Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’

io9 “Could Humans Evolve into a Giant Hive Mind?”

What I find fascinating about this nice journalistic piece is the biases in particular scientists that it exposes once it asks for uninformed speculation. Most prominently, Joan Strassman betrays her biases about relatedness (we have to be highly related to be a superorganism, period) and the nature of human society (by focusing on conflict in a sloppy manner). Clearly these factors are a matter of debate, but as the scientific authority she is ready to render her clear opinion. Travisano and Ratcliff don’t do much better, as they can’t seem to get past their biases towards microbes (and of course relatedness). Interviews like these confirm my suspicion that primary researchers may not be the best equipped people to explain the larger meaning of their work.

Overall this is a valuable piece, but the author gets one thing wrong: she fails to distinguish different forms of conflict. Ants as a species are not a single eusocial organism: they form eusocial colonies of individuals that frequently brutalize each other. So the presence of human conflict is far from being conclusive evidence against our eusocial nature: the critical question is whether we are like ants, who suppress most forms of conflict within their colonies and reserve conflict for inter-colonial competition. To decide whether humans are eusocial, we first have to decide what scale of human group represents a “colony”.