+++
title = "Macrobiology"
slug = "macrobiology"
description = "Macrobiology is the Wheel of Heaven corpus's name for the study of living systems composed of biological individuals — humanity and planetary life read as organisms one scale up, the way microbiology studies the systems composed of the units below the cell. It takes literally the canon's axiom that «all in the universe is living… the earth is living, like all the planets» and its picture of humanity as «a great being in gestation» whose cells are persons, and reads that claim through the mainstream biology of individuality: the major evolutionary transitions by which independent organisms fuse into higher-level ones, superorganism theory, and the Gaia hypothesis together with the objection that felled it. Its distinctive move is that the corpus supplies what Gaia lacked — a population of created humanities and a «natural selection, on the cosmic scale» — the missing premise that would let a planetary organism be a product of selection rather than an accident. It is the biological counterpart to the discipline the companion article «The Shape of Humanity» names civilizational morphology, and the name commits, where morphology hedges, to the aliveness the canon asserts."
template = "wiki-page.html"
toc = true
aliases = ["/articles/macrobiology/"]

[extra]
editorial_pass = "2026-08"
claim_type = "speculative"
core_claim_ids = ["woh-claim-0025"]
core_versions = { woh-claim-0025 = "0.1.0" }
category = "Science & Technology"
entry_type = "concept"
alternative_names = ["macrobiology", "civilizational biology", "the biology of the whole", "macro-scale biology", "macrobiologie (French)", "Makrobiologie (German)"]
timeline = ["age-of-aquarius"]
see_also = [
    { title = "Living Earth", path = "wiki/living-earth", description = "The sibling claim that the planet itself is a literal living being; macrobiology extends the aliveness from the planet to the species." },
    { title = "Cosmic Competition", path = "wiki/cosmic-competition", description = "The population of created humanities that supplies what the Gaia hypothesis lacked — a set of planetary organisms undergoing selection." },
    { title = "Saṃsāra", path = "wiki/samsara", description = "The failure mode of the macrobiological transition: the organism can miscarry and the gestation begin again." },
    { title = "Mass Effect", path = "wiki/mass-effect", description = "Why the larger living body's clock runs too slow for its cells to feel it living beneath them." },
    { title = "Fractal Cosmology", path = "wiki/fractal-cosmology", description = "The ladder of nested living scales that macrobiology climbs one rung of — humanity to human as human to cell." },
    { title = "Astrobiology", path = "wiki/astrobiology", description = "The sister discipline studying life IN the universe; macrobiology studies life AS the universe's larger living units." },
    { title = "Golden Age", path = "wiki/golden-age", description = "The completed transition: the organism carried successfully to a coherent, peaceful global body." },
    { title = "Cosmic Chain", path = "wiki/cosmic-chain", description = "The nested sequence of created-and-creating civilizations within which the seeding of humanities takes place." },
]

