Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
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
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
A single cell is itself a giant—a magical living giant made up of trillions of non-living atoms—and an animal is a higher-level giant made up of trillions of cells. This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can visualize it as a tower.
Tim Urban • A Game of Giants — Wait but Why
an ecosystem isn’t just a list of living things (squirrel, tree, bee, flower); it’s the set of relationships between those living things (the squirrel lives in the tree, the bee pollinates the flower).
adrienne maree brown • Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
We find the eusocial intelligence of insects like ants and bees particularly striking, since the swarm appears so much more intelligent than the automaton individuals, yet we turn our own much more capable coordination mechanisms, such as markets, bureaucracies and corporations, into cartoon antagonists for courageous rebels operating individually ... See more
Substack • Graph Minds
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.