Species as Canonical Referents of Super-Organisms
A species is a reproductively isolated population. In essence, it consists of organisms which can only breed with each other, so its ability to self-replicate is entirely self-contained. In practice, the abstraction only applies well to macroflora and macrofauna, which is still enough to inform our intuitions of super-organismal interaction.
Interspecific interactions can frequently be modeled by considering the relevant species as agents in their own right. Agents motivated by self-sustention to acquire resources, preserve the health of their subagents, and bargain or compete with others on the same playing field as themselves. Parasitism, predation, pollination—all organismal interactions generalizable to super-organismal interactions.
Optimization of the genome does not occur at the level of the organism, nor does it occur at the level of the tribe. It occurs on the level of the genome, and selects for genes which encode traits which are more fit. From this perspective, it makes sense for “species” to be a natural abstraction. Yet, I claim there are properties which species have that make them particularly nice examples of super-organisms in action. Namely:
Boundaries between species are clear and well-defined, due to reproductive isolation;
Competitive dynamics between species are natural to consider, rather than having to move up or down a vertical hierarchy;
The “intentional stance”, when applied to species, is simple: reproduction.
However, it is precisely because species have such nice properties that we should be incredibly cautious when using them as intuition pumps for other kinds of super-organisms, such as nation-states, companies, or egregores. For instance:
Boundaries between nation-states and companies are relatively straightforward to define (determined by citizenship or residency and employment, respectively). Boundaries between egregores are . . . complicated, to say the least.[1]
Company competition is generally modelable with agent-agent dynamics, and so is nation-state competition. But the act of “merging” (via acquisition, immigration, etc.) is available to them in a way that it is not to species. (Again, egregores are complicated . . .)
The goal of a company is to maximize shareholder value. The goal of a nation-state is . . . to provide value to its citizens? The “goal” of an egregore is ostensibly to self-perpetuate and . . . fullfill whichever values it wants to fulfill.[2]
These “issues” are downstream from horizontal boundaries between other super-organisms we want to consider being less strong than the divides between idealized species. While Schelling was able to develop doctines of mutually-assured destruction for Soviet-American relations, many other nation-state interactions are heavily mediated by immigration and economic intertwinement. It makes less sense to separate China and America than it does to separate foxes and rabbits.
Don’t species run into the same issues as well? Humans are all members of one species, and we manage to have absurd amounts of intraspecial conflict. Similarly, tribal dynamics in various populations are often net negative for the population as a whole. Why shall we uphold species as the canonical referent for superorganisms?
Species are self-sustaining and isolated. The platonic ideal of a species would not only be reproductively isolated, but also resource isolated, in that the only use for the resources which organisms of a species would need to thrive were ones which were unusable for any other purpose. Horizontal differentiation is necessary to generalize agent modeling to systems larger than ourselves, and species possess a kind of horizontal differentiation which is important and powerful.
A corollary of this observation is that insofar as our intuitions for “superorganismal interaction” are based on species-to-species interaction, they should be tuned to the extent to which the superorganisms we have in mind are similar to species. AI-human interaction in worlds where AIs have completely different hardware substrates to humans are notably distinct from ones in which humans have high-bandwidth implants and absurd cognitive enhancement, so they can engage in more symbiotic relationships.
I would be interested in fleshing out these ideas more rigorously, either in the form of case studies or via a debate. If you are interested, feel free to reach out.
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One way to establish a boundary between two categories is to define properties which apply to some class of objects which could be sorted into one of the two buckets. But what is the “class of objects” which egregores encompass?! Shall we define a “unit meme” now?
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I’m aware I’m not fully doing justice to egregores here. I still include them as an example of a “superorganism” because they do describe something incredibly powerful. E.g., explaining phenomena where individuals acting in service of an ideology collectively contravene their own interests.
This gives the bones of a proper theoretical foundation on the moral duties between members of different species.
For example, this would back the intuition of eating dog to be worse than eating a bear or octupus, regardless of intelligence, and of killing rats out of hand
This is an unusually well written post for its genre.
I didn’t see any references to group selection or extended phenotypes. If you consider those concepts obvious background, it might be good to put in a few words about them so we know how your thoughts relate (or don’t relate). And if you aren’t familiar with those concepts, I’d suggest reading up! Many smart people have spent decades arguing about this sort of thing and there are some great books there.
Quick summary of a reason why constituent parts like of super-organisms, like the ant of ant colonies, the cells of multicellular organisms, and endosymbiotic organelles within cells[1] are evolutionarily incentivized to work together as a unit:
Question: why do ants seem to care about the colony than care about themselves? Answer: reproduction in an ant colony is funneled through the queen. If the worker ant wants to reproduce its genes, it can’t do that by being selfish. It has to help the queen reproduce. Genes in ant workers have nothing to gain by making their ant more selfish and have much to gain by making their worker protect the queen.
This is similar to why cells in your pancreas cooperate with cells in your ear. Reproduction of genes in the body is funned through gametes. Somatic evolution does pressure the cells in your pancreas to reproduce selfishly at the expense of cells in your nose (this is pancreatic cancer). But that doesn’t help the pancreas genes long term. Pancreas-genes and the ear-genes are forced to cooperate with each other because they can only reproduce when bound together in a gamete.
This sort of bounding together of genes making disperate things cooperate and act like a “super organism” is absent in members of a species. My genes do not reproduce in concert with your genes. If my genes figure out a way to reproduce at your expense, so much the better for them.
Like mitochondria and chloroplasts, which were separate organisms but evolved to work so close with their hosts that they are now considered part of the same organism.
Inside the super organism you are correct, but the genome is influenced by outside forces as whole over the ages—and any place where this breaks down for long enough you eventually get two species instead of one.
Therefore outside groups can treat the species as a super organism in general, the individual members must be dealt with individually when there is previous loyalty to another member of the other species.
For example, an Englishman and his dog vs an eskimo and his dog. The two humans may be against each other, the dogs may be against each other, but the opposite human/dog interactions would be standard if they weren’t already attached to other in-species members.