Quotes About Superorganism

By the time I learned to say "Six-inch number seven on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of what the mind would label silence. You were now subsumed into the superorganism. The

An admonishment of sorts, the gentle warning of one who arrived on an earlier ship: You there! Listen! Independence and resilience. This is what the new immigrant needs. Don't get fooled by all this activity. Don't invoke the superorganism. No, no. One functions alone in America. Begin now.

Linepithema humile is a species of ant native to Northern Argentina that has, with our help, become a new kind of global superorganism.

By failing to observe and understand groups, we fail to see how the world actually works and instead find ourselves surrounded by "meaningless, unrelated and destructive phenomena." It's arguable that in In Dubious Battle Steinbeck's point about crowds was that the only way to understand them is to watch them and see how they behave—to, as Doc Burton puts it, see the superorganism in action.

The problem of an efficient group structure alone is enough to absorb anyone's interest. An organization of a committee of scientists or a panel of script writers is far from what it could be. But we lack control in the world at large to investigate more efficient structures. Here, on the contrary, here we begin to understand and build the Superorganism. We can construct groups of artists and scientists who will act as smoothly and efficiently as champion football teams.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

They are not disease organisms bent on our destruction. They are something else entirely, the foundation of all life on this planet. As Margulis makes plain, "Bacteria are not really individuals so much as part of a single global superorganism."13 And that superorganism is in actuality an incredibly large community of highly intelligent interactive subparts, just as our white blood cells are of us (or as we, as individuals, are of the human communities in which we live).

The modern growth of Islam is the coalescence of a superorganism drawn together by the magnetic attraction of a meme. But this meme has an advantage: The social body it is trying to pull together has existed as a unified social beast in the past. The old reflexes of solidarity are still there, waiting to be aroused. The meme of the new Islam is not laboring to generate a small and fragile embryo. It is simply attempting to awaken a sleeping giant. VIOLENCE IN SOUTH AMERICA AND AFRICA

The individual is a cell in the social superorganism. When he feels he is no longer necessary to the larger group, he, too, begins to wither away. As

Superorganism, ideas, and the pecking order—these are the primary forces behind much of human creativity and earthly good. They are the holy trinity of the Lucifer Principle.