The Early Superorganism Concept
It has long been noticed that durable social groups have a certain structural similarity with individual animals. In this view, any society can be regarded as a “superorganism”, effectively an organism made up of organisms. This concept was first made explicit in sociology in the late nineteenth century – think of the long-standing expression body politic – and not long afterward was applied to social groups of nonhuman animals.
As applied to social insects, the analogy has given rise to such terms as colony, drone, queen, slavery, soldier, and worker. The analogy was treated as a more or less casual metaphor until, about a century ago, the world’s leading specialist on ants, William Morton Wheeler made a strong case for applying it to social insects [16]. He noted that the colony resembles a metazoan body in a number of striking ways. Among these, it shows a division of labor among its constituent members and a colony cyclemirroring the individual...
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Starr, C.K. (2020). Superorganism Concept. In: Starr, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Social Insects. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90306-4_122-1
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