[extra.infobox]
type = "Proposed discipline / corpus concept: the study of living systems composed of biological individuals — humanity and planetary life read as organisms one scale up"
core_premise = "Humanity is a living system one level of individuality above the person: a body-in-formation whose cells are persons, whose organs are institutions, whose nervous system is the planetary communication net — an organism the way a multicellular body or an insect colony is an organism"
etymology = "From Greek *makrós* ('large') + *bíos* ('life'); the exact mirror of *microbiology* (*mikrós*, 'small'). Names, by symmetry, the study of the living systems composed of biological individuals, as microbiology studies the systems composed of the units below the cell"
scientific_basis = "The mainstream biology of individuality: the major evolutionary transitions (Maynard Smith & Szathmáry, 1995); superorganism theory (Wheeler, 1911; Hölldobler & Wilson, 2009); organismality as graded cooperation-vs-conflict (Queller & Strassmann, 2009; Godfrey-Smith, 2009); the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974)"
the_gaia_problem = "The Gaia hypothesis (planet-as-organism) was checked by the objection of W. Ford Doolittle (1981) and Richard Dawkins (1982): with no population of planets reproducing with variation, natural selection cannot have built a planetary organism — Earth has no parents and no rivals"
the_corpus_answer = "The canon supplies the missing population: the Elohim create life «on an infinity of planets» (LWTE 2:105) under «a natural selection, on the cosmic scale» (ETTMTTP 2:25) — a breeder, a population of humanities, and a selective filter, exactly what a science of planetary organisms requires and could never obtain for itself"
status_in_source_material = "The humanity-as-organism premise is explicit canon (LWTE 2:104–111; ETTMTTP 2:32, 'all in the universe is living… The earth is living, like all the planets'). 'Macrobiology' as the discipline's name, and its synthesis with the mainstream biology of individuality, is corpus-internal interpretive construction"
epistemic_status = "Speculative in the corpus's strict sense: interpretive synthesis running ahead of any single source. The defensible claim is that humanity is *becoming* one organism by a process biology recognizes and can test for — not that it already is one"
relationship_to_civilizational_morphology = "The biological counterpart of the discipline the companion article *The Shape of Humanity* names *civilizational morphology*. Morphology reads the shape of the whole; a biology asserts the whole is alive. Macrobiology is the name that commits to the aliveness the canon states outright"
distinguished_from = "Astrobiology (life in the universe, at or below our scale); civilizational morphology (the same object, named to hedge the aliveness claim); the Gaia hypothesis (planet-only, and without the population selection requires); sociobiology (behavior of social animals, not the whole-as-individual)"
principal_text = "*Let's Welcome the Extra-terrestrials* (Vorilhon/Raël, 1979), ch. 2 §§104–111 (humanity as 'a great being in gestation'); *Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet* (1975), 'Neither God nor Soul' (2:32) and 'The Second Encounter' (2:24–25)"
+++

**Macrobiology** is the Wheel of Heaven corpus's name for the study of living
systems *composed of* biological individuals — humanity and planetary life read
as organisms one scale up. Its symmetry is exact: microbiology studies the cell
and the units below it, so a macrobiology would study the systems built *from*
biological units the way a cell is built from microbiological ones — **humanity
standing to the human as the human stands to the cell**. The term takes at face
value the canon's axiom that *"all in the universe is living… The earth is
living, like all the planets"* and its picture of humanity as *"a great being in
gestation"* whose cells are persons, and reads that claim through the mainstream
biology of how many living things become one. It is the biological counterpart of
the discipline the companion Explainer
[*The Shape of Humanity*](/articles/the-shape-of-humanity/) names
*civilizational morphology*; where
*morphology* reads only the shape of the whole, *macrobiology* commits to the
aliveness the canon asserts. The reading is **speculative** in the corpus's
strict sense — interpretive synthesis that runs ahead of any single source — and
this entry marks plainly where the canon's explicit claim ends and the synthesis
begins.

## Etymology and naming

**"Macrobiology"** joins Greek *makrós* ("large") and *bíos* ("life"), the exact
mirror of *microbiology*, whose *mikrós* means "small." The word is not wholly
new — it surfaces occasionally in older biological writing as a loose antonym of
microbiology, meaning the study of organisms large enough to see — but it has
never named an established field or carried a research program. The corpus
repurposes it deliberately for the study of the living systems *composed of*
biological individuals, one rung up the ladder of scale.

The choice of *biology* over *morphology* is the entry's load-bearing naming
decision. The companion Explainer *The Shape of Humanity* proposes a science of
humanity-as-organism and floats three names for it — *civilizational morphology*,
*civilizational biology*, and *macrobiology* — then keeps *morphology* in front,
on the honest ground that "a morphology claims only to read the shape of the
whole; a *biology* asserts that the whole is itself alive… a discipline ought to
earn it rather than smuggle it in through its own name." Macrobiology is the name
for the position that the aliveness *can* be earned — because the canon states it
outright, and because the mainstream biology of individuality supplies a
rigorous, testable account of a crowd of organisms becoming a single organism.
The two names point at one object; *macrobiology* is the one that does not hedge.

Related terms operate within the framework: **civilizational biology** (the
plainer synonym); **superorganism** (the biological category for a colony that
functions as one individual); **organismality** (the graded property of being an
individual); and **major transition in individuality** (the evolutionary event by
which lower-level individuals fuse into a higher-level one).

## The biology of the whole

Macrobiology's scientific basis is the mainstream account of **biological
individuality** — the recognized, non-metaphorical study of how many living
things become one.

