Eusocial insects challenge the classical idea of the organism. Colonies of termites, ants, and bees are neither mere collections of individuals nor single unified agents. Instead, they are fields of enacted potential, where life is continuously negotiated across perspectives, roles, and time.
In this series, we explore how eusocial colonies organise themselves:
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How does a termite mound breathe, regulate climate, and grow without a single architect?
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How do ants solve complex foraging problems across sprawling networks?
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How do bees orchestrate activity and information through temporal synchrony and dances?
We examine each system through the readiness lens:
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Ability — the colony-scale repertoire of actions and adaptive potentials.
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Inclination — local biases shaping each individual’s readiness to act.
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Individuation — perspectival lenses through which individuals enact the colony’s potential.
Through this perspective, eusocial colonies are graded, dynamic wholes, where identity, coherence, and agency are relational, distributed, and emergent. This series invites us to see life not as a hierarchy of discrete units, but as a spectrum of enacted possibilities, continuously negotiated across the many.
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