Re:The queen does not rule
by IgorPartola on Friday December 23, 2016 @03:43PM
(#13247137)
You don't have to look as far as ants to make the analogy you are making. Almost no animal, and even some plants cannot reproduce without some minimal number of "tribe" members. This is true for anything from chimps to probiotics.
This all depends on how you define "life" and "individuality": slippery concepts. And it's hard to not confuse those with emergent behavior once you do get millions/billions of individuals together. Sure you could treat NYC as its own autonomous living organism. Or you could treat it as millions of individuals. It certainly doesn't make sense to treat it as gazillions of cells.
The idea of having free will has been debated for centuries, but intuitively I think it's obvious that a human has more free will than an ant.
> you could treat NYC as its own autonomous living organism
The most accurate description is that NYC is part of the phenotype of the human genome.
BTW, this idea is not mine, it's from Richard Dawkins:
The same thing turns out to be true of humans. A single human in isolation cannot reproduce. Even a single breeding pair in the wild will (almost certainly) not be able to reproduce. The minimal reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a village or a tribe. So you too are not really an orgnism but an organ, a component of a larger reproducing system that, just like an ant colony, is made of parts that are not physically connected to each other.