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Concept
Superorganism
Summary
A superorganism or supraorganism is a group of synergetically interacting organisms of the same species. A community of synergetically interacting organisms of different species is called a holobiont.
The term superorganism is used most often to describe a social unit of eusocial animals, where division of labour is highly specialised and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods. Ants are the best-known example of such a superorganism. A superorganism can be defined as "a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective", phenomena being any activity "the hive wants" such as ants collecting food and avoiding predators, or bees choosing a new nest site. In challenging environments, micro organisms collaborate and evolve together to process unlikely sources of nutrients such as methane. 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. Superorganisms tend to exhibit homeostasis, power law scaling, persistent disequilibrium and emergent behaviours.
The term was coined in 1789 by James Hutton, the "father of geology", to refer to Earth in the context of geophysiology. The Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock, 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, although this has been disputed. This view relates to systems theory and the dynamics of a complex system.
The concept of a superorganism raises the question of what is to be considered an individual. Toby Tyrrell's critique of the Gaia hypothesis argues that Earth's climate system does not resemble an animal's physiological system. Planetary biospheres are not tightly regulated in the same way that animal bodies are: "planets, unlike animals, are not products of evolution.
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