EDIT Completely rewritten to be hopefully less condescending.
There are lessons from group selection and the extended phenotype which vaguely reduce to “beware thinking about species as organisms”. It is not clear from this essay whether you’ve encountered those ideas. It would be helpful for me reading this essay to know if you have.
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 more about the colony than 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 ear (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.
I haven’t looked much at the extended phenotype literature, although that is changing as we speak. Thanks for pointing me in that direction!
The thing I wanted to communicate was less “existing groups of things we call species are perfect examples of how super-organisms should work” and more “the definition of an ideal species captures something quite salient about what it means for a super-organism to be distinct from other super-organisms and its environment.” In practice, yes, looking at structure does seem to be better.
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.
EDIT Completely rewritten to be hopefully less condescending.
There are lessons from group selection and the extended phenotype which vaguely reduce to “beware thinking about species as organisms”. It is not clear from this essay whether you’ve encountered those ideas. It would be helpful for me reading this essay to know if you have.
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 more about the colony than 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 ear (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.
I haven’t looked much at the extended phenotype literature, although that is changing as we speak. Thanks for pointing me in that direction!
The thing I wanted to communicate was less “existing groups of things we call species are perfect examples of how super-organisms should work” and more “the definition of an ideal species captures something quite salient about what it means for a super-organism to be distinct from other super-organisms and its environment.” In practice, yes, looking at structure does seem to be better.
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.