If anything qualifies as a superorganism it is an ant hill or a bee hive. The border of each, with a few big orifices issuing forth from ground or tree, seems animal-like: barriers and pores spatially crisp and functionally formal. But when masses of workers disperse to forage, the edge of the superorganism is spatially even fuzzier than a cloud’s edge.

Metapatterns (1995)

Portrait of Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk

Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology

Tyler Volk is a professor in the departments of environmental studies and biology at New York University. His areas of interest include principles of form and function in systems (described as metapatterns), environmental challenges to global prosperity, CO2 and global change, biosphere theory and the role of life in earth dynamics.

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Gregory Stock

Metaman

In this visionary book, Gregory Stock gives us a new way of understanding our world and our future. He develops the provocative thesis that human society has become an immense living being: a global superorganism in which we humans, knitted together by our modern technology and communication, are like the cells in an animal's body. Drawing on impressive research, Stock shows this newly formed superorganism to be more than metaphor: it is an actual living creature, which he has named Metaman, meaning beyond and transcending humans.