Bees and Humans fit the definition. Therefor, aggregations of bees and humans, like hives and countries, also fit the definition.
"Countries" seem more of a stretch, as replicating would technically mean creating other countries like itself. Not just sustaining itself into the future.
Do hives seed other hives? I suppose they would, so they better fit the definition.
Individual humans don't quite fit the definition, many don't reproduce at all, the ones that do only do in groups of two. Strictly speaking you'd have to wait and see whether a given human child eventually reproduces to decide it's alive...
But with bees it's much worse -- in each hive, only the queen and some drones reproduce, most bees are worker bees that can't. So this definition fits bee hives better than it does individual bees.
Seems the definition would need to say something about the species as a whole reproducing. But that leads to the species definition problem. And what about that tortoise that was the last of its species?
> "Countries" seem more of a stretch, as replicating would technically mean creating other countries like itself. Not just sustaining itself into the future.
The world is full of countries, nations and so forth. At some time in the distant past there was no nations. After that there was one. Now there is over a hundred, with the corpses of many more lying in our past.
All usable land on Earth has been claimed now so they have no space to grow in number without cannabilising one another. Their walls have grown hard and inflexible with the passage of time and laws and agreements, and the evolutionary pressures of conflict have subsided of late, as they cannot move against one another without incurring the wrath of alpha predators, and the alpha predators cannot attack one another without the assurity of mutual destruction.
But countries live a long time, and their frame of reference is different from our own. Their moods encompass entire generations of the lives of mankind. They will eventually again fight among themselves unless ordered into cells within a higher organism. They will fight and devour one another, birthing new border states or vassal states. To any greater being it would appear like an almost peaceful dance, the ebb and flow of lines on a map, the respiration of civilisation.
To us it would be every bit as savage and chaotic as it must be for the cells and bacteria which comprise us.
Well EO Wilson posited certain eusocial insect colonies, including bees, as a super-organism. I think the idea has some currency in biology. The idea is that Darwinian selection is acting upon the colony, so it is the unit of evolution. Remember that eukaryotic cells are a symbosis of two prokaryotic cells.
Not sure how often or even if countries self-reproduce.
I'm mulling this over... It's an interesting idea for sure. I'm not sure that it can't be reduced to human populations in general, which makes it more like the super-organism Wilson describes.
OTOH, not all human populations are states, as in countries, and arguable that is the "organism" said to be reproducing itself....
