What is a superorganism?

Superorganism is any aggregate of individual organisms that behave like a united organism. Members of the Superorganism have highly specialized social cooperative instincts, labor divisions and cannot survive for a very long time since their superorganism. A standard example of superorganism is an ant colony, but there are many others - termit hills, bee hives, nests of wasps, coral reefs, fungal colonies, groves of genetically identical trees, etc.

Coral reefs are sometimes considered superorganisms because of the way they form a continuous mass of animals. Like other superorganisms, the organisms of the institutes have very similar, not the identical genetic structures. Although the colored animals in a cliff do not mean actively cooperate, their presence as a habitat for a wide variety of animals brings so muchfood that these animals work together if unknowingly. The cliffs existed, minus a few gaps since the beginning of the Cambrian era, about 542 million years ago.

Some thinkers somewhat fantastically called human information networks emerging signs of global superorganism, but this is not very right, because people did not develop in such a large number. For most of our history, people have worked in 100-200 hierarchical tribes, where each individual is very interest, gene's fund is diverse and cooperation is something different from perfect. Global populations exceeding 5 million are a relatively recent phenomenon, and people had no time to develop to obtain signature characteristics of superorganism components. Moreover, there is no active selection pressure in this respect.