### The major transitions

The idea that a crowd of organisms can become a single organism is not a strain
on biology; it is how biology built the large individuals that exist, humanity
included. In *The Major Transitions in Evolution* (1995), the British
evolutionary biologist **John Maynard Smith** and the Hungarian evolutionary
biologist **Eörs Szathmáry** proposed that the history of life is punctuated by
events of one kind: entities that once reproduced independently become parts of a
larger entity that reproduces as a whole, surrendering the ability to go it
alone. Free-living bacteria were engulfed and became the mitochondria inside every
eukaryotic cell — the fusion the biologist **Lynn Margulis** established through
her theory of endosymbiosis. Single cells bound their fates into multicellular
bodies, most giving up reproduction forever to become tissue so that a sequestered
few could carry the line onward. Solitary insects became the eusocial colony. The
signature of a completed transition is always the same: independence traded for
membership, and a new individual appearing one level up.

### Superorganisms

The colony case has a founding paper. In 1911 the Harvard entomologist **William
Morton Wheeler** published "The Ant-Colony as an Organism," arguing that a colony
feeds, grows, defends itself, and reproduces as a unit while its ants are as
committed to it, and as unable to persist outside it, as the cells of a tissue.
Nearly a century later **Bert Hölldobler** and **Edward O. Wilson** — Wilson the
founder of sociobiology — gave the case its mature form in *The Superorganism*
(2009), showing that an insect colony passes the same tests of individuality a
wolf or an oak passes, so a science that called the wolf an organism and the
colony a metaphor would be applying two standards to one fact.

### The test for individuality

Biology also supplies a criterion. The evolutionary biologists **David Queller**
and **Joan Strassmann** proposed "organismality" in place of the yes-or-no
question: an assemblage is organismal to the degree that its parts *cooperate*
highly and *conflict* little. By this measure individuality is graded — a human
body scores near the ceiling, an ant colony high, a slime-mould aggregation
lower, a herd lower still — and the interesting cases sit in the middle where the
word "individual" is being earned or lost. The philosopher of biology **Peter
Godfrey-Smith** describes the same passage as a *de-Darwinizing* of the parts: as
a whole tightens into an individual, its components stop being separate players in
the evolutionary game and become organs of a single one. A transition in progress
is precisely what the dial shows while it is turning.

### The Gaia problem

Biology has attempted the planetary version of this claim once already. In the
1970s the independent British scientist **James Lovelock**, with Lynn Margulis,
proposed the **Gaia hypothesis**: that the biosphere actively regulates the
planet's temperature, atmosphere, and ocean chemistry, holding them far from dead
equilibrium — behaving like the homeostasis of a single body. The objection that
felled it was simple. Adaptations — the appearance of design *for* something — are
built by natural selection, which needs a *population* reproducing with variation,
the better-adapted out-reproducing the worse. The molecular evolutionary biologist
**W. Ford Doolittle** (1981) and **Richard Dawkins** (1982, in *The Extended
Phenotype*) pointed out that there is only one Earth: it has no parents, no
offspring, and no rivals, so no population of planets ever competed. Whatever
holds Earth's chemistry in its band cannot be an adaptation built by selection for
the planet's own good. This is the same "sample of one" wall that stops a science
of the whole — here built out of evolutionary theory rather than methodology — and
an honest macrobiology has to answer it.

## In the primary sources

The canon supplies both the claim and, uniquely, the resource that answers the
Gaia objection.

The axiom is stated flatly in the second message, in the section titled "Neither
God nor Soul":

{% library(book="extraterrestrials-took-me-to-their-planet", chapter=2, verse=32) %}
But all in the universe is living and is in harmony with the infinitely large and
the infinitely small. The earth is living, like all the planets, and, for the
little mould that is humanity, it is difficult for you to realize it because of
the time lag due to the enormous difference of mass which prevents you from
capturing its palpitations.
{% end %}

The {% wiki(slug="mass-effect") %}Mass Effect{% end %} explains why the aliveness
is imperceptible — the larger body's clock runs too slow for its cells to
register — but the assertion itself is straight biology: the Earth *is living*,
and humanity is "the little mould" upon it, a film of small living things on the
surface of a larger one. One rung further in, humanity is an organism in its own
right. {% wiki(slug="yahweh") %}Yahweh{% end %} asks {% wiki(slug="rael") %}Raël{% end %}
to hold the picture exactly:

