Edited by author 12-19-2000 12:50 PM

> ...individual within that entity
Since the emphasis is on our increasing specialization and communication, a city like New York is an appropriate test case for the thought experiment. But limiting the question to a city also brings up the annoying question of the boundaries of an entity. While not ignoring the question entirely (and Lewis Thomas may bring a lot to that question), I'd like to focus first on the *process* of increasing specialization and communication and whether it's evolutionarily driven (exploring first what *that* means).

Edited by author 12-19-2000 12:47 PM
I'm very fond of Lewis Thomas and would certainly recommend any of his books. I recollect that Thomas repeatedly muses on whether individual organisms are really independent. He's fascinated by symbiotic relationships, parasitical relationships, and other arrangements that benefit multiple "independent" entities.

It occurs to me that another way of thinking about this question is to evaluate entities (societies, e.g.) in terms of their goals. Whether or not you believe that the City of New York, for example, forms an organism, properly called, it seems clear that "New York" has a set of goals that is distinct from the set of goals of any one individual within that entity.

Edited by author 12-19-2000 12:40 PM
13-Dec-2000 4:40am

There's an evolutionary process that results in a new entity that's an amalgamation of smaller-scale entities. On the grand scale, this formation is much more significant than the adaptation of each individual entity through natural selection. It's the appearance of a more complex, more organized entity.

At some point, single-celled creatures "evolved into" higher forms of life where each cell has a specialized function and coordinates closely with other cells^*. Does that same evolutionary process act on humans? As we become more and more specialized in our work and more highly connected, are we in fact forming larger-scale entities, or even a single global entity?

We can answer simply: yes, they're called societies and interest groups of all scales. But I'd like to examine the process of social formation and relate it to evolutionary processes. Evolutionary processes can be viewed as the response of a reproducing organism to an environmental pressure that causes its form to adapt, over generations, in order to survive (viewing it as an intentional process from the organism's perspective).

What are the pressures on the "Humans On Earth" entity that demand greater specialization and connectivity in order for it to survive?

It appears that Lewis Thomas has examined at least some of this in Lives of a Cell. I'll read it and see how much he addresses the process that brings about the more complex entity, and examines its relation to human society.

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^*Lots of questions here, and I need to learn a lot about cell reproduction and its evolution: When a different organism appears, especially one that might be viewed as an amalgamation of entities, can we say the simpler organism "evolved into" another? Is it legitimate to view the eventuation of multi-celled organisms as a combination of previously single celled organisms? Can we say the single cell "gave up its identity" as an organism in order to survive? Perhaps we should think instead of the cell-splitting process that happens as an embryo forms: at some point in our planet's history, a single cell probably split into two connected halves, or from one viewpoint didn't complete the usual reproductive split, and this organism was then able to reproduce (How? And how did sexual reproduction evolve, wherein genes from two entities are combined when producing a third?)