Instead of exhibiting characteristics as a unified whole, Earth represents a vastly more complex—and less coordinated—system.

In 1910, while delivering a lecture to his peers, the American entomologist William Morton Wheeler made a bold declaration: The colonies formed by ants and other social insects, he proposed, were not just collections of individual organisms—they were organisms in their own right.

Wheeler was explicit that he did not mean this merely as an analogy, but literally as a biological fact. Like a cell or person, he explained, an ant colony “behaves as a unitary whole,” maintaining itself and resisting dissolution. An ant colony, he continued, was effectively a giant amoeba-like creature, with the nest functioning as a kind of shell, the mass of ants as cytoplasm (the gelatinous substance that fills a cell), and the queen as a nucleus or storehouse of genetic material required for reproduction. The long lines of workers ceaselessly marching in and out of the nest were akin to an amoeba’s fluid, limb-like extensions, known as pseudopodia.

By the 1920s, Wheeler began using the word “superorganism” to describe insect colonies, a term eventually embraced by such scientific luminaries as E. O. Wilson. But the idea it represented ultimately influenced much more than entomology. The concept of a superorganism has become a fixture of academia, percolating into disciplines as varied as psychology, economics, microbiology, computer science, philosophy, and anthropology. It frequently features in popular culture as well, with examples ranging from the hyper-technological Borg in Star Trek to the neurobotanical Eywa in Avatar. And it helped inspire the modern understanding of humans as chimeric beings whose cells are at least 50% bacteria and other microbes. 

Untangling the precise history of the term superorganism is important because it informs ongoing debates about individuality, evolution, and even the nature and definition of life. According to widely cited sources, the true origin of this influential concept is much older than Wheeler. Wikipedia and Encyclopedia.com, as well asnumerous scholarly publications, state that eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton coined the word superorganism—not in reference to social insects, but rather to describe Earth as a whole. Hutton was a holistic and interdisciplinary thinker who characterized the planet as a “living world” and often referred to Earth’s “physiology” and capacity for self-repair. Nearly two centuries later, British inventor and scientist James Lovelock cited Hutton’s thinking as an important antecedent to his Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth is a single, living, self-regulating system. 

While writing my recent book Becoming Earth, which explores Earth as a living planet, however, I discovered that this origin story—the one plastered across both the internet and research literature—is wrong. Hutton never used the term superorganism. Nor did the word originate with entomologists. The provenance, evolution, and meaning of the term have been repeatedly misunderstood and misrepresented, leading to countless inaccurate citations and conceptual confusion.

The mistaken notion that Hutton coined the term superorganism began with none other than Lovelock. In the 1963 book The Fabric of Geology, geologist Donald B. McIntyre writes that “the secret of Hutton is that he thought of the world as a sort of superorganism.” It seems Lovelock conflated McIntyre’s commentary about Hutton for Hutton’s own words, initiating a chain of erroneous references that continues to this day. I cannot find any evidence that Hutton ever wrote or spoke the word superorganism himself. 

^{1 “The notion of Gaia is not new,” Lovelock wrote in 1992. “In a way it started about 200 years ago, in 1789, in an Edinburgh lecture given by Dr. [Joseph] Black, the discoverer of carbon dioxide. He gave the lecture on behalf of James Hutton, who was ill at the time. Hutton had written, ‘I consider the Earth to be a super-organism and that its proper study should be by physiology.’”}

Yet there is no evidence that Hutton ever wrote or spoke those words. The source of Lovelock’s confusion seems to be a 1963 book called The Fabric of Geology, a collection of essays edited by Claude C. Albritton Jr., which Lovelock cites as the basis for his claim about Hutton. In The Fabric of Geology, geologist Donald B. McIntyre writes that “the secret of Hutton is that he thought of the world as a sort of superorganism.” The Fabric of Geology also states that Hutton’s references to a physiology of Earth are “reminiscent, incidentally, of Thomas Robinson’s book, The Anatomy of the Earth, published in 1694, which proclaimed that the Earth was a superorganism with ‘a constant circulation of water, as in other animals of blood.’” But the word superorganism does not actually appear in either text. Robinson’s book even predates common usage of the word organism.

