Of Termites and Men: On the Ontology of Collective Individuals

It is likely that upon observing the effortless turning and looping ballet of a flock of pigeons or school of fish you have asked yourself the question “How do they do it?”1 As Brian Partridge noted in a Scientific American essay from the 1980s: [This] question occurs naturally to anyone watching a school of silversides moving slowly over a reef in clear tropical waters. Hundreds of small silver fish glide in unison, more like a single organism than a collection of individuals. The school idles along on a straight course, then wheels suddenly; not a single fish is lost from the group. A barracuda darts from behind an outcropping of coral and the members of the school flash outward in an expanding sphere. The flash expansion dissolves the school in a fraction of a second, yet none of the fish collide. Moments later the scattered individuals collect in small groups; ultimately the school re-forms and continues to feed, lacking perhaps a member or two.2 Or consider the ostensibly simple act of a honeybee foraging for nectar as Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson describe it in their 2009 collaboration Superorganism: Although simple in appearance, the act is a performance of high virtuosity. The forager was guided to this spot by dances of her nestmates that contained symbolic information about the direction, distance, and quality of the nectar source. To reach her destination, she traveled the bee equivalent of hundreds of human miles at bee-equivalent supersonic speed. She has arrived at an hour when the flowers are most likely to be richly productive. Now she closely inspects the willing blossoms by touch and smell and extracts the nectar with intricate movements of her legs and proboscis. Then she flies home in a straight line. All this she accomplishes with a brain the size of a grain of sand and with little or no prior experience.