Conclusion

This paper aimed to introduce the concept of human society as a multizoa organism, i.e. an organism made of many animals, and to provide a brief overview of some of the applications of multizoa theory. Crucially, it did not aim to exhaust the list of applications, but rather to lay the groundwork for their future exploration.

Instead of having human society and Earth be part of a single organism as the Gaia theory proposes, multizoa theory defines human society as a plant-like multizoa organism that is rooted on Earth’s surface. However, that does not minimize the extreme importance of the planet in human society’s survival. As a plant’s survival depends on the health of the soil it is planted in, so too does a plant-like multizoa organism depend on the health of the planet it is ‘planted’ in. The process of evolution through natural selection on Earth has led to the development of plants that have an intimate relationship with the soil that they are surrounded by, where they continually replenish it with nutrients just as they extract the nutrients that they need, and that may be an evolutionary lesson for multizoa organisms – no known stationary plants destroy the soil that they are in, and that may just be because the process of multicellular evolution through natural selection has deemed such a “trait” maladaptive. This could suggest that human society as a multizoa organism may be most successful in its survival and reproduction during the process of multizoa natural selection by treating Earth in a sustainable way.

In emphasizing the unitary nature of the worldwide human society, multizoa theory does not seek to diminish the importance of each individual human which makes it up. On the contrary, the health of a multizoa organism is dependent on the health of each person that is part of that organism, just like the health of a multicellular organism is dependent upon the health of the cells which constitute it. Moreover, multizoa theory proposes that the intelligence of a multizoa organism is partly predicated upon the autonomy of its underlying people, upon the number of people within the society that have their basic necessities met unconditionally, and are free to explore other activities. This is based on the parallel with neurons in the associative cortices, which are thought to be responsible for the higher-order thinking processes within the human brain. ¹ Within classical biology, intelligence is thought to be an important factor in determining the ability of an organism to survive selection pressures and to reproduce, and the same may apply to multizoa organisms. These are just some of the ways in which multizoa theory values the life of each individual person that makes up a society.

Finally, from a metabiological perspective, the similarity between multicellular and multizoa organisms cannot help but bring to mind the concept of self-similarity. A self-similar unit is one that is exactly or mostly similar to parts of itself. ² Going one step above (or rather, below), there is also self-similarity between individual cells and the multicellular organisms that form it. After all, the name given to the specialized structures within cells is “organelles”, since they are reminiscent of the organs of multicellular organisms. Individual cells have been shown to display primitive forms of virtually all features of multicellular organisms, including sensory processing via vision, intelligence, social cohesion, and others. ² Self-similarity is a property of fractals, which have previously been associated with other natural phenomena.35 With the addition of multizoa theory, we can now trace self-similar patterns between biological entities that exist at three different orders of magnitude– cells, which are made of interdependent molecules, multicellular organisms, which are made of interdependent cells, and multizoa organisms, which are made of interdependent humans. This self-similarity is approximate rather than exact, since there are features which distinguish the biological units that exist at each order of magnitude. Nevertheless, it is a feature prominent enough to warrant attention, and perhaps to encourage further investigation.