The term superorganism appears to have been coined nearly a century after Hutton died. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its first usage to the writing of William Edward Hearn, a legal and economic writer, in the late nineteenth century. Various scholars began using the word superorganism in the late 1800s to describe human societies, specifically. Wheeler popularized the term among entomologists. And Lovelock adopted it for his planetary-scale theories. 

The predominant yet false origin story of the term superorganism has undoubtedly influenced how people understand and use it. There’s a major difference between arguing that members of a tight-knit insect colony function as a cohesive entity and claiming that literally every living thing on Earth cooperates as part of a single, planet-sized being. Understanding the distinction is essential to understanding the true nature of life on Earth.

The idea of a superorganism makes sense when describing insect colonies—at the very least as an apt analogy. In colonies formed by many species of ants, bees, termites, and wasps, numerous small and highly related individuals cooperate to ensure the colony’s survival, dividing the necessary duties of life—foraging, defense, reproduction, and so on—amongst different cohorts in a way that is analogous to the organs of a multicellular organism. In service of this unity, many individual colony members sacrifice their lives, the opportunity to reproduce, or both. Because those individuals share such a large portion of their genes, however—75% in some cases—their sacrifices nonetheless perpetuate their own genetic legacies.

Human societies exhibit even more extreme, elaborate, and explicit forms of cooperation, altruism, and division of labor.

For Lovelock, the notion that a preeminent eighteenth-century scientist had coined the word superorganism to describe our planet beautifully echoed his own thinking. In his earliest writing on Gaia, he described it as an immense living being composed of many smaller collaborating entities that deliberately altered the planet in order to benefit itself.

He later recanted that teleological framing and refined his ideas. Yet he continued to use the term superorganism to describe Earth, especially in his second book, The Ages of Gaia, so much so that his ideas remain synonymous with a planetary superorganism. 

I think that was a mistake. Earth is not a superorganism—it’s vastly more complex. The living systems we call organisms are members of populations and species, which are products of evolution by natural selection. Every species is defined by a coherent genome, which is passed from one generation to the next. Evolution by natural selection unfolds through changes in the overall genetic composition of populations whose members differ in their traits and compete to leave the most offspring.

In contrast, Earth does not have a single genome, does not compete or reproduce with other planets, and does not undergo standard Darwinian evolution. These were some of the main scientific critiques that evolutionary biologists mounted against Lovelock’s original articulation of the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s and ’80s. Our planet is not composed of the cooperating members of a single species, nor even of a single biome—it’s a massive ensemble of all existing ecosystems, which are themselves intricate networks of the living and nonliving. Earth is not so much a superorganism as a metaecosystem. 

A similar critical distinction is why English botanist Arthur Tansley helped popularize the word “ecosystem” in the 1930s. At the time, influential American scientist Frederic Clements argued that, much like individual organisms, forests and other botanical communities were cohesive and highly organized organic entities that progressed through a series of discrete developmental stages, from juveniles to adults capable of reproduction. Tansley disagreed with that emphasis: “the more fundamental conception is, as it seems to me, the whole system,” he wrote. “Though the organisms may claim our primary interest, when we are trying to think fundamentally we cannot separate them from their special environment, with which they form one physical system…These ecosystems, as we shall call them, are of the most various kinds and sizes.”

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that ecosystems, and Earth as a whole, have attributes that resemble those of individual organisms. Although ecosystems may not compete or reproduce in the same way organisms and species do, some scientists have characterized ecosystems as living entities capable of self-regulation and evolution.

Researchers have described the Amazon rainforest, for example, as a “biogeochemical reactor” that sustains and stabilizes itself, generates about half of the rain that falls on its canopy, and has maintained its essential structural features and ecological characteristics for more than 55 million years.

Moreover, organisms and their environments are locked in perpetual coevolution. All living creatures alter their environments. Some of these changes persist and inevitably influence the evolution of those organisms’ descendants. This continual feedback loop binds life and environment through evolutionary and geologic time, creating the opportunity for both to converge on self-stabilizing processes that favor mutual persistence. 

