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Pretty soon after cells started joining together to form animals, some of the animals discovered that they could go up another level of emergence and form even bigger giants made up of multiple animals. If you look around, you’ll see them everywhere—schools of fish, packs of wolves, colonies of ants, waddles of penguins. Groups like these represent... See more

Tim Urban • A Game of Giants — Wait but Why

The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime... Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief un... See more

Maria Popova • Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

We have behaved like ordinary cells for too long, pretending there is no movement from the inside to the outside or vice versa. We have believed, for too long, that our minds belong to us as individuals. But advances in everything from forest ecology to microbiology show us we are not siloed selves but relational networks, built metabolically by ou

The Library

organism.earth

Earth Is Becoming Sentient

Steph Ango stephango.com

Ideas do more than merely bond a group together. They justify that group’s expansion. Like the hungry amoeba, the superorganism is anxious to grow. It is anxious to feast on the flesh of its neighbors.

Howard Bloom • The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

SOCIAL INSECTS BELIEVE in division of labor. Early on, scientists coined the term “superorganism” to describe a collective in which each individual is part of a greater whole.

Peter Wohlleben • The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief, and Compassion—Surprising Observations of a Hidden World

In nature, simple rules give rise to complex behavior. A single ant follows pheromone trails, but an ant colony collectively optimizes food-gathering strategies, adjusts to environmental changes, and builds intricate structures—none of which any individual ant understands. Intelligence emerges not from a single unit, but from the interactions betwe... See more

Helen Edwards • The Evolution of AI: From Models to Agents to Social Intelligence

According to the systems view, an organism, or living system, is an integrated whole whose essential properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts. They arise from the interactions and relationships between the parts.