Giving in.....and cashing in? The state of social sciences

To put it bluntly, the social sciences have largely been a scientific flop.  Despite ample funding for decades and claims to be science, no one can say that as a result of the knowledge gained through social science research, our society is socially healthier or happier or really even more self-understanding than decades ago.  One could ask why we still bother to invest in anything other than the most safe and useful kinds of social science (like, perhaps, demography or economic statistics that are measurements rather than 'theories' of social life).  Perhaps we should close down the departments and let the jobs go to fields that better deliver the goods?

Never!  An article  in the NY Times suggests that, yes, social sciences have failed -- or rather, have accomplished what they set out to do a century ago, describe society, and are now stagnating -- but that shifting to hypertech approaches will save them, and that this will require dissassembling current departmental structure in favor of new-fangled ones, as was done in the hard sciences.

The author says that we've now long known that, for example, too much concentration of power in a few money oligarchs leads to social disparity, and that racism is part of human nature, and that health disparities exist, other things of that sort  Instead of continuing the relentless, but unproductive restudy of this litany of topics, what we need is to set up departments for these new get-with-the-modern-program technologies.

... social scientists should devote a small palace guard to settled subjects and redeploy most of their forces to new fields like social neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and social epigenetics, most of which, not coincidentally, lie at the intersection of the natural and social sciences. Behavioral economics, for example, has used psychology to radically reshape classical economics.

But what is the point of any academic department, especially in the sciences?  One might say that it is to learn truths and teach them to students who will live better and/or more edifying lives.  But is it simply to document what researchers see, such as that racism and health disparities exist, as the author suggests the social sciences have done very well?  In the case of 'science', we also expect research to lead to solving or at least ameliorating problems we face, and this is particulary true of the social sciences -- they should help us improve group and economic behavior, political and intercultural relations, improve education and social well-being, and relieve mental anguish, etc., should they not?  And we look, whether properly or not, to university faculty to take a leading role in this. 

From this point of view, the problem is not that we have now long known basic facts about society, psychology, economics, and politics, but that there has not been the dividend to the society that's been paying the bills to keep these fields in business. The state of our society these days is prima facie evidence that social sciences, despite a half-century of substantial funding (including by NIH), have not been delivering the goods.

Now one source of troubles in the social sciences has been a strong anti-science movement that has gone under various names, in various disciplines.  One term is 'postmodernism', whose advocates basically argue that personal subjective impressions exist but that social phenomena aren't being or can't be subject to ideas like laws of Nature.  This has been very divisive, and like many things became an ideology of its own, that has driven some departments to hive off scientific branches in a mutually desired separation from militant subjectivism.  But that rift doesn't seem to be the author of this article's problem--at least it's not so stated, whose argument is that social sciences have been successful up to a point, but then stalled.  Why it stalled is not explained.  Is it that what is settled are just some bland generalizations rather than precise predictions?

From its beginning in the Enlightenment period, an important and explicit goal and criterion of science has been to manipulate and control Nature.  In that light, it is not easy to see the failure of social sciences when it comes to many social issues we face.  We have an unbudgable drug problem -- illegal substance abuse as well as pervasive lifetime meds including mood-related therapy.  Those in the lower classes (why are there still lower classes?) are in jail, unemployed, poorly educated and hovering fearfully, to the sound of gunshots, in their locked tenements at night.  Hm, and there still seems to be a race problem.  Everyone in the middle class has to have a permanent personal therapist, and belong to a gym to get some exercize and relief from their daily cubicles.  Kids are overwhelmingly not receiving good educations.  Our governments are spying on everyone and democracy is retreating, with fewer participants and private interests buying influence.  And we need not mention the general gun problem.

What about teen sex and pregnancy?  Or, how about our diet, and its health consequences, not to mention our failure to accept a social contract by which we agree to care for each other (as in, for example, nationalized health care and decent welfare programs that give funds to the actual needy)?  Are increasing economic disparity and unconstrained greed by bankers and boom-and-bust cycles signs of a successful social science program -- when we've known the underlying social facts, as the author says, for a long time?  And what about crime cycles?  They occur, but nobody knows why.

