E.O. Wilson Returns to the Hive With Superorganism Tome

Today, E. O. Wilson is thinking small. He wants an ants-only conversation. Usually the Harvard biologist engages in big-think — ideas that have shaken up biology, evolutionary theory, psychology, and more, often embroiling him in heated debates and controversies. The hottest was after the publication of his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. His theories on genetic determinism got him tagged as a social Darwinist (technically accurate) and, worse, a crypto-fascist (not so much).

But right now butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. In November, he and Bert Hölldobler are publishing a monumental sequel to their Pulitzer-winning 1990 best seller, The Ants, and Wilson says he doesn't want any trouble. Really? Because there's controversy right there in the book's title: The Superorganism. It seems Wilson's troublemaking days are far from over.

Wilson and Hölldobler first explored the concept of superorganisms in The Ants. Could large groups of animals function together as a single entity with distributed intelligence? Did evolution work through such groups, selecting at the group level rather than the individual? The implications were staggering, not only for bugs but also for humans. Group evolution meant that altruism and self-sacrifice — i.e., morality — might be as much a part of our genetic heritage as hair and eye color. Many prominent biologists, led by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, said no, there was no such thing as a superorganism: Evolution worked on the genes of self-serving individuals only, not groups.

But the idea struck a chord outside the biological sphere. It became a powerful meme among computer geeks, as any Google search reveals. Programmers got to work building "ant-based" search and scheduling-optimization algorithms modeled on the foraging patterns of real-world ants. Cybervisionaries saw in the superorganism an ideal way of describing the networked global brain that they were just beginning to imagine. The idea meant the singularity might be nearer than anyone thought. Wired's Kevin Kelly drew on Wilson's theories for the conceptual framework of the Hive Mind, humanity's emerging cognitive interconnectedness. Even today, Kelly is writing about the One Machine and the Technium, a neologism he defines as "a superorganism of technology."

The Ants became a hard-science blockbuster, probably with more buyers than actual readers, like Hawking's A Brief History of Time. This time around, Wilson and Hölldobler have seemingly irrefutable proof that superorganisms exist. The new book is even more dense and less accessible to the layperson, but the renewed controversy will help sell it. Not only will it reignite the war with Dawkins, but it will also breathe new life into the beloved geek meme. Expect the term superorganism to start popping up again in every discussion of Web evolution. Mechanical Turk? Wikipedia? Hello!

Kelly is a bit disappointed with The Superorganism — "It's very ant-y," he says — because it doesn't explicitly address the application of social-insect insights to human pursuits. Wilson prefers to leave that to others. For now. When I press him on how the lessons from the pheromone-based ant language apply to humans using asynchronous messaging across social networks, he flicks me away as one might an ant crawling up their lapel. That'll all be covered in his next book (working title: The Forces of Social Evolution