Today , more than half of the human population lives in hive - similar warrens phone cities . Does this mean we are on the tipping degree of becoming colony brute the path bee and pismire did ? It ’s not exclusively inconceivable . We spill to scientists to find out whether urban humanity are evolving into superorganisms .
instance of hive world Titanicus via EA
What Is an Individual?
Before we consider whether human could form beehive mind or colony societies , we first postulate a working definition of what it means to be an someone . But the whole thought of an “ individual being ” is a mess messy than it seems . Washington University biologistJoan Strassmann , who haspublished papers on this topicwith colleague David Queller , pointed out that it ’s fabulously hard to specify an individual living form .
What , for example , makes a tree an somebody ? “ Say it ’s an oak from an acorn — that ’s one being , ” Strassmann said . “ But if it ’s an aspen , the tree may not be disjoined . All the aspens in a grove may well be the same clone all coming up from the same source system with connections . Or those connections may be severed . ” She ’s referring to the way aspens uprise from the same root system of rules , the fashion many plants and slime mould do . Is your aspen an individual who deal a root system with its neighbors , or are all the trees who share the source system part of one “ someone ” ? And this is just the beginning of the kinds of complexity you run into when try out to define life forms .
Plus , every person whom we think of as an individual actually evolved from simpler being that work cooperatively . Your body is a company of cubicle that function together to make you take the air , clean your blood , and support your food for thought . And even the cells in your body are actually a collection of cell organelle , or tiny organs , like the energy - produce mitochondria . scientist believe mitochondria were once single - celled beast absorbed by larger cells that eventually became the familiar animate being cell we know today , with their nuclei , cell organ , and cytoplasm all wrapped up in a nice fatty tissue layer .
Strassmann and Queller use the terminus “ evolution ” to describe the process of becoming an individual being . They underscore that even our individuation is the outcome of a “ social unconscious process ” where many organisms that were previously individuals get together to make our multicellular sense of self . In a sense , we are already beehive . Our body are comprise of meg of cells and germ that work together selflessly , living and die for the colony .
The Daughters Who Don’t Leave Their Mothers
The origin of settlement organism , then , ambush in our own bodies . What led those first single - celled individual to join up and become multicellular ?
University of Minnesota biologist Mike Travisano and Will Ratcliffhave been doing experimentsthat clue at the result . They managed to plough single - celled barm into multicellular being in just a few months , by breeding the barm for what they call clumpers . First they put ordinary , single - celled yeast in a fluent medium where the cells that clumped together fell to the bottom more promptly . Then they bred these clumpers exclusively , and found that after 60 days — roughly 400 generations of barm — they had simple multi - cellular being .
“ bunch is the first step , ” Ratcliff said . But what build a single celled creature suddenly become a cluster ? It ’s all about shaver who pass up to leave the nest . Yeast reproduce by “ bud , ” work a new daughter cell attached to the mother prison cell bulwark . “ Normally when the daughter is matured it makes an enzyme that releases it , ” Ratcliff explained . “ It calculate like what occur is that girl cell release is curb . The mothers remain attached to their daughter cells . That has the effect of arrive at each cluster genetically very . ” Multicellular organisms are , generally , pack with genetically identical cells — that ’s the case in your body , where every mobile phone take exactly the same DNA .
What Ratcliff and Travisano discovered was that eventually these bunch start behaving like individual organisms , with some cellular telephone committing self-destruction in a cognitive process called caspase-mediated cell death . This on the face of it grisly physical process is actually how multicellular organism typically maintain their integrity . senior cells who are n’t serve optimally kill themselves off while younger ones bear on to divide . Once a cell is willing to swallow the expiry time from another in its cluster , you could argue that it is localize the survival of the organism over its own . Now , you have a dependency organism that behaves like an individual .
Ratcliff and Travisano call their multicellular barm individuals “ Plectrophenax nivalis ” due to their bod ( see image , with dead cells in bolshie ) . When these snowflake arrest big enough , one would break off from another . finally , the researchers found , these yeast were evolve as snowflakes rather than as exclusive - celled organism .
Through single - celled cooperation , new case-by-case organism had lead off to form . Ratcliff and Travisano are continuing their experimentation , try on to image out whether the barm snow bunting show other signs of organismality beyond apoptosis . They ’re trying to make multicellular gullible alga too .
Welcome to the Hive Mind
Now for the real question : What would inspire a radical of multicellular organisms like ants or humans to take shape a superorganism ? In their playscript The Superorganism , biologist Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson indicate that it ’s a complex process postulate genetic phylogenesis and environmental pressure . broadly a mathematical group of insect like bee will move from deport as individuals to forming colonies when they are hive away food ( like love or pollen ) that come in from multiple source . At that full point , a colony has a better chance of surviving than an person .
But the big transition moment from individual to settlement — like the yeast snow bunting moment — comes when two bee engage in a segmentation of labor . Hölldobler believes the first division of labor is probably when one insect becomes a reproducer and the other takes guardianship of her babies instead of regurgitate herself . She sacrifices her ability to reproduce for the great goodness of the burgeoning colony .
