Facebook Is Not A Brain, And Other Failed Metaphors

It sounds cool to say maybe the Internet has turned us all into one giant superorganism, as Robert Wright does today in the Opinionator blog at the New York Times. But before we bandy about coold-sounding words, it's necessary to think hard about what they mean–particularly, what they mean to the biologists who first developed them as concepts.

The word superorganism can describe an ant colony or any other society of animals in which the individuals function like cells in a body. They come in ...