Self And The Phenomenon Of Life: A Biologist Examines Life From Molecules To Humanity

The Expanded Self: Society as Self 293

“9x6” b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity

In this balance hangs the fate of mankind. We are all denizens of the
same planet, our only habitat in this vast cosmos. Either we go down
the road of self-inflicted extinction, using increasingly lethal weapons of
mass destruction, or we build a paradise on Earth by wisely and safely
steering the course of biological evolution.

Notes and References

1. I like to distinguish mega-self from the so-called “super organism”, first
   coined by William Morton Wheeler in 1928 and recently revived by Holl-
   dobler and Wilson. The difference is that super organism refers to insect
   societies, the organizational principle of which is 90% instinctive, based
   mainly on chemical communication (pheromones), whereas my concept
   of mega-self encompasses all levels of living things, including humans, and
   it is on the latter that this chapter emphasizes. Human societies are much
   more complex, and much more flexible, than those of insects, with instincts
   playing only a small part. See: Holldobler B, Wilson EO. (2009) The Super-
   organism. Norton, New York.


2. Riehl C. (2011) Living with strangers: Direct benefits favour non-kin coop-
   eration in a communally nesting bird. Proc R Soc Lond B 278: 1728–1735.


3. Nogueira T, Rankin DJ, Touchon M, et al. (2009) Horizontal gene transfer
   of the secretome drives the evolution of bacterial cooperation and viru-
   lence. Current Biol 19: 1683–1691.


4. Cordero OX, Wildschutte H, Kirkup B, et al. (2012) Ecological populations
   of bacteria act as socially cohesive units of antibiotic production and resis-
   tance. Science 337: 1228–1231.


5. Koschwanez JH, Foster KR, Murray AW. (2011) Sucrose utilization in bud-
   ding yeast as a model for the origin of undifferentiated multicellularity.
   PLoS Biol 9(8): e1001122. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001122.


6. Margulis L. (1981) Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. W. H. Freeman,
   San  Francisco.


7. Hamilton WD. (1964) The genetical evolution of social behavior. I, II,
   J Theor Bio. 7: 1–16.


8. In genetics, “ploidy” refers to the number of sets of chromosomes in the
   cell. A cell is diploid if it contains two sets of chromosomes; those with only