{% library(book="lets-welcome-the-extraterrestrials", chapter=2, verse=108) %}
It is exactly the same thing for humanity, considering each human to be like a
cell of the great being in gestation, that is, Humanity.
{% end %}

And the resource that a science of planetary organisms needs — a population of
specimens under selection — the canon states as the Elohim's own method. They
create life "on an infinity of planets"
({% libref(book="lets-welcome-the-extraterrestrials", chapter=2, verse=105) %}LWTE 2:105{% end %}),
and the outcomes are filtered:

{% library(book="extraterrestrials-took-me-to-their-planet", chapter=2, verse=25) %}
This is, in a way, a natural selection, on the cosmic scale, of the species
capable of escaping their planet. Only those who perfectly master their
aggressiveness can attain this stage. The others self-destruct as soon as their
scientific and technological level permits them to invent weapons powerful enough
for that.
{% end %}

## The Wheel of Heaven reading

Read as a claim about method, the canon resolves the Gaia objection. Doolittle and
Dawkins said the Earth cannot be an organism because no population of planets
undergoes differential reproduction. The canon answers that there *is* such a
population — the humanities seeded across the cosmos — and that it *does* undergo
differential reproduction, filtered by a selection pressure stated with total
specificity: the capacity to master aggression before acquiring the power to
self-destruct. The worlds that pass propagate onward along the
{% wiki(slug="cosmic-chain") %}Cosmic Chain{% end %}; the worlds that fail are
removed from the population by their own hand. That is not a metaphor for
selection but a description of it, with a substrate (planetary humanities), a
variation (their differing wisdom-to-power ratios), and a filter (the maturity
test). The corpus reading is that **macrobiology is possible, on the canon's
terms, precisely where the Gaia hypothesis was impossible** — because the canon
supplies the one resource biology could never find for itself: a breeder,
standing outside the specimen, with a population of specimens and a record of how
they run. This is the framework the corpus elsewhere calls
{% wiki(slug="cosmic-competition") %}Cosmic Competition{% end %}.

Applied to the present, the mainstream criterion and the canon converge on the
same diagnosis: a **major transition in individuality caught in the act**. In a
single human lifetime the planet grew a nervous system (a communication net
carrying the signals of eight billion cells at light-speed), runs a single
planet-spanning metabolism (supply chains coupling every region), and has fused
past the point where any part can be lost without the whole — the situation the
archaeologist Joseph Tainter states as "collapse, if and when it comes again,
will this time be global." Cooperation is high and climbing. What remains
unfinished is the suppression of *conflict* — the one thing a completed transition
requires, the reason your cells almost never turn cancer — and its unfinished
name in the canon is aggression. When the transition fails to master conflict
before the power to self-destruct arrives, the organism does not mature but
miscarries: the failure mode the corpus calls {% wiki(slug="samsara") %}saṃsāra{% end %},
the wheel begun again. When it succeeds, the result is the
{% wiki(slug="golden-age") %}Golden Age{% end %}. Biology and canon describe one
process and agree on where humanity stands in it: near the hinge, and not yet
safe.

## Relationship to civilizational morphology

Macrobiology and *civilizational morphology*
name the same undiscovered discipline from two positions. *The Shape of Humanity*
develops it as a **morphology** — a reading of the form, growth, and
transformation of humanity as a single developing body — and assembles its
fragments from a century of macro-history: Oswald Spengler's "morphology of
world-history," Arnold Toynbee's challenge-and-response, Joseph Tainter's
declining marginal returns, and Geoffrey West's scaling laws. That article keeps
*morphology* in front deliberately, because a morphology claims less: it reads a
shape without asserting the shape is alive.

Macrobiology takes up the harder word. Its wager is that the aliveness need not be
smuggled in through the name because the canon states it outright and the biology
of individuality can test it. The two are complementary rather than rival: a
macrobiology needs a morphology (it must read the organism's form and life-cycle),
and a morphology that took the canon seriously would become a macrobiology (its
object, the canon says, is alive). The difference is one of nerve about the same
claim — which is why the companion article leaves the quarrel for "the
cross-examination to return to," and this entry is where it returns.

