Viewed from the human perspective, the activities of the individual ants seemed to matter far less than the behavior of the colony as a whole. In fact, the colony acted as if it were an independent creature, feeding itself, expelling its wastes, defending itself, and looking out for its future. Wheeler was the man who dubbed a group of individuals collectively acting like one beast a superorganism.

Over 200 billion red blood cells a day die in the interests of keeping you alive.  Do you anguish over their demise?  Like those red corpuscles, you and I are cells in a social superorganism whose maintenance and growth sometimes requires our pain or elimination, suppresses our individuality, and restricts our freedom.  Why, then, is it of any value to us?  Because the superorganism nourishes every cell within it, allowing a robustness none of its individual components could achieve on its own.

The superorganism is often a vile and loathsome beast.  But like the body nourishing her component cells, the social beast gives us life.  Without her, each of us would perish.  That knowledge is woven into our biology.  It is the reason that the rigidly individualistic Clint Eastwood “Man Without a Name” does not exist.  The internal self-destruct devices with which we come equipped at birth ensure that we will live a constituents of a larger organism, or we will simply not live at all.  Behind these superorganismic imperatives is nature’s latest wrinkle in the research and development racket.  Despite claims of individual selectionists, human evolution is propelled not only by competition between single souls but by the forms of their cooperation.  It is driven by the games that superorganisms play.

Behind the writhing of evil is a competition between organizational devices, each trying to harness the universe into its own peculiar pattern, each attempting to hoist the cosmos one step higher on a ladder of increasing complexity.  First, there is the molecular replicator, the gene; then, there is its successor, the meme; and working hand in hand with each is the social beast.  Hegel said the ultimate tragedy is not the struggle of an easily recognizable good against a clearly loathsome evil.  Tragedy, he said, is the battle between two forces, both of which are good, a battle in which only one can win.  Nature has woven that struggle into the superorganism. – Howard Bloom The Lucifer Principle p. 58, 323 & 325

A Colombian woman has become the world’s first recipient of windpipe tissue constructed from a combination of donated tissue and her own cells. Stem cells harvested from the woman’s bone marrow were used to populate a stripped-down section of windpipe received from a donor, which was then transplanted into her body in June.  – NewScientist 19 November 2008

By injecting stem cells directly into the brain, scientists have successfully reversed neural birth defects in mice whose mothers were given heroin during pregnancy. Even though most of the transplanted cells did not survive, they induced the brain’s own cells to carry out extensive repairs.  – MIT January 7, 2009

A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. – CNN February 11, 2009

Scientists have found a way to make an almost limitless supply of stem cells that could safely be used in patients while avoiding the ethical dilemma of destroying embryos.  – Guardian UK March 1, 2009

A novel matrix of neural stem cells and a biodegradable polymer can quickly repair brain damage from stroke in rats. Within just seven days of injecting the concoction directly into the damaged part of the brain, new nerve tissue grew to fill stroke-induced cavities.  – MIT  March 9, 2009

President Barack Obama announced Monday that he will allow federal financing of medical research using stem cells from discarded human embryos, the vanguard of a broader effort to end what he calls a Bush-era “war on science.”  – Miami Herald March 9, 2009