". He concludes that "the superorganism analogy is unwarranted".[10]

Some scientists have suggested that individual human beings can be thought of as "superorganisms";[11] as a typical human digestive system contains 1013 to 1014 microorganisms whose collective genome, the microbiome studied by the Human Microbiome Project, contains at least 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself.[12][13] Salvucci wrote that superorganism is another level of integration that is observed in nature. These levels include the genomic, the organismal and the ecological levels. The genomic structure of organisms reveals the fundamental role of integration and gene shuffling along evolution.[14]

In social theory edit

The 19th-century thinker 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"[15]), 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.[16] 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".[17]

The economist Carl Menger expanded upon the evolutionary nature of much social growth but never abandoned 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".[18]

Both Spencer and Menger argued that because individuals choose and act, any social whole should be considered less than an organism, but Menger emphasized that more strongly. Spencer used the organistic idea to engage in extended analysis of social structure and conceded that it was primarily an analogy. For Spencer, the idea of the super-organic best designated a distinct level of social reality above that of biology and psychology, not a one-to-one identity with an organism. Nevertheless, Spencer maintained that "every organism of appreciable size is a society", which has suggested to some that the issue may be terminological.[19]

The term superorganic was adopted by the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber in 1917.[20] Social aspects of the superorganism concept are analysed by Alan Marshall in his 2002 book "The Unity of Nature".[21] Finally, recent work in social psychology has offered the superorganism metaphor as a unifying framework to understand diverse aspects of human sociality, such as religion, conformity, and social identity processes.[22]

In cybernetics edit

Superorganisms are important in cybernetics, particularly biocybernetics, since they are capable of the so-called "distributed intelligence", a system composed of individual agents that have limited intelligence and information.[23] They can pool resources and so can complete goals that are beyond reach of the individuals on their own.[23] Existence of such behavior in organisms has many implications for military and management applications and is being actively researched.[23]

Superorganisms are also considered dependent upon cybernetic governance and processes.[24] This is based on the idea that a biological system – in order to be effective – needs a sub-system of cybernetic communications and control.[25] This is demonstrated in the way a mole rat colony uses functional synergy and cybernetic processes together.[26]

Joël de Rosnay also introduced a concept called "cybionte" to describe cybernetic superorganism.[27] The notion associates superorganism with chaos theory, multimedia technology, and other new developments.

