Free The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson Page B

human brains. And they have accomplished the feat with a remarkably small number of instincts. Think of evolving a superorganism as constructing a Tinkertoy. With just a few basic pieces fitted together in different ways it is possible to manufacture a wide variety of structures. In the evolution of superorganisms, those that survive and reproduce the most effectively are the ones that dazzle us today with their sophisticated complexity.
    The fortunate few species able to evolve superorganismic colonies have as a whole also been enormously successful. The twenty thousand or so known species of social insects (ants, termites, social bees, and wasps combined) make up only 2 percent of the approximately one million known species of insects, but three-fourths of the insect biomass.
    With complexity, however, comes vulnerability, andthat brings me to one of the other superorganism superstars, the domestic honeybee, and a moral lesson. When disease strikes solitary or weakly social animals that we have embraced in symbiosis, such as chickens, pigs, and dogs, their lives are simple enough for veterinarians to diagnose and fix most of the problems. Honeybees, on the other hand, have by far the most complex lives of all our domestic partners. There are a great many more twists and turns in their adaptation to their environment that upon failing could damage some part or other of the colony life cycle. The intractability thus far of the honeybee colony collapse disorder of Europe and North America, which threatens so much of crop pollination and humanity’s food supply at the present time, may represent an intrinsic weakness of superorganisms in general. Perhaps, like us, with our complex cities and interconnected high technology, it is their excellence that has put them at greater risk.
    You may occasionally hear human societies described as superorganisms. This is a bit of a stretch. It is true that we form societies dependent on cooperation, labor specialization, and frequent acts of altruism. But where social insects are ruled almost entirely by instinct, we base labor division on transmission of culture. Also we, unlike social insects, are too selfish to behave like cellsin an organism. Almost all human beings seek their own destiny. They want to reproduce themselves, or at least enjoy some form of sexual practice adapted to that end. They will always revolt against slavery; they will not be treated like worker ants.

9
    Why Microbes Rule the Galaxy
     
    B eyond the Solar System there is life of some kind. It exists, experts agree, on at least a small minority of Earthlike planets that circle stars as close as a hundred light-years to the Sun. Direct evidence of its presence, whether positive or negative, may come soon, perhaps within a decade or two. It will be obtained by spectrometry of light from mother stars that passes through the atmospheres of the planets. If the analysts detect “biosignature” gas molecules of a kind that can be generated only by organisms (or else are far more abundant than expected in a nonliving equilibrium of gases), the existence of alien life will pass from the well-reasoned hypothetical to the very probable.
    As a student of biodiversity and, perhaps more importantly, at heart a congenital optimist, I believe I can add credibility to the search for extrasolar life from the history of Earth itself. Life arose here quickly when conditionsbecame favorable. Our planet was born about 4.54 billion years ago. Microbes appeared soon after the surface became even marginally habitable, within one hundred million to two hundred million years. The interval between habitable and inhabited may seem an eternity to the human mind, but it is scarcely a night and a day in the nearly fourteen-billion-year history of the Milky Way galaxy as a whole.
    Granted that the origin of life on Earth is only one datum in a very big Universe. But astrobiologists, using an increasingly sophisticated technology focused on the