Social Evolution and Superorganisms: From Biological Systems to Noosphere Formation

their metabolism and reproduce; each one, pursuing its own purposes, changes and adapts to the natural environment it finds around it, continuously improving. Individual organisms tend to aggregate and organize according to those characteristics typical of syntropic and evolutionary processes, so it is more than legitimate to ask what the purpose of this human social evolution is. From this perspective, it is true that each society evolves toward an ideal model implicitly defined by its statutory purposes, so the purpose of evolution of individual societies is not the same. However, given that the drive to social organization is natural and inherent in humans, it is logical to ask what the perfect model of human society as a whole is and what phases are necessary for its achievement.

From Organisms to Superorganisms

In the biological field, there has been long discussion about the existence or not of superorganisms and what their definition might be. From our point of view, an organism is a system in organic evolution, i.e., a self-organizing system with syntropic character in which the interactions between its elements are defined internally to the system itself. When an organism is an element of a superior system also in organic evolution, then we can define the second system a superorganism. Specifically, any form of society is a superorganism, being a self-organizing system with syntropic character whose elements are in turn organisms and whose interactions are defined within the system itself.

That said, we believe that the passage from organism to superorganism is a very natural passage in a group of systems in organic evolution. Organization on progressive scales seems to be a constant impulse of this type of evolution. When the population reaches a certain level of expansion, the elements that belong to it begin to specialize. This specialization of individual elements of the system leads to the necessity of an opposing force of mutual coordination between the parts. If this succeeds, we then witness the emergence of a superorganism.

Formation of the Terrestrial Noosphere

The works of Le Roy, Vernadsky, but especially of Teilhard de Chardin have attempted to bring some millennial doctrines relative to cosmic evolution back to the canons of contemporary science. These thinkers wanted to see the appearance of humanity as an event functional to terrestrial evolution. Just as the birth and diffusion of cyanobacteria was functional to produce the Great Oxidation and form a terrestrial atmosphere suitable to host more evolved and complex forms of life, freed from the marine depths, translating into a strong impulse in the constitution of the biosphere; so the appearance of Man, his diffusion and his action would be functional in an evolutionary sense to the formation of the noosphere of Earth, that is, the thinking and cogitating layer of Earth currently latent and adynamic that is made dynamic by Man's action.

It is clear that more than the action of the single Man here we must consider the action of billions of individuals, of entire peoples who dynamize the otherwise latent thinking being of Earth through their thoughts, their emotions and with the energy of their actions or works. Here we want to add that the type of noosphere produced is not independent of the quality of feelings and thoughts expressed by Humanity. As there exist different typologies of atmosphere, some favorable to the proliferation of certain forms of life and others that inhibit them, so we must think that not all human actions, emotions and thoughts constructively produce the same type of psychic ecological substrate useful for the evolution of Earth's consciousness.

The Consciousness of a People and Ancestral Unconscious

If we consider cellular evolution as reflecting on a microscopic scale social evolution, following the current of social biology, the first and most important transition was that which marked...