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Lüttge, Ulrich (ed.); Cánovas, Francisco M. (ed.); Matyssek, Rainer (ed.). Progress in Botany 77. Springer, 2016, p. 223. “Note that etymologically, the Latin word ‘supra’ means ‘higher’ in the sense of ordination, whereas ‘super’ implies a spatial order. Thus, in contrast to the mainly used notion of ‘superorganism’, we prefer to stay with the notion of a ‘supraorganism’.”
  2. ^ Kelly, Kevin (1994). Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world. Boston: Addison-Wesley. pp. 98. ISBN 978-0-201-48340-6.
  3. ^ Deneubourg JL, et al. (1989). "The Self-Organizing Exploratory Pattern of the Argentine Ant". Journal of Insect Behavior. 3 (2): 159–168. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.382.9846. doi:10.1007/BF01417909. S2CID 18862040.
  4. ^ O'Shea-Wheller TA, et al. (2015). "Differentiated Anti-Predation Responses in a Superorganism". PLOS One. 10 (11): e0141012. Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1041012O. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141012. PMC 4641648. PMID 26558385.
  5. ^ Britton NF, et al. (2002). "Deciding on a new home: how do honeybees agree?". Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 269 (1498): 1383–1388. doi:10.1098/rspb.2002.2001. PMC 1691030. PMID 12079662.
  6. ^ "The Search for Superorganisms". PBS. 20 April 2016.
  7. ^ Technium Unbound, SALT The Long Now Foundation
  8. ^ Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, James Lovelock, Oxford University Press, 1979
  9. ^ Tyrrell, Toby (2013), On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 209, ISBN 9780691121581
  10. ^ Tyrrell, Toby (2013), On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 209, ISBN 9780691121581
  11. ^ Kramer, Peter; Bressan, Paola (2015). "Humans as Superorganisms: How Microbes, Viruses, Imprinted Genes, and Other Selfish Entities Shape Our Behavior". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 10 (4): 464–481. doi:10.1177/1745691615583131. hdl:11577/3162912. ISSN 1745-6916. PMID 26177948. S2CID 12954636.
  12. ^ Gill, S. R.; Pop, M.; Deboy, R. T.; Eckburg, P. B.; Turnbaugh, P. J.; Samuel, B. S.; Gordon, J. I.; Relman, D. A.; et al. (2 June 2006). "Metagenomic Analysis of the Human Distal Gut Microbiome". Science. 312 (5778): 1355–1359. Bibcode:2006Sci...312.1355G. doi:10.1126/science.1124234. PMC 3027896. PMID 16741115.
  13. ^ Salvucci, E. (1 May 2012). "Selfishness, warfare, and economics; or integration, cooperation, and biology". Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology. 2: 54. doi:10.3389/fcimb.2012.00054. PMC 3417387. PMID 22919645.
  14. ^ Salvucci, E. (May 2016). "Microbiome, Holobiont and the net of life". Crit Rev Microbiol. 42 (3): 485–94. doi:10.3109/1040841X.2014.962478. hdl:11336/33456. PMID 25430522. S2CID 30677140.
  15. ^ The Principles of Sociology, Vol. 1, Part 1. "The Data of Sociology", Herbert Spencer, 1876
  16. ^ The Principles of Sociology, Vol. 1, Part 2, Chapter II, "A Society Is an Organism" (sections 222 and 223), Herbert Spencer, 1876
  17. ^ Holistic Thought in Social Science, D. C. Phillips, Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 123
  18. ^ Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics, Carl Menger, Louis Schneider (translator), New York University Press, 1985
  19. ^ The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, Tim S. Gray, 1996, p. 211
  20. ^ Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict, Houghton Mifflin, 1934, p. 231
  21. ^ Marshall, Alan (2002). The Unity of Nature. doi:10.1142/p268. ISBN 978-1-86094-330-0.
  22. ^ Kesebir, Selin. The Superorganism Account of Human Sociality: How and When Human Groups are Like Beehives. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2012, 16, 233-261.
  23. ^ a b c Kelly, Kevin (1994). Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world. Boston: Addison-Wesley. p. 251. ISBN 978-0-201-48340-6.

    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 ...
  24. ^ François, Charles (2004). International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics, Second edition. Munchen: Walter de Gruyter. p. 428. ISBN 3598116306.
  25. ^ A, Corning Peter (2017). Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution And The Rise Of Humankind. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific. p. 211. ISBN 978-9813230934.
  26. ^ Corning, Peter (2010). Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 199. ISBN 978-0226116136.
  27. ^ Gackenbach, Jayne (2011). Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications. Amsterdam: Elsevier. p. 319. ISBN 978-0123694256.

Literature edit

  • Jürgen Tautz, Helga R. Heilmann: The Buzz about Bees – Biology of a Superorganism, Springer-Verlag 2008. ISBN 978-3-540-78727-3
  • Bert Hölldobler, E. O. Wilson: "The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies", W.W. Norton, 2008. ISBN 978-0-393-06704-0
  • Selin Kesebir (2012). "The Superorganism Account of Human Sociality How and When Human Groups Are Like Beehives". Personality and Social Psychology Review. 16 (3): 233–261. doi:10.1177/1088868311430834. PMID 22202149. S2CID 9530301. SSRN 1933734.

External links edit

  • People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid, Wired Magazine, October 11, 2004
  • First Bees and Ants, and Now People: This Evolutionary Transition Might Be Coming for Humanity, Haaretz Magazine, November 19, 2022

