The more one looks at the animal kingdom, the more one wonders where the clear demarcators of individuality are. Emergent behaviors like this suggest to me that maybe the ant colony itself is more of an independent organism than any individual ant.
Isn't this true of humans too when we rely on entire supply chains for our food, water, and electricity?
Similar to a fractal, the difference between an organism and a superorganism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism) depends on how close you zoom in. It's easy to think about an ant colony as a superorganism, and from there to think about human civilization as a superorganism, and then the entire Earth's biosphere as a single superorganism. Then you can go the other way and think about how every human body is its own superorganism; your body is composed of approximately as many human cells as non-human cells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome). You are an entire ecosystem.
The human body and the ant colony are units of reproduction; an individual ant, like an individual cell, cannot reproduce. Only the colony or the human can do that.
Human societies aren't like that; the humans are free to reproduce on their own. It is a mistake to generalize from the ant colony to human society, much less to the entire world.
> Human societies aren't like that; the humans are free to reproduce on their own.
It's not nearly that simple. If you take away "society" (running water, sewage, electricity, traffic lights, medical treatment, fresh diverse food, security, etc) most people would die off and the few survivors would find childrearing very burdensome.
The study of how human organizations can reproduce themselves and maintain vitality, rather than dying off when a leader or generation dies off, is critically important. Classical biology doesn't have a monopoly on "reproduction".
I don't agree that societies don't reproduce. A society grows as its population of humans increases, and eventually the population grows large enough that it splits into multiple societies, e.g. the depletion of local resources via overpopulation leads to diasporas setting up new societies elsewhere, and these new societies tend imitate the familiar structures of the original society. IMO, that's reproduction.
Yes, that is a quote from me. It matches my description of what I said. (Of course, it matches it even better if you don't cut it off in the middle of a sentence:)
> Human societies aren't like that; the humans are free to reproduce on their own.
It doesn't match your description of what I said. What are you trying to say?
So then you do think that human societies can reproduce, despite appearing to say that human societies, unlike humans and ant colonies, cannot reproduce? Can you re-word your statement to clearly indicate what you believe?
> despite appearing to say that human societies, unlike humans and ant colonies, cannot reproduce?
This is not even an attempt to approximate what I said. I said that humans are composed of cells which cannot reproduce, colonies are composed of ants which cannot reproduce, and human societies -- unlike humans and ant colonies -- are composed of humans which reproduce independently of the society. When I specifically indicate that what distinguishes human societies from ant colonies is that ants can't reproduce and humans can, what else could that mean?
This makes nonsense of the idea that a human society could be viewed as a superorganism. They don't have the coherence; they are constantly subject to betrayal by the humans of which they are composed. There are historical processes which look like the reproduction of a society: in the wake of Alexander the Great, northern India received a bunch of Greek colonists who built theaters, spoke Greek, practiced Greco-paganism, and wrote a lot of history, which marked a big contrast with the existing societies which built stepwells, spoke Sanskrit, practiced Buddhism, and wrote almost no history. And then the Greeks took up Buddhism. And they started speaking Sanskrit. And they stopped writing history. And they stopped building theaters. But they didn't go anywhere.
If societies were superorganisms, that couldn't have happened. The loss of Greek culture in India would have simultaneously been the loss of all the Greeks.
Human societies "reproduce" like the human individual organism "reproduces itself" (its constituent cells are continuously replaced), not the way individual humans "reproduce" (make another human like it).
(Except sometimes human societies do really reproduce, like by colonization of foreign lands.)
> The human body and the ant colony are units of reproduction; an individual ant, like an individual cell, cannot reproduce. Only the colony or the human can do that.
I honestly don't know if you're trying to be rhetorical here or what, but individual cells DO reproduce and individual humans do not.
A human cell dividing is not reproduction in the evolutionary sense, unless the cell is cancerous. It is reproduction in the same sense that my shoes can reproduce by means of me buying another pair when the first pair wears out.
> Or does the unit of reproduction require mixing genes[?]
No, there are clonal organisms.
> Would human reproduction to human societies be similar to mitosis to cells?
No; all the cells in a body divide on the terms the body sets and they die when the body does. (Or earlier, when so directed.) The only way for them to reproduce is indirectly, through the production of gametes. They do not and generally cannot have an independent existence. Human reproduction within human societies is the analogue of a cell within the body becoming cancerous. At that point, the cancer's uncontrolled mitosis is a form of independent reproduction, though it tends not to work out for the cancer because they almost never develop a way to leave the body, and end up killing themselves.
There are some exceptions, such as HeLa and the cancer that lives in Tasmanian devils.
> Emergent behaviors like this suggest to me that maybe the ant colony itself is more of an independent organism than any individual ant.
That’s Aunt Hillary from Gödel, Escher, Bach :)
I forget the specific line, but at some point Achilles asks the Anteater if it hurts the Colony when he eats some ants, and the response is along the lines of “Does it hurt Achilles when he gets a haircut?”
Anteater: [...] I am on the best of terms with ant colonies. It's just ANTS that I eat, not colonies--and that is good for both parties: me, and the colony.
Achilles: How is it possible that--
Tortoise: How is it possible that--
Achilles: --having its ants eaten can do an ant colony any good?
Crab: How is it possible that--
Tortoise: --having a forest fire can do a forest any good?
Anteater: How is it possible that--
Crab: --having its branches pruned can do a tree any good?
Anteater: --having a haircut can do Achilles any good?
> maybe the ant colony itself is more of an independent organism than any individual ant
Yes, of course. The ant queen mates only once in her life, and the colony she starts right after is made from the genetic material collected during this one foundational act.
Genetically speaking, all the ants in the colony are one organism. (Lots of different and weird ways to express the genetics phenotypically, though.)
Isn't this true of humans too when we rely on entire supply chains for our food, water, and electricity?