King of the Jungle

     I've been thinking a lot about the nature of evolution and what constitutes the dominate life form on Earth. I've imagined what would happen if you were to pit various species against each other. Which species would prevail? In these imaginary conflicts, human individuals do very poorly unless they are equipped with the benefits of being part of a group, of a social organism. Strip a human individual of these benefits and he has difficulty dealing with any individual of a number of species. In fact, any individual of most bi-gendered species do poorly against a minimalist social organism in the same species. The minimalist pair of a species would generally be a female and male. I can not think of any bi-gendered species that would not dominate a single-gendered species. I've come to believe that the dominate form of life on Earth is what I call the Social Organism (or S-ORG for short).  Social Organisms can be composed of members of a given species or of several species filling different roles. Whatever form a Social Organism takes, we generally have evolved language that describes that S-ORG. The S-ORG composed of a species of birds is referred to as a flock. It is no coincidence that we have evolved so many words to label S-ORGs. These labels include tribes, cities, counties, states, gangs, clubs, fraternities and so on. None of this is controversial. What I believe IS controversial is that these S-ORGs are entities that should be the unit of analysis for everything from sociology to economics, and from law to evolution, rather than the individuals that are the components of the S-ORGs.

    The first premise I'm putting forward is that Social Organisms have attributes that are analogies to the attributes of species individuals, that the S-ORG is more than the sum of its parts. The S-ORG has its own evolutionary agenda that may conflict with the agenda of the individuals that comprise the S-ORG. It is an organism in its own right, with memory and a group consciousness. Further, and even more controversial, there are analogies to DNA and even to the way DNA is processed.

     The second premise is that the evolution of S-ORGs has been the dominate evolutionary story rather than the evolution of individuals within species. In fact, to take this premise further, the individual's dependence (on the S-ORGs they belong to) for survival has slowed the evolution of individuals of species while the evolution of the S-ORGs individuals belongs to has been relatively rapid.

   The third premise, also controversial, is that the evolution of S-ORGs is, in large part, non Darwinian. 

   The purpose of this blog is to discuss these theories and to evolve further theories of how S-ORGs function and how these concepts can be used to resolve long standing questions about how things work in the world. Once I started analyzing history, art and current events in terms of S-ORGs a lot of things started to make sense, started to seem less arbitrary and random.