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Date: | Sun, 12 Sep 2021 19:50:48 -0400 |
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Glad to know someone is interested by this.
After decades when mention of superorganism was anathema in social insect studies, there have been multiple pleas to "revive" the superorganism. This revival "movement" includes the following scholars:
E. O. Wilson, Charles Lumsden, Thomas Seeley, David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober.
For Wilson and Sober, a superorganism is "a collection of single creatures that together possess the functional organization implicit in the formal definition of organisms". While this formal definition is consistent with Wheeler's articulation of three essential activities of nutrition, reproduction, and protection, (the various vital processes), Wilson and Sober's use of functional organization is further restricted to organization around reproduction.
They summarize their superorganism model as follows:
i) A population is subdivided into a number of groups.
ii) Groups vary in properties that affect the number of dispersing progeny (group fitness).
iii) Variation in group fitness is caused by underlying genetic variation that is heritable.
iv) No differences exist in the fitness of individuals within groups.
However, competition at levels lower than the colony can occur among individual colony-mates, among males. Competition can even occur between workers and queens.
PLB
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