## Comparative observations

The intuition that the whole is a single body is old and recurrent, and the
corpus reads the recurrence as a fragmentary memory of the cosmological situation
the framework describes rather than as independent poetic invention.

- **Plato's *Timaeus*** (30b–34b) fashions the cosmos as "a single visible living
  creature" (ζῷον), "a living being endowed with soul and intelligence" — the
  founding Western statement that the world is literally an organism.
- **The Puruṣa Sūkta** (Ṛgveda 10.90) derives the world and the orders of human
  society from the sacrificed body of a primordial cosmic Man — society and cosmos
  as one dismembered organism.
- **Adam Kadmon**, the primordial cosmic Man of {% wiki(slug="kabbalah") %}Kabbalah{% end %},
  figures humanity and cosmos as a single anthropic body whose form maps the
  divine emanations.
- **The Hermetic "as above, so below"** (the Emerald Tablet) states the
  macrocosm–microcosm correspondence between the cosmic body and the human one —
  the same principle the source material assigns to the Star of David of the
  {% wiki(slug="raelian-symbol-of-infinity") %}Raëlian emblem{% end %}.
- **Thomas Hobbes's *Leviathan*** (1651) draws the commonwealth as "an Artificial
  Man," and **Herbert Spencer's "The Social Organism"** (1860) built a sociology
  on the analogy — while insisting, importantly, that unlike a real body the
  social whole "exists for the benefit of its members, not its members for the
  benefit of society," the exact guardrail the canon also draws.

These preserve the image in their own idioms; macrobiology's contribution is not
the metaphor, which is ancient, but the claim that the metaphor names a real
transition now testable by the biology of individuality.

## Mainstream and critical perspectives

The reading faces two serious objections, and the honest position concedes what
each is owed.

**The metaphor objection.** The evolutionists who felled Gaia would say the
superorganism is a lens, not a fact — a beehive is not literally an animal — and
that the corpus has put the aliveness into the *name*, the exact move *The Shape
of Humanity* warned against. The reply is a concession that splits the discipline.
There is a **this-world macrobiology** that needs no Elohim: the study of the
transition in individuality observable on Earth, using Wheeler, Maynard Smith and
Szathmáry, Queller and Strassmann — fully compatible with mainstream biology, and
returning the verdict "transition in progress, not complete." And there is a
**canonical macrobiology** that adds the breeder, the population of worlds, and
the pass-mark, and is speculative because its load-bearing premise is the claim
about the Elohim that cannot be checked from inside the specimen. The defensible
claim is the narrower one: humanity is *becoming* an organism, by a process
biology recognizes; the canon supplies, if granted, the premise that would make
the planetary version a science rather than an accident.

**The totalitarian danger.** The idea that a society is a body and a person a cell
has a body count: taken literally it dissolves the individual into the collective,
the move by which twentieth-century tyrannies justified spending persons for the
"health" of the race or state, and which Karl Popper dismantled in *The Open
Society and Its Enemies*. *The Shape of Humanity* cross-examines this at length;
the entry restates the guardrail rather than re-arguing it. *To describe a whole
is not to license the dissolution of its parts.* The canon is emphatic on the
point: {% wiki(slug="infinity") %}the Infinite{% end %} is "infinitely
indifferent" to us, so no cosmic body is owed our sacrifice, and the individual's
life "has only the importance that we give it." The organism macrobiology
describes matures *by* the free awakening of its cells, one at a time — the
opposite of the totalitarian body that matures by consuming them.

## Distinguishing from adjacent concepts

- **vs. {% wiki(slug="astrobiology") %}astrobiology{% end %}.** Astrobiology
  studies life *in* the universe at or below our own scale — its origin,
  distribution, and detection. Macrobiology studies life *as* the universe's
  larger living units — the systems for which persons and planets are the cells.
- **vs. civilizational morphology.** The same object and discipline, named to
  hedge (morphology) or to commit (macrobiology) on whether the whole is alive.
- **vs. the Gaia hypothesis.** Gaia is planet-only and, on the standard objection,
  lacks the population that selection requires; macrobiology extends to
  humanity-as-organism and draws its population and selective history from the
  canon's account of created worlds.
- **vs. sociobiology.** Sociobiology explains the social behavior of animals in
  terms of individual fitness; macrobiology treats the social whole as itself the
  individual.
- **vs. {% wiki(slug="fractal-cosmology") %}Fractal Cosmology{% end %} and
  {% wiki(slug="mass-effect") %}Mass Effect{% end %}.** Those describe the infinite
  ladder of living scales and the scaling of time along it; macrobiology is the
  study of the living systems on one rung of that ladder — the rung one step above
  the human.

