---
title: "Superorganism"
description: "Wheeler's 1919 coinage, as Moynihan traces it: \"just as cells cooperate to create an organism, individual organisms can cooperate to create a 'superorganism', each more potent than the sum of its…"
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/superorganism"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/superorganism"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Superorganism

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/superorganism), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Wheeler's 1919 coinage, as Moynihan traces it: "just as cells cooperate to create an organism, individual organisms can cooperate to create a 'superorganism', each more potent than the sum of its parts" — evolutionary history read as the production of ever-larger wholes, prompting the 1920s question whether a globalising humankind was itself becoming one. Its neglected half is the cost: higher-level coordination "demands its lower-level units sacrifice all prior autonomy," which Moynihan illustrates with Britton, Pawlowski's "New Leviathan" and the totalitarian celebrations of erased individuality that shadow every planetary-brain vision, the noösphere included. *What Is Intelligence?* uses the term neutrally (the hive as symbiogenesis; humans as a "collective superorganism" including wheat, cars and cattle), and *After Alignment* takes AI as a "model superorganism," an experimental organism.

## Appears in

- [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence) (2025-09-23)
- [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere) (2025-05-10)
- [What is Intelligence? (Lecture)](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/wii-film) (2025-05-10)
- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) (2025-05-10)
- [Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain) (2024-11-19)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._