Reviving the superorganism

Wilson, David Sloan; Sober, Elliott

doi:10.1016/s0022-5193(89)80169-9

Cited by 520 publications

(285 citation statements)

References 49 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

267

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…13 This attitude has one 12 Other examples include the immunological delineation in social insects where, sometimes, the immunological unit is the "superorganism" (Cremer and Sixt 2009;Pradeu 2012). 13 A partly similar view had already been defended in a landmark paper by (Wilson and Sober 1989), whose aim was to rehabilitate the notion of a "superorganism" (e.g., some ant colonies) and the possibility of group selection. Wilson and Sober proposed to reject the notion of a "biological individual" and to adopt the notion of "organism" or "superorganism" at different biological levels, based on the degree of within-unit and between-unit natural selection: "Natural selection can act both within a unit (favoring some elements of the unit over others) and between units (favoring some units over others).…”

Section: "Organisms" or "Biological Individuals"?mentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Most of them are. But being an interactor comes in degrees, and it can perfectly well happen that a given physiological individual displays a low degree of interactor-like individuality (examples include group selection in some social insects (Wilson and Sober 1989), or strong cellular selection at the 19 Contrary to a frequent assumption, horizontal associations are not necessarily more recent and less indispensable for the host than vertical associations (McFall-Ngai 2002;Ebert 2013). 20 Interestingly, Wilson and Sober (op.…”

Section: Evolutionary Individuality and Physiological Individuality Dmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Organisms or biological individuals? Combining physiological and evolutionary individuality

Pradeu

2016

Biol Philos

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The definition of biological individuality is one of the most discussed topics in philosophy of biology, but current debate has focused almost exclusively on evolution-based accounts. Moreover, several participants in this debate consider the notions of a biological individual and an organism as equivalent. In this paper, I show that the debates would be considerably enriched and clarified if philosophers took into account two elements. First, physiological fields are crucial for the understanding of biological individuality. Second, the category of biological individuals should be divided into two subcategories: physiological individuals and evolutionary individuals, which suggests that the notions of organism and biological individual should not be used interchangeably. I suggest that the combination of an evolutionary and a physiological perspective will enable biologists and philosophers to supply an account of biological individuality that will be both more comprehensive and more in accordance with scientific practices.

show abstract

Section: "Organisms" or "Biological Individuals"?mentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Evolutionary Individuality and Physiological Individuality Dmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organisms or biological individuals? Combining physiological and evolutionary individuality

Pradeu

2016

Biol Philos

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A superorganism can be defined as a 'collection of single creatures that together possess the functional organization implicit in the formal definition of organism.' [41] This is a perspective that has been adopted in evolutionary biology to describe the social organization of a variety of species, ranging from insects like ants, termites and bees, to mole rats. [42][43][44] The idea has also been extended to human social groups.…”

Section: Human Society As a Superorganismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral action as cheater suppression in human super organisms: Testing the human superorganism approach to morality

Aunger

Greenland

2014

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

'For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things [of this sort]; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city.' (Aristotle, The Politics 37)Aristotle. The Politics. Trans. Carnes Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. AbstractLarge-scale human groups cannot rely on shared genetic interests or dyadic reciprocity to ensure social cohesion as genetic similarity is low and indirect reciprocity is rife; nevertheless, such societies continue to cohere, due to the evolution of novel regulatory mechanisms that inhibit defaulting on social obligations: moral sentiments and actions. The present paper argues that the extent of moral concern can be most usefully identified by defining the set of functions required to sustain a human 'superorganism'. These functions are determined to be boundary, production, distribution, storage, control, structure, enforcement, signaling, memory, excretion, perception and reproductive functions. Moral obligations to act arise when individuals default on contributing to these functions. To test this approach, roughly 80,000 respondents from over 200 countries completed a web-based experiment hosted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). This experiment elicited a suite of responses to a set of 33 short scenarios derived from the 13 domains of superorganism function. Results indicate that all functions are moralized, while violations falling outside this domain (social conventions and individual decisions) are not. People living in larger communities exhibited stronger moral sentiments and action propensities, consistent with the greater interdependence of living in groups with more social roles. Such people were also more likely to see the function of the justice system as supporting group-level protection rather than personal recrimination or restitution, were more willing to engage in punishment of those who failed to punish cheaters, and more offended by those who choose not to contribute to social welfare. These results support the contention of Human Superorganism Theory that large-scale human groups strongly rely on moral propensities to regulate those who fail to perform superorganismal functions. Given this supporting evidence, we believe this new approach to defining the moral domain has implications for fields ranging from psychology to legal theory. Defining the moral domainUntil recently, morality was largely the domain of philosophers. A typical debate might involve defining why killing another human being is wrong (taken as one of the foundations for a good society). Answers might include: because it will destabilize society and lead to general unhappiness (the consequentialist position of Berkeley), or because it violates the Golden Rule of doing to others what we would want them to do to us (subscribed to by deontologists like Kant), or because people of good upbringing and hence virtuous character would not be inclined to do so (the posi...

show abstract

“…To several authors, however, the phenomenon itself still remains vaguely or controversially defined [69]. According to Wilson and Sober [70], a group will show superorganismic properties when between-group selection is larger than within-group selection; when natural selection operates strongly within groups, these cease to be superorganisms. This rather extreme definition of superorganisms would disqualify those insect societies in which nestmates compete for reproduction, including the above-mentioned ants.…”

Section: Reproductive Conflict and The Superorganismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflict and cooperation in ant societies

Heinze¹,

Hölldobler²,

Peeters³

1994

Naturwissenschaften

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Dedicated to Ernst Mayr on the occasion of his 90th birthdayWe review the different levels of reproductive conflict within ant societies. Workers and queens may disagree about sex allocation and the origin of males. Other conflicts arise between queens in multiply queened colonies and occasionally also between workers. These conflicts are resolved either by manipulation, such as sexual deception, changed mating patterns, or pheromonal signaling, or by physical aggression among nestmates. We outline the conditions under which physical aggression occurs and which behaviors are involved in the regulation of reproductive dominance. * Permanent address: CNRS URA 667, Universit6 Paris Nord,

show abstract

Reviving the superorganism

Cited by 520 publications

References 49 publications

Organisms or biological individuals? Combining physiological and evolutionary individuality

Organisms or biological individuals? Combining physiological and evolutionary individuality

Moral action as cheater suppression in human super organisms: Testing the human superorganism approach to morality

Conflict and cooperation in ant societies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About