ABSTRACT
In The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas (1974) writes about societies as organisms, emphasizing our collective discomfort in understanding the individual as a part of a larger system. Yet a system of relatively few elements is capable of activity unattainable by the individual organism. For example, a solitary ant, whose nervous system has few neurons, is patently incapable of a thought, but a group of ants encircling a dead moth demonstrates a kind of thinking, planning, calculating intelligence. Why are such examples of separate animals cooperating to form a system totally unpredictable on the basis of the sum of the individuals' skills so discomforting to us? Why, in Thomas's words, do we humans seldom feel our “conjoined intelligence”?
