Colonies that conquer

摘要

Being just one cell, a bacterium has to be a jack-of-all-trades. By contrast, multicellular organisms, such as humans, profit from a division of labour between their specialized organs. The digestive, immune, circulatory and other systems all cooperate to help the gonads to maximize the reproductive success of that organism in competition with other organisms. Would a village of human inhabitants, in competition with other villages, profit similarly if its foragers, defenders and communicators volunteered to help the reproducers maximize their reproductive success? Certainly not. But many social insects do just this, as Bert Holldo-bler and Edward Wilson beautifully portray in their new masterpiece The Superorganism.