    16

    thin

    gs race off to the far corners of their new home in a cheerful hunt

    for dinner.  They never stop to think that they may be part of a

    community whose corporate life is as critical as their own.  They are

    unaware that someday they, like their parents, will have to cluster with

    their fellows in a desperate cooperative measure on which the future of

    their children will depend.39

    Another creature enlisted in a superorganism is the citizen of a

    society called the sponge.  To you and me, a sponge is quite clearly a

    single clump of squeezable stuff.  But that singularity is an illusion.

    Take a living sponge, run it through a sieve into a bucket, and the

    sponge breaks up into a muddy liquid that clouds the water into which

    it falls.  That cloud is a mob of self-sufficient cells, wrenched from their

    comfortably settled life between familiar neighbors and set adrift in a

    chaotic world.  Each of those cells has theoretically got everything it

    takes to handle life on its own.  But something inside the newly

    liberated sponge cell tells it, "You either live in a group or you cannot

    live at all."  The micro-beasts search frantically for their old

    companions, then labor to reconstruct the social system that bound

    them together.  Within a few hours, the water of your bucket grows

    clear.  And sitting at the bottom is a complete, reconstituted sponge.

     Like the sponge cells and the slime mold amoeba, you and I are

    parts of a vast population whose pooled efforts move some larger

    creature on its path through life.  Like the sponge cells, we cannot live

    in total separation from the human clump.  We are components of a

    superorganism.

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