    14

    Superorganism

    Over a hundred years ago, Matthias Schleiden, the German

    botanist, was pondering the recently discovered fact that beings as

    simple as water fleas and as complex as human beings are made up of

    individual cells.  Each of those cells has all the apparatus necessary to

    lead a life of its own.  It is walled off in its own mini-world by the

    surrounding hedge of a membrane, carries its own metabolic power

    plants, and seems quite capable of going about its own business,

    ruggedly declaring its independence.  Yet the individual cells, in

    pursuing their own goals, cooperate to create an entity much larger

    than themselves.  Schleiden declared that each cell has an individual

    existence, and that the life of an organism comes from the way in

    which the cells work together.34

    In 1858, pathologist Rudolf Virchow took Schleiden's observation

    a step further.  He declared that "the composition of the major

    organism, the so-called individual, must be likened to a kind of social

    arrangement or society, in which a number of separate existencies are

    dependent upon one another, in such a way, however, that each

    element possesses its own peculiar activity and carries out its own task

    by its own powers."  A creature like you and me, said Virchow, is

    actually a society of separate cells.35

    As we've already seen, the reasoning also works in reverse--a

    society acts like an organism.  Half a century after Virchow,

    entomologist William Morton Wheeler was observing the lives of ants.

    No ant is an island.  Wheeler saw the tiny beasts maintaining constant

    contact, greeting each other as they passed on their walkways,

    swapping bits of regurgitated food, adopting social roles that ranged

    from  warrior or royal handmaiden to garbage handler and file clerk.

    (Yes, at the heart of many ant colonies is a room to which all incoming

    workers bring their discoveries.  Seated at the chamber's center is a

    staff of insect bureaucrats who examine the new find, determine where

    it is needed in the colony, and send it off to the queen's chamber if it is

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