And, well, is being gay a disease, a genetic trait, or suddenly (and historically, again) simply part of the normal range that needs to be recognized?  Why was it unconstitutional to have same-sex marriage a few years ago but suddenly it's constitutional and just fine...but only in some societies?  And then how about the world's 7 billion population, and growing, or the choking air and warming climate due to uncontrolled urbanization, exurbanization, suburbanization, and paving over of farmland (and uncontrolled soil erosion)?  We can think internationally, and that brings us to militant Islam (cf, formerly militant Christianity), to genocide (e.g., Rwanda, Congo, Yugoslavia).  Or blood diamonds?

One cannot fault the social sciences for not solving all the world's problems.  The problems are hard and there isn't agrement on what is wrong or what to do (some people benefit from blood diamonds, inequity, and recreational drugs and would not want the system to change).  And after all, even if biomedical sciences are sciences, people still get diseases--with few exceptions the same diseases we got before NIH started pouring money into biomedical research.  We have said much here in our blog about the over-promises of medicine, but there is, at least, a direct mandate to try to do something about the problems studied, and in many areas it actually gets done.  But if the successes in social sciences are true, then why have things stalled in the progress department?

This a sad situation, because in many ways the social sciences are far, far more important to our lives, and life-long, than even medical science. After all, we do all have to die of some cause some day, but that is usually brief relative to a lifetime, unlike the long-lasting effects of war, poverty, social discrimination, endless mental anguish, poor education, uncontrollable economies and their job and other consequences.  Knowing this and knowing about human cultures and their behavior, change, and structure, and about human behavior, are very important and it would be a major tragedy if, universities chuck them for venal reasons, (investing in chemistry because it brings in grant money), because every student should hear their wisdom.  That's certainly true in anthropology, our particular field.

But perhaps the social sciences should level with us more openly and with less selfishness: universities do have every right to ask whether they should shift resources to more effective areas of research.  Instead of disemboweling the Times author's field, he wants a bunch of new tech-based departments formed, which among other things is usually another way to acquire buildings, administrative staff, and lower teaching responsibilities, but as what?  a reward for a history of failure?  There is nothing wrong with arguing that, say, network analysis or game theory, or what-you-will could improve the yield, but those could be (and already are) studied in social science departments without having special centers, and many of these research areas have actually been around for a long time, again, without much yield.  For example, the idea of social networks, one of the author's recommended new disciplines, isn't exactly new.

The issues we rattled off above are ones whose nature and prevalence have changed dramatically in all sorts of ways, even just during your and our lifetimes, and repeatedly over known history.   They have not changed because of what professors at universities say, as a rule, but as a result of the internal workings of societies in the real world.  Indeed, that cultures evolves on their own, with humans being relatively biologically constant, has long been known.

To suggest that the issues in understanding social phenomena are genetic is really preposterous.  The societal changes have been major, but the gene pool hasn't changed!  Certainly some genotypes may make someone a bit more likely to do this or that, but the predictive power to date has generally been poor, and cultural context is manifestly and vastly more important than genotype, as we've said many times and about which there is even widespread agreement.   Let those who advocate new-tech for old problems demonstrate that it will actually make a real difference, without making promises (as does genetics) that this will solve all ills.  After all, if it's science it should lead to rigorous theory with predictive powers, and those then should be translatable into policy and amelioration of problems.  This seems to be what the author is claiming.

Rigorous understanding of its problems is very difficult and the social sciences probably need a good dose of slow-down, scale-back and rethinking their basic epistemology -- their way of understanding the world or posing well-posed questions.  If students had a better understanding of society and its issues (i.e., the faculty were teaching more and doing less multivariate regression on social survey data, or fMRI scans, or computer-based observations on paid undergraduate volunteers, etc.), there might be some at least edification in their lives, perhaps even some new understandings (if knowledge is even relevant to human social behavior).

Technology is challenging to learn and use, but that's often a rather mechanical process, and it is trivially easy to invoke technology as if that by itself will lead to answers.  We see this in genetics and other omics fields every day.  Anyone can buy a DNA sequencer or software to analyze brain scans.  So is the plea to shift social science to such areas a sideways glance at where the money is, and the societal will to spend it?  Maybe not, but it certainly has a familiar ring, that we hear all the time in biomedical circles.  It rings of physics envy, which goes all the way back at least to Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx (and, in some ways, Darwin himself).