These parallels extend to the scale of the planet. Like many living things, Earth is a cohesive system that absorbs, stores, and transforms energy. Earth has highly organized structures, membranes, and both short and long-term rhythms. Our planet has, as Wheeler would say, resisted dissolution for more than four billion years. In that time, it has also become increasingly complex, habitable, and resilient.

Life has been integral to this evolution. Living organisms do not merely reside on Earth—they are a literal extension of the planet, composed entirely of its elements. For eons, life has been thoroughly intertwined with Earth’s geology and chemistry. The ubiquity of life gives the planet’s surface a kind of anatomy: Life’s entanglement with geochemical processes endows the planet with a metabolism and physiology, and the perpetual coevolution of life and environment amplify Earth’s innate capacity for self-regulation.

Earth is not a single organism, nor a composite superorganism, but it is very much alive. Earth is a vast interconnected living system—a living planet. 

The convoluted history of the term superorganism and its underlying concept reveals a major bias in how we think about life. As fairly large, highly social, and self-aware animals, the forms of life most familiar and valuable to us are other multicellular organisms: plants, fungi, and especially animals. When we deign to notice life at different scales, our instinct is to compare those systems to organisms—in other words, to ourselves.

But this tendency risks making “life” and “organism” entirely synonymous, when they are clearly not. There is no logical reason that the phenomenon we call life should occur at only one scale.

In my backyard in Portland, Oregon, there is an olive tree—a tree that frequently comes to mind when I reflect on the nature of life. Last winter, after being sheathed in thick ice for several consecutive days, the olive tree lost most of its leaves. They dried, curled, and fell to the ground, forming a morbid halo of brittle brown husks.

At what point, I wondered, had those leaves died? Was there a precise moment when they transitioned from animate to inanimate? Was the process akin to losing fingertips to frostbite, or more like losing a hand, eye, or lung? Or was the relative autonomy of each exquisite fluttering leaf—each containing multiple vital organelles descended from ancient free-living microbes—entirely incomparable to anything in human or vertebrate anatomy?

For months, the olive showed little signs of further change, neither losing more leaves nor growing new ones. My partner Ryan and I began to question whether the tree, which we had planted several years earlier, would survive. Yet, to our astonishment, by the end of the following summer, the olive had fully recovered, abandoning its weakest limbs and growing a beautifully thick new crown of grey-green foliage. 

How best to characterize the life of a tree? In their simultaneous coherence and multiplicity—their multitudes of interconnected branches, leaves, and roots; their nested layers of interdependent creatures from entirely different kingdoms—they reveal the narrowness, inadequacy, and hypocrisy of the paradigms we typically use to understand life.

Mainstream science recognizes that the cells within the leaves of a tree are indisputably alive—and that they have a great deal in common with microalgae and other single-celled organisms—but it does not regard those cells as organisms themselves. A leaf exists in more of a definitional limbo, typically characterized as a living tissue or organ rather than a living being. And yet there is no disagreement whatsoever about calling trees organisms, despite the abundant evidence that they are whole worlds unto themselves, crawling with animals and microbes and literally fused with symbiotic fungi. On what grounds, then, does Western science exclude forests, planets, and other living systems above the scale of an organism from the realm of the living, even when those systems exhibit so many of the defining features of life, including a propensity to sustain and regulate themselves?

Much of this resistance comes from a historical legacy of flawed equivalencies between organisms and life at other scales. We must accept that the phenomenon we call life is not restricted to the level of the organism and that it does not look exactly the same in all its manifestations.

Life is a protean process, a multiscalar phenomenon. The cells that make up an ant, the ant itself, the colony, the tree beside which the colony tunneled, the forest of which the tree and colony are parts, and the planet as a whole—none is identical, but all are equally, thrillingly, defiantly alive. 

This story first appeared in Atmos Volume 11: Micro/Macro with the title, “Gaia Complex.”

Biome

Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.

Learn More