Global Superorganism
Description
"From Nate Hagens paper on "Economics for the Future: Beyond the Superorganism"
Highlights
• We lack a cohesive map on how behavior, economy, and the environment interconnect.
• Global human society is functioning as an energy dissipating superorganism.
• Climate change is but one of many symptoms emergent from this growth dynamic.
• Culturally, this “Superorganism” doesn’t need to be the destiny of Homo sapiens.
• A systems economics can inform the ‘reconstruction’ after financial recalibration."
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067#bib0335)
Discussion
Cultural evolution, Ultrasociality and the Superorganism
Nate Hagens:
“What took place in the early 1500s was truly exceptional, something that had never happened before and never will again. Two cultural experiments, running in isolation for 15,000 years or more, at last came face toface. Amazingly, after all that time, each could recognize the other’s in-stitutions. When Cortés landed in Mexico he found roads, canals, cities, palaces, schools, law courts, markets, irrigation works, kings, priests, temples, peasants, artisans, armies, astronomers, merchants, sports, theatre, art, music, and books. High civilization, differing in detail but alike in essentials, had evolved independently on both sides of the earth.” (Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (2004, pp50-51)
“Ultrasociality refers to the most social of animal organizations, with fulltime division of labor, specialists who gather no food but are fed by others, effective sharing of information about sources of food and danger, self-sacrificial effort in collective defense.” (Campbell, 1974; Gowdy and Krall,2013). Humans are among a small handful of species that are extremely social. Phenotypically we are primates, but behaviorally we’re more akin to the social insects (Haidt, 2013). Our ultrasociality allows us to function at much larger scales than as individuals. At the largest scales, cultural evolution occurs far more rapidly than genetic evolution (Richerson and Boyd, 2005). Via the cultural evolution that began with agriculture, humans have evolved into a globally interconnected civilization, ‘outcompeting’ other human economic models along the wayto becoming a de facto ‘superorganism’ (Hölldobler and Wilson, 2008).A superorganism can be defined as "a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective"(Kelly, 1994). Via cooperation (and coordination), fitness transfers from lower levels to higher levels of organization (Michod and Nedelcu, 2003). The needs of this higher-level entity (today for humans; the global economy) mold the behavior, organization and functions of lower-level entities (individual human behavior) (Kesebir, 2011). Human behavior is thus constrained and modified by ‘downward causation’ from the higher level of organization present in society (Campbell, 1974). All the ‘irrationalities’ previously outlined have kept our species flourishing for 300,000 years. What has changed is not ‘us’ but rather the economic organization of our societies in tandem with technology, scale and impact. Since the Neolithic, human society has organized around growth of surplus, initially measured physically e.g. grain, now measured by digital claims on physical surplus, (or money) (Gowdy and Krall, 2014). Positive human attributes like cooperation have been co-opted to become coordination towards surplus production. Increasingly, the “purpose” of a modern human in the ultrasocial global economy is to contribute to surplus for the market (e.g. the economic value of a human life based on discounted lifetime income, the marginal productivity theory of labor value, etc.) (Gowdy 2019, in press)."
Source: essay by Nate Hagens: Economics for the future – Beyond the Superorganism.