ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2009
Beyond society: the evolution of organismality.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 112 papers.
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Who cites it
112 citing papers in PubMed.
- A new narrative for social immunity research in termites.Trends open · 2026Review
- From the Selfish Gene to the "We": Cooperation Often Needs Suppressors.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Community First Theory: How Collective Organization Generates Individual Diversity.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Studying adaptation at the invisible scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Two kinds of evolutionary individuals: the concept of common interest as an evolutionary foundation of dualism on biological individuality.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2026Article
- The fru gene specifies male cooperative behaviors in honeybee colonies.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Translating Research on Evolutionary Transitions Into the Teaching of Hierarchical Complexity in University Biology Courses.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Top-Down Coercive Mechanisms and the Major Transitions in Evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Testing the coordination hypothesis: incompatibilities in aggregative development of an experimentally evolved social amoeba.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- The evolution of division of labour: preconditions and evolutionary feedback.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Mutualism and division of labour: a mutual expansion of concepts.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Division of labour as key driver of social evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Ecological change and conflict reduction led to a social circulatory system in ants.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Quantifying the configurational complexity of biological systems in multivariate 'complexity space'.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Exploring immune memory traits in the social immunity of a fungus-growing ant.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.Interface focus · 2024Review
- On Protein Loops, Prior Molecular States and Common Ancestors of Life.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Review
- Chemical and transcriptomic diversity do not correlate with ascending levels of social complexity in the insect order Blattodea.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Are Viruses Taxonomic Units? A Protein Domain and Loop-Centric Phylogenomic Assessment.Viruses · 2024Review
- Selection on the joint actions of pairs leads to divergent adaptation and coadaptation of care-giving parents during pre-hatching care.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
52 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of organismality is a social process. All organisms originated from groups of simpler units that now show high cooperation among the parts and are nearly free of conflicts. We suggest that this near-unanimous cooperation be taken as the defining trait of organisms. Consistency then requires that we accept some unconventional organisms, including some social insect colonies, some microbial groups and viruses, a few sexual partnerships and a number of mutualistic associations. Whether we call these organisms or not, a major task is to explain such cooperative entities, and our survey suggests that many of the traits commonly used to define organisms are not essential. These non-essential traits include physical contiguity, indivisibility, clonality or high relatedness, development from a single cell, short-term and long-term genetic cotransmission, germ-soma separation and membership in the same species.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.