Honeybees bring out that evolution is stranger than you ever realized
This crude class is between a reproductive caste and a doer caste . In a typical bee dependency , you have bee who care for the young , make honey , and forage for food — and that ’s just the starting time . extremely complex ant society have many other caste , including things like farmer castes , scraps collector castes , and major fighter caste who are ants feed special foods to make them grow much larger than other ants in the colony .
What ’s truly awesome about these insect social club is that , despite the familiar language , they do n’t in reality have a queen or ruling class . The queen is just part of the reproductive caste , ensuring that the beehive has a mint of genetic law of similarity ( like our multicellular yeast ) and continues to produce vernal . But each worker has germinate what Hölldobler calls an “ algorithm ” for making determination about what jobs to do when , based on communicate with other insects and what caste it is currently in ( bees , for example , pass through several castes as they age ) . There is no insect who is a passe-partout controller , who understands the totality of what ’s hap in the beehive .
So settlement high society or superorganisms evolve when some someone give up their reproductive rights and create a variance of labor . This scenario is often a reception to environmental pressure , such as the pauperization to lay in nutrient from many origin and protect against many enemy at once . Colonies only make it because they are fitter than individual in such environments , and there are example of dependency organisms gradually evolving back into individuals when the surroundings alter .
The Human Superorganism
lease ’s enrol the realm of rank and file surmisal and regard whether man could evolve into a colony organism . It ’s a motif that crops up a sight in skill fiction . Humans receive a radical where everybody act like they ’re part of an ant or bee settlement : Each individual is fix to give everything , including their lives , for the survival of the group . Star Trek ’s assimilate extraterrestrial being , the Borg , are just one of many example of how we ’ve suppose such societies . But is human evolution actually moving in this direction ?
While acknowledging that human cities could be considered colony - like , Strassmann was extremely dubious . “ The things that would drive a human group to organismality would be crushing of struggle and an gain in cooperation , ” she enjoin . “ That could happen with high-pitched relatedness . But right now there ’s far too much dispute . ” She point out that the best kinds of conjunct groups for forming an organism are knockoff , and homo are far from being inherited dead ringer of each other . Plus , she aver , “ Just look at humans . All that fight . I wish they were more like [ dependency ] organism . ”
Travisano , having witnessed the birth of multicellular yeast in just a few hundred generations , noted that “ it ’s severe to say it ’s impossible . ” But at the same time , he and Ratcliff felt that the transition from somebody to colony might be easy with “ smaller organisms , ” at least in the lab . They pointed out that in some path homo are already dependency being , if you view the huge microbial ecosystems that exist in our gut and aid us to survive .
Ultimately , though , they get up against the same issue Strassmann identified : When being make the leap from single cell to multicellular , or from multicellular to colony , they are commonly genetically identical or very confining .
So maybe you ’d want a smart set of human clones to make the complete changeover from individuals to colony . Or maybe , as Hölldobler separate Wired ’s Brandon Keim in 2007 , you ’d just require a really good division of labor . He said :
What is common in all these social systems is a class of labor ; and once this was evolutionarily return , it became implausibly successful . This is unfeigned for almost any order : once they reach a high division of labor , they have enormous successes due to variance of labor . And the second thing , once a companionship becomes almost like an organism , it becomes very tightly unified .
But evenHölldobler admittedthat humans have too much conflict to forge colony — a behaviour he calls maladaptive :
15,000 year ago we were huntsman gatherers . We demo mathematical group cohesiveness and discrimination against other group . It was adaptative . It was quite understandable that we evolve traits of group recognition , and constitute trusted we recognize foreigners . This is my conviction that this is probably the other ground for our unfortunate xenophobic behavior that is still in us . It ’s a behaviour that is now frightfully maladaptive .
Does that intend our xenophobia is what keeps us individuated ? perhaps . After all , we have many of the prerequisite required to become a colony being . We have a highly complex sectionalization of labor , and we gather and store intellectual nourishment from a form of origin . We are even very close to each other genetically — as universe biologist have pointed out , humans are very inbred .
Why inbreeding really is n’t as spoiled as you mean it is
So what prevents us from crossbreed the threshold into mold superorganisms ? Maybe we just have n’t evolve beyond our primitive group remainder enough . Or mayhap part of what makes us humankind , at least decent now , is constantly navigate between colony cognizance and difference . Either way , we ’re not potential to merge into hive being any metre presently .
A interlingual rendition of this io9 flashback story run on io9 in 2010
Sources
Beyond lodge : The phylogeny of organismality , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Experimental organic evolution of multicellularity , Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson , The Superorganism : The Beauty , Elegance , and Strangeness of Insect Societies ( New York and London : Norton , 2009 )
Images : Beehive by Lehrer viaShutterstock ; barm snowflake via Will Ratcliff ; Ukraine soldiers via ABC News
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