The Strangest Experiment Life Ever Ran On Itself — The Evolution of the Superorganism

A bee is not quite a creature. An ant is not quite a creature. They are cells — cells of an organism that decided to build itself not from molecules but from bodies. Evolution invented this trick at least five times, completely independently. A slime mold with no brain solves mathematical problems and built a network resembling the Tokyo rail system. A honeybee swarm votes on real estate without a single leader. An ant colony — whose genome was completely rewritten one hundred and fifty million years ago, as revealed by a landmark Cell study in September 2025 — operates as one organism with twenty million bodies. This is the superorganism: one of the strangest, most successful experiments in the four-billion-year history of life. And it raises one unavoidable question: is it happening again, right now, in us? Subscribe    / @theevolutionoflife2026   to Evolution of Life — new episodes every week.