## See also

- [The Shape of Humanity](/articles/the-shape-of-humanity/)
- [The Infinite in Both Directions](/articles/the-infinite-in-both-directions/)
- [Cosmic Competition](../cosmic-competition/)
- [Saṃsāra](../samsara/)
- [Golden Age](../golden-age/)
- [Cosmic Chain](../cosmic-chain/)
- [Mass Effect](../mass-effect/)
- [Fractal Cosmology](../fractal-cosmology/)
- [Astrobiology](../astrobiology/)
- [Life Engineering](../life-engineering/)
- [The Apocalypse](../apocalypse/)
- [Elohim](../elohim/)
- [Yahweh](../yahweh/)

## References

### Principal Raëlian sources

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). *Let's Welcome the Extra-terrestrials* (1979); collected in *Intelligent Design: Message from the Designers*. Nova Distribution, 2005. Chapter 2, §§104–111: humanity as "a great being in gestation" and the embryological prediction of its development.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). *Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet* (1975); collected in *Intelligent Design*. The "Neither God nor Soul" section (2:31–32) for "all in the universe is living… The earth is living"; "The Second Encounter" (2:24–25) for saṃsāra and the "natural selection, on the cosmic scale."

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). *The Book Which Tells the Truth* (1974); collected in *Intelligent Design*. Ch. 5: humanity as a "disease" of the gigantic being whose atoms are the stars.

### The biology of individuality

Wheeler, William Morton. "The Ant-Colony as an Organism." *Journal of Morphology* 22, no. 2 (1911): 307–325.

Maynard Smith, John, and Eörs Szathmáry. *The Major Transitions in Evolution*. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Hölldobler, Bert, and Edward O. Wilson. *The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies*. W. W. Norton, 2009.

Queller, David C., and Joan E. Strassmann. "Beyond Society: The Evolution of Organismality." *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B* 364, no. 1533 (2009): 3143–3155.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. *Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection*. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Seeley, Thomas D. *Honeybee Democracy*. Princeton University Press, 2010.

### The Gaia hypothesis and its critics

Lovelock, James E., and Lynn Margulis. "Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis." *Tellus* 26, no. 1–2 (1974): 2–10.

Lovelock, James. *Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth*. Oxford University Press, 1979.

Margulis, Lynn. *Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution*. Basic Books, 1998.

Doolittle, W. Ford. "Is Nature Really Motherly?" *The CoEvolution Quarterly* 29 (Spring 1981): 58–63.

Dawkins, Richard. *The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene*. Oxford University Press, 1982. See ch. 12.

### Growth, scaling, and the planetary layers

West, Geoffrey B. *Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies*. Penguin Press, 2017.

Tainter, Joseph A. *The Collapse of Complex Societies*. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Vernadsky, Vladimir I. *The Biosphere*. 1926; complete English translation, Copernicus/Springer, 1998.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. *The Phenomenon of Man*. 1955; English, Harper & Row, 1959.

### The cosmic-body tradition and the critical voice

Plato. *Timaeus*. 30b–34b: the cosmos as "a single visible living creature." Various editions.

*Ṛgveda* 10.90, the Puruṣa Sūkta. In *The Rig Veda: An Anthology*, trans. Wendy Doniger. Penguin Classics, 1981.

Scholem, Gershom. *On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah*. Schocken, 1991. On Adam Kadmon.

Hobbes, Thomas. *Leviathan*. 1651. Various editions.

Spencer, Herbert. "The Social Organism." *The Westminster Review*, 1860.

Popper, Karl R. *The Open Society and Its Enemies*. Routledge, 1945.

### Web resources

"Superorganism." *Wikipedia*. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism>.

"The major transitions in evolution." *Wikipedia*. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_Transitions_in_Evolution>.

"Gaia hypothesis." *Wikipedia*. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis>.