A Consumer's Guide to Superorganisms

The organism, like the molecule, the cell, and the species, is one of the fundamental levels in our hierarchical classification of life and its components. The units ranked at these levels, being concrete, particular things, are individuals in the broadest philosophical sense. But in a much narrower and more familiar sense, individual means an individual organism. Like species, the term individual is hard to define, but in most biological discourse it has meant the unit of philosophical autonomy. Some authors have attempted to revise this terminology, restricting individual to organisms, and redefining organism to include families and other units. Such semantic surgery is unnecessary if the goal is merely to justify selection at more than one level. Analogies between levels may be interesting, but many of them do not deserve to be taken seriously.