Dear Howard,
It seems to me that the term “supra-organism” could improve on “super-organism” given also the connotations of the latter phrasing (“Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles.”). The competition is in terms of phenotypes and not genotypes. Here’s how it works. Social groups compete. They battle for pecking order position in a hierarchy of groups. They strive to be at the top of that hierarchy and to avoid the fate of the chicken at the bottom. What’s the main thing over which groups compete? It’s a badge of group membership. A badge of what molecular biologist Luis Villarreal and philosopher Guenther Witzany call “group identity.”[iv] That badge? A cluster of memes. A knot of replicators that live in a sea of minds. The Babylonians competed with the Assyrians and the Medes. They competed using different languages. They competed using different ideas of what clothes to wear, what was right and wrong, and, most important, what gods to worship.[v] The eight states that made war in China in from 475 BC to 221 BC also had competing languages, religions, and philosophies. Rome set itself against the Persian Empire using the same tools of group identity: a different language, a different clothing style, a different way of worship, and a different pantheon of gods-- different ideas. And today militant Islam—in the form of the Islamic State and what’s left of al Qaeda--is pitting itself against the West, Russia, and China using the ideas of Islam. Using the words and deeds of Mohammed, words and deeds that are still making copies of themselves in new minds 1,384 years after Mohammed’s death. Best, Loet _____ Loet Leydesdorff Professor, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. Tel. +31-20-525 6598; fax: +31-842239111 <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net> l...@leydesdorff.net ; <http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ Visiting Professor, ISTIC, <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> Beijing; Honorary Professor, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> University of Sussex; http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en> &hl=en
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