Superorganism

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.

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.

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.

[16] The economist Carl Menger expanded upon the evolutionary nature of much social growth but never abandoned methodological individualism.

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.

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 ...