Superorganisms are groups of organisms that behave as a single entity, with specialized social cooperation and divisions of labor. Examples include ant colonies, termite mounds, coral reefs, and even the human body’s microbiome. While some have suggested that human information networks could be considered a global superorganism, humans have not evolved to cooperate in such large numbers.
A superorganism is any aggregate of individual organisms that behaves as a unified organism. Members of a superorganism have highly specialized social cooperation instincts, divisions of labor, and are unable to survive away from their superorganism for very long. The standard example of a superorganism is an ant colony, but there are many others: termite mounds, beehives, wasp nests, coral reefs, mushroom colonies, groves of genetically identical trees, etc.
Some have suggested that humans are each a superorganism, because in every typical human there are 1013 to 1014 microorganisms that perform a variety of tasks, but primarily aid in digestion. Microorganisms in the human body outnumber our cells by 10 to 1, and their genetic material exceeds ours by 100 to 1. Many of these have not been isolated or studied. The Human Microbiome Project, a US$115 million project of the National Institutes of Health, aims to identify and characterize as many of these microorganisms as possible, which include bacteria, archaea and viruses.
In the iconic superorganism, an ant colony, there are specialized ants to tackle various tasks. Soldier ants to defend the colony, worker ants to gather food, a queen ant to lay eggs, etc. Termite mounds are similar. Termites actually build elaborate cathedral mounds, which can reach 9m (30ft) high in extraordinary cases. All of these colonies operate as a unified entity. Soldier ants may willingly sacrifice themselves in defense of the nest, an unusual behavior among animals, which are usually shaped by evolution to be self-preserving.
Coral reefs are sometimes considered superorganisms due to the way they form a continuous mass of animals. Like other superorganisms, the constituent organisms of a reef have very similar, if not identical, genetic structures. Although the coral animals in a coral reef do not actively cooperate, their presence as habitat for a wide diversity of animals brings in so much food matter that these animals cooperate, albeit unknowingly. Coral reefs have existed, minus some gaps, since the beginning of the Cambrian Era, about 542 million years ago.
Some thinkers have somewhat fancifully called human information networks the emerging signs of a global superorganism, but this is not very correct since humans did not evolve to cooperate in such large numbers. For most of our history, humans have cooperated in hierarchical tribes of 100-200, where each individual is highly self-interested, the gene pool is diverse, and cooperation is far from perfect. Global populations exceeding 5 million are a relatively recent phenomenon and humans have not had time to evolve to acquire the distinguishing characteristics of the constituent members of a superorganism. Moreover, there is no active selection pressure in this direction.
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