February 15, 2024
superorganism, other, uses, disambiguation, superorganism, supraorganism, group, synergetically, interacting, organisms, same, species, community, synergetically, interacting, organisms, different, species, called, holobiont, mound, built, cathedral, termitesa. For other uses see Superorganism disambiguation A superorganism or supraorganism 1 is a group of synergetically interacting organisms of the same species A community of synergetically interacting organisms of different species is called a holobiont A mound built by cathedral termitesA coral colony Contents 1 Concept 2 In social theory 3 In cybernetics 4 See also 5 References 6 Literature 7 External linksConcept editThe term superorganism is used most often to describe a social unit of eusocial animals in which division of labour is highly specialised and individuals cannot survive by themselves for extended periods Ants are the best known example of such a superorganism A superorganism can be defined as a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective 2 phenomena being any activity the hive wants such as ants collecting food and avoiding predators 3 4 or bees choosing a new nest site 5 In challenging environments micro organisms collaborate and evolve together to process unlikely sources of nutrients such as methane This process called syntrophy eating together might be linked to the evolution of eukaryote cells and involved in the emergence or maintenance of life forms in challenging environments on Earth and possibly other planets 6 Superorganisms tend to exhibit homeostasis power law scaling persistent disequilibrium and emergent behaviours 7 The term was coined in 1789 by James Hutton the father of geology to refer to Earth in the context of geophysiology The Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock 8 and Lynn Margulis as well as the work of Hutton Vladimir Vernadsky and Guy Murchie have suggested that the biosphere itself can be considered a superorganism but that has been disputed 9 This view relates to systems theory and the dynamics of a complex system The concept of a superorganism raises the question of what is to be considered an individual Toby Tyrrell s critique of the Gaia hypothesis argues that Earth s climate system does not resemble an animal s physiological system Planetary biospheres are not tightly regulated in the same way that animal bodies are planets unlike animals are not products of evolution Therefore we are entitled to be highly skeptical or even outright dismissive about whether to expect something akin to a superorganism He concludes that the superorganism analogy is unwarranted 10 Some scientists have suggested that individual human beings can be thought of as superorganisms 11 as a typical human digestive system contains 1013 to 1014 microorganisms whose collective genome the microbiome studied by the Human Microbiome Project contains at least 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself 12 13 Salvucci wrote that superorganism is another level of integration that is observed in nature These levels include the genomic the organismal and the ecological levels The genomic structure of organisms reveals the fundamental role of integration and gene shuffling along evolution 14 In social theory editThe 19th century thinker 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 15 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 16 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 17 The economist Carl Menger expanded upon the evolutionary nature of much social growth but never abandoned 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 18 Both Spencer and Menger argued that because individuals choose and act any social whole should be considered less than an organism but Menger emphasized that more strongly Spencer used the organistic idea to engage in extended analysis of social structure and conceded that it was primarily an analogy For Spencer the idea of the super organic best designated a distinct level of social reality above that of biology and psychology not a one to one identity with an organism Nevertheless Spencer maintained that every organism of appreciable size is a society which has suggested to some that the issue may be terminological 19 The term superorganic was adopted by the anthropologist Alfred L Kroeber in 1917 20 Social aspects of the superorganism concept are analysed by Alan Marshall in his 2002 book The Unity of Nature 21 Finally recent work in social psychology has offered the superorganism metaphor as a unifying framework to understand diverse aspects of human sociality such as religion conformity and social identity processes 22 In cybernetics editSuperorganisms are important in cybernetics particularly biocybernetics since they are capable of the so called distributed intelligence a system composed of individual agents that have limited intelligence and information 23 They can pool resources and so can complete goals that are beyond reach of the individuals on their own 23 Existence of such behavior in organisms has many implications for military and management applications and is being actively researched 23 Superorganisms are also considered dependent upon cybernetic governance and processes 24 This is based on the idea that a biological system in order to be effective needs a sub system of cybernetic communications and control 25 This is demonstrated in the way a mole rat colony uses functional synergy