The superorganism analogy

In the 1870s there arose in sociology the idea that a human society could usefully be analogized with an organism. It was soon seen that the analogy could be extended to embrace societies of other animals (Espinas, 1877), and about a century ago Wheeler (1911) explicitly treated the social-insect colony as a "superorganism" with broad functional similarities to a multi-cellular organism.

This concept of the colony is with us today, although in quite different form from its first incarnation. It is most meaningful with respect to a) organization of the immediate work of the colony, and b) colony cycles. The first is the substance of the thriving research programme of social physiology and self-organization (Camazine et al. 2001; Detrain et al., 1999; Moritz and Southwick, 1992; Pasteels and Deneubourg, 1987; Seeley, 1995), with marked advances in our understanding of how colonies forage, build nests, and maintain a suitable microhabitat, all drawing inspiration from the analogy with organisms.

Christopher K. Starr. Steps toward a general theory of the colony cycle in social insects. Life Cycles in Social Insects: Behaviour, Ecology and Evolution. V. E. Kipyatkov (Ed.), St. Petersburg University Press, St. Petersburg, 2006, pp. 1–20.

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