(leafcutter ants at work from here)
In his book Out of Control, Kevin Kelly defines a superorganism as “a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective.”
Ant colonies are the best example of superorganisms.
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In an interview with Wired, leading superorganism theorist Bert Hoelldobler spoke to the complexity of ant colonies:
Leafcutter ants…have castles underground that go eight meters deep, that have a surface of about 50 square meters, and all sort of channels, chambers. It’s a beautifully constructed piece of art…
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Put a couple million individuals — tiny little brains — together, and they interact according to certain rules that create an emergent pattern. The end result is these fantastic nests. And not only that, these collectives of little brains — if you take a picture of the brain, a brain consists of a couple million or billion neurons. The members of an ant colony [are neurons that form] a little brain. These are millions of brains connected in a way we don’t understand yet.
With the thread of superorganisms on the mind, I recently came across this post on a entrepreneurial economics site:
Humans, perhaps thankfully, are still a long way from building a global superorganism, whether intentionally or not.
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Yet a reasonable analogy between ants and humans might be the systems that humans build, and I have in mind specifically the global financial system. This seems to be a close approximation of the ant superorganism in that the division of labor is quite deep, the system can often be said to be acting in one unified direction (up or down), there is innovation (ants “invented” agriculture long before humans), and it is marked by behavior in response to discrete signals.
In the forementioned Wired interview, Hoelldobler goes on to entertain the possibility of superorganism behavior among humans:
I’m very careful, because human society is a society built on a cultural fundamental basis. But there are biological rules to our social behavior: no question. We are one of the few species to evolve social systems. What is common in all these social systems is a division of labor; and once this was evolutionarily rendered, it became incredibly successful. This is true for almost any society: once they reach a high division of labor, they have enormous successes due to division of labor. And the second thing, once a society becomes almost like an organism, it becomes very tightly interconnected.
Given the nature of the current global economic system – the division of labor and social interconnectedness that it represents – it will be interesting to see how the system evolves once the current crisis has passed.
A restructured global economic system could be a fascinating experiment in biomimicry in light of the logic and advantages of superorganisms.
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For further info on a superorganism in the form of ants, I highly recommend Deborah Gordon’s Ted Talk.
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