Definition of Superorganism
What does it mean?  How should it be used? 

By Jerry Cates

In its simplest form, a superorganism is a group of individual organisms or cells that functions as a social or biological unit.  Often, when the word "colony" is used, this is the meaning intended, yet a colony, while composed of a group of individuals, does not have to function as a social unit to justify its claim to be a colony.  The members of such colonies merely aggregate together, for better or worse.

Matthias Jakob Schleiden (1804-1881), a German botanist who co-founded the theory of cells with Theodor Schwann, recognized that each cell in a multi-celled organism has an individual existence, but that the life of the organism derives to a certain extent from the way the cells work together. Rudolph Virchow, a pathologist, took Schleiden's observation further. In 1858, he asserted that "the composition of the major organism, the so-called individual, must be likened to a kind of ... society, in which a number of separate existencies are dependent upon one another, in such a way, however, that each element possesses its own peculiar activity and carries out its own task by its own powers." Animals, said Virchow, comprise societies of cells.

Some fifty years later, William Morton Wheeler (1865-1937), an entomologist, recorded his observations on the lives of ants. From his perspective, the activities of individual ants mattered less than the collective behavior of the colonies they form. Wheeler was the first to describe that behavior as characteristic of a superorganism. The term, not an overnight success (Wheeler was controversial in his own way, and many of his ideas, unlike this one, were later deemed of questionable utility), lay essentially unused until Lewis Thomas took it up in 1974, in his book Lives Of A Cell.

A community of life-forms that functions as a social unit behaves as though it were a single organism of a higher order, typically to such an extent that the survival of the individuals depends on their collective social successes.  Such a community is aptly termed a superorganism, but the full extent of the superorganism that the community forms extends beyond its living members, to include the inorganic structures they build and maintain to house and hold their society together. Examples include colonies of social insects such as bees and their hives; termites and their workings; and ants and their nests. Each of these superorganisms displays an ability to organize, and a collective will, that transcends that of any the individual members.  That display is made possible not just by the collective activities of the members, but also by the physical appliances they construct and use.

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To the reader: definitions like this, owing to their necessary brevity, can be incomplete or even misleading. If you found this definition troublesome in one way or another, please contact me with your critical comments.  Jerry Cates

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