and cybernetic processes together 26 Joel de Rosnay also introduced a concept called cybionte to describe cybernetic superorganism 27 The notion associates superorganism with chaos theory multimedia technology and other new developments See also editCollective intelligence Group mind science fiction Holobiont Organismic computing Quorum sensing collective behaviour of bacteria Stigmergy Siphonophorae Gaia HypothesisReferences edit Luttge Ulrich ed Canovas Francisco M ed Matyssek Rainer ed Progress in Botany 77 Springer 2016 p 223 Note that etymologically the Latin word supra means higher in the sense of ordination whereas super implies a spatial order Thus in contrast to the mainly used notion of superorganism we prefer to stay with the notion of a supraorganism Kelly Kevin 1994 Out of control the new biology of machines social systems and the economic world Boston Addison Wesley pp 98 ISBN 978 0 201 48340 6 Deneubourg JL et al 1989 The Self Organizing Exploratory Pattern of the Argentine Ant Journal of Insect Behavior 3 2 159 168 CiteSeerX 10 1 1 382 9846 doi 10 1007 BF01417909 S2CID 18862040 O Shea Wheller TA et al 2015 Differentiated Anti Predation Responses in a Superorganism PLOS One 10 11 e0141012 Bibcode 2015PLoSO 1041012O doi 10 1371 journal pone 0141012 PMC 4641648 PMID 26558385 Britton NF et al 2002 Deciding on a new home how do honeybees agree Proceedings of the Royal Society B 269 1498 1383 1388 doi 10 1098 rspb 2002 2001 PMC 1691030 PMID 12079662 The Search for Superorganisms PBS 20 April 2016 Technium Unbound SALT The Long Now Foundation Gaia A New Look at Life on Earth James Lovelock Oxford University Press 1979 Tyrrell Toby 2013 On Gaia A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth Princeton Princeton University Press p 209 ISBN 9780691121581 Tyrrell Toby 2013 On Gaia A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth Princeton Princeton University Press p 209 ISBN 9780691121581 Kramer Peter Bressan Paola 2015 Humans as Superorganisms How Microbes Viruses Imprinted Genes and Other Selfish Entities Shape Our Behavior Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 4 464 481 doi 10 1177 1745691615583131 hdl 11577 3162912 ISSN 1745 6916 PMID 26177948 S2CID 12954636 Gill S R Pop M Deboy R T Eckburg P B Turnbaugh P J Samuel B S Gordon J I Relman D A et al 2 June 2006 Metagenomic Analysis of the Human Distal Gut Microbiome Science 312 5778 1355 1359 Bibcode 2006Sci 312 1355G doi 10 1126 science 1124234 PMC 3027896 PMID 16741115 Salvucci E 1 May 2012 Selfishness warfare and economics or integration cooperation and biology Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology 2 54 doi 10 3389 fcimb 2012 00054 PMC 3417387 PMID 22919645 Salvucci E May 2016 Microbiome Holobiont and the net of life Crit Rev Microbiol 42 3 485 94 doi 10 3109 1040841X 2014 962478 hdl 11336 33456 PMID 25430522 S2CID 30677140 The Principles of Sociology Vol 1 Part 1 The Data of Sociology Herbert Spencer 1876 The Principles of Sociology Vol 1 Part 2 Chapter II A Society Is an Organism sections 222 and 223 Herbert Spencer 1876 Holistic Thought in Social Science D C Phillips Stanford University Press 1976 p 123 Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics Carl Menger Louis Schneider translator New York University Press 1985 The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer Tim S Gray 1996 p 211 Patterns of Culture Ruth Benedict Houghton Mifflin 1934 p 231 Marshall Alan 2002 The Unity of Nature doi 10 1142 p268 ISBN 978 1 86094 330 0 Kesebir Selin The Superorganism Account of Human Sociality How and When Human Groups are Like Beehives Personality and Social Psychology Review 2012 16 233 261 a b c Kelly Kevin 1994 Out of control the new biology of machines social systems and the economic world Boston Addison Wesley p 251 ISBN 978 0 201 48340 6 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 Francois Charles 2004 International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics Second edition Munchen Walter de Gruyter p 428 ISBN 3598116306 A Corning Peter 2017 Synergistic Selection How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution And The Rise Of Humankind Hackensack NJ World Scientific p 211 ISBN 978 9813230934 Corning Peter 2010 Holistic Darwinism Synergy Cybernetics and the Bioeconomics of Evolution Chicago University of Chicago Press p 199 ISBN 978 0226116136 Gackenbach Jayne 2011 Psychology and the Internet Intrapersonal Interpersonal and Transpersonal Implications Amsterdam Elsevier p 319 ISBN 978 0123694256 Literature editJurgen Tautz Helga R Heilmann The Buzz about Bees Biology of a Superorganism Springer Verlag 2008 ISBN 978 3 540 78727 3 Bert Holldobler E O Wilson The Superorganism The Beauty Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies W W Norton 2008 ISBN 978 0 393 06704 0 Selin Kesebir 2012 The Superorganism Account of Human Sociality How and When Human Groups Are Like Beehives Personality and Social Psychology Review 16 3 233 261 doi 10 1177 1088868311430834 PMID 22202149 S2CID 9530301 SSRN 1933734 External links editPeople Are Human Bacteria Hybrid Wired Magazine October 11 2004 First Bees and Ants and Now People This Evolutionary Transition Might Be Coming for Humanity Haaretz Magazine November 19 2022 Portal nbsp Biology Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Superorganism amp oldid 1194779129, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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