Superorganism emergence

"We actually had meetings where we planned for a turf war between the Mexicans and the Hells Angels over methamphetamine," says retired DEA agent Mike Heald, who headed the San Francisco meth task force, "but it turned out they realized they'd make more money by working together."

10/26/2007
Another example of external pressure increasing internal cooperation.

10/23/2007
possibly relevant study in social organization, as seen on reddit.

9/30/2007
From Reeve HK, Holldobler B 2007. 'The emergence of a superorganism through intergroup competition.' PNAS 104(23):9736-40:

Abstract:
Surveys of insect societies have revealed four key, recurring organizational trends: (i) The most elaborated cooperation occurs in groups of relatives. (ii) Cooperation is typically more elaborate in species with large colony sizes than in species with small colony sizes, the latter exhibiting greater internal reproductive conflict and lesser morphological and behavioral specialization. (iii) Within a species, per capita brood output typically declines as colony size increases. (iv). The ecological factors of resource patchiness and intergroup competition are associated with the most elaborated cooperation. Predictions of all four patterns emerge elegantly from a game-theoretic model in which within-group tug-of-wars are nested within a between-group tug-of-war. In this individual selection model, individuals are faced with the problem of how to partition their energy between investment in intercolony competition versus investment in intracolony competition, i.e., internal tugs-of-war over shares of the resources gained through intergroup competition. An individual's evolutionarily stable investment in between-group competition (i.e., within-group cooperation) versus within-group competition is shown to increase as within-group relatedness increases, to decrease as group size increases (for a fixed number of competing groups), to increase as the number of competing groups in a patch increases, and to decrease as between-group relatedness increases. Moreover, if increasing patch richness increases both the number of individuals within a group and the number of competing groups, greater overall cooperation within larger groups will be observed. The model presents a simple way of determining quantitatively how intergroup conflict will propel a society forward along a "superorganism continuum."