Superorganisms
Monday, March 23rd, 2009We often see animals appearing to move in unison, such as bison or fish. However, what looks like a team effort is in fact each animal jostling to get to the middle of the group to evade predators.
By contrast, an ant nest or a beehive can behave as a united organism in its own right. In a beehive, the workers are happy to help the community, even to die, because the queen carries and passes on their genes. However, superorganisms are quite rare, and only exist when the internal conflict within a social group is suppressed - so we cannot use this term, for example, to describe human societies.