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What's the least complex organism known to man that exhibits signs of a social self-awareness?

Anti-social predators don't count, unfortunately, as social awareness is a required condition for the question I'm seeking an answer on. Please permit me to specify - I'm looking for -multicellular- organisms. Good answers to start with. Okay, let me narrow it down a bit. I'm looking for multicellular organisms with some form of "culture". Bees actually could qualify - I don't know enough about them to say they don't - but I define culture in an organism as behavior that is not genetically induced but rather inherited in some manner utilizing socialization skills. The bees do a dance, a sort of code to indicate where the good flowers are. If that dance varies from generation to generation like languages with humans, I would certainly consider that to be the type of self-awareness I had in mind. Other than that, dolphins teaching their children how to use sponges to avoid getting stung and monkeys learning how to wash their fruits and vegetables by watching humans do it - that would be the type of thing I was initially thinking about.

Public Comments

  1. The first thing that occurred to me was slime molds, but I'm not sure that these qualify as multicellular (let alone self-aware). Another problem is a definition of social self-awareness; what precisely does this mean? Are social insects such as bees and ants self-aware in this manner?
  2. Bacteria have recently been proven to be social. A scientist has been studying Human bacteria of which she has determined over 10,000 different types (species?), and has discovered social interaction amongst them, including, but not limited to, communicating their feeding habits, movements, environmental changes, etc.
  3. Social insects (some bees, wasps, hornets, ants and termites) have turned reproduction over to a single, well cared for, individual--the queen. The individuals, or workers, all advance their genes into the next generation by caring for their mother, the queen. In this way an insect society is like a "superorganism" in which the individuals are analogous to its cells. This demonstrates social self awareness - in other words, knowing their caste or place in the community and advancing the community exclusively through that role.
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