Sunshine Skyways

According to the Seattle Community Network, a "community is not just a collection of individual human beings. It is a super-organism that belongs to and is part of culture, composed of interactions between people, everything that is learned" (my emphasis). That a community is equated to a superorganism is reminiscent of plant ecologist Frederick Clements' argument that a plant community is literally a superorganism (Hubbell). Whether a community is literally or figuratively a superorganism, such thinking contradicts the methodological individualists, who posit that society or community is nothing more than a collection of individual actors. Another metaphor, but from chemistry, is that two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen combine to create water, which is unlike its constituent elements, but, at the same time, is essentially H 2 O. Are communities more than the sum of their individual members? Do interrelationships within a community create things that would not result from individual actions without community?