Maybe our society is falling for snake-oil promises by biomedical sciences, NIH, the journals, and the media.  But it is not hard to think that the suggestion that the answer for social science problems is the same technologies, and invoking evolution and behavior genetics, is either very shallow, very gullible, or a very cynical strategy to get at the public purse.  And anyone over the age of consent should be aware of the history of abuse that a fervor for geneticizing or Darwinizing behavior leads to.  It is naive not to be concerned that the gushing rush in this direction today does not pose risks of some sorts of repeat of the mind-set of the eugenics era.  Change a few terms here and there, and the conceptual rhetoric is very similar.

Fortunately, it's not very likely that the social sciences' lobbying will shift much money their way. After all, the new genomics itself, despite decades of hype and billions of dollars, has not made much of a dent even in major health problems. Most of our health gains have been due to things like environmental changes (exercise, better diet, etc.), rather than most of the kinds of research that's been so publicized. Besides that, geneticists are already grabbing the behavior genetics/evolutionary psychology brass ring.   But the lack of dramatic progress even in medicine suggests that there seems to be no precedent or natural success-based momentum to draw money, already getting so tight that geneticists are crying in their champagne, away into the historically low-yielding fields that have been floundering.  For that to happen, we need to hear some actual ideas, not a list of current fads or technologies, nor a plea for new research centers in times of fiscal stress.

What is needed is to examine everything, root and branch, and resource deprivation rather than largesse is most likely to engender it.  Just to take some illustrative examples of business as usual issues that should be considered seriously, is multivariate regression using off the shelf software packages, standard practice in the social sciences, the best way to understand social behavior?  Are experiments on college students, the best way to understand society as a whole?  Is survey research reliable?  If society is changing so that the same kinds of surveys have to be done again and again, then something is wanting in the explanatory realm.  Will 'experts' on campuses, publishing in journals few people read, change political vested interests, eliminate the many emotional seeds of racism or greed for differential wealth, other peoples' resources, or political power?  Even in principle, how can social science, or behavior genetics for that matter, change smug, hypocritical religions and their willingness to slaughter each other?  Or are these things simply beyond the realm of what our society views as 'research' and not well suited to the type of activities we call 'science'?

As we said above, in our opinion the issues and problems in the social sciences' purview are, in truth, more important to more people in more ways and for more years than most of those in the hard sciences, even including much of medical science.  How should they be addressed?

You be the judge!

When a fly's smell is bad, its life stinks.

Is the system by which humans detect odors, olfaction, as deeply conserved through evolution as we've long assumed?  Olfaction presents an important chemosensory challenge to organisms, like us, that evaluate their environment by picking up some subset of its chemical aspects.  A wide diversity of animals smell with a series of more or less randomly varying cell-surface receptors on the olfactory tissue which is exposed to the outside world (e.g., the lining of your nose). 

Human olfactory system; 1: Olfactory bulb 2: Mitral cells 3: Bone 4: Nasal Epithelium 5: Glomerulus 6: Olfactory receptor cells; Wikimedia

Olfactory receptor neuron; Wikimedia

Neurons express olfactory receptor (OR) molecules, which are proteins (and hence coded by specific genes) that have a binding pocket in the part that sticks outside of the olfactory neuron.  There are hundreds of different OR genes in the genome, and they vary in their amino acid content so that the binding pocket of each responds only to specific aspects of an odorant molecule.  A given odorant will be detected by only a subset of ORs; this has been known for a long time, but how it happens is still unknown and debated.  Recent arguments suggest that certain aspects of quantum entanglement (rather than molecular binding) are responsible.

Now, if all ORs were expressed by each olfactory neuron, each cell would respond to every odorant, sending "I detect this!" messages to the brain.  Whether you were smelling lion or chocolate, your brain would get the same message--a 'bell' rung by each neuron.

Instead, through various mechanisms each neuron only expresses one of these many OR gene products.  The mechanism is very specific, though currently basically not understood, but that is not our topic today.  The point is that when chocolate molecules waft through your nose, they 'ding' only some of the neurons.  Lion smell dings others.  Indeed, the wiring to the brain's detection center, the olfactory bulb, sends signals from cells using the same OR to the same places in the brain.  This allows your brain to do the bookkeeping and keep an orderly account of what's out there; as a result you can tell if you are about to become a meal or partake of one. 

Insects have a very different repertoire of OR genes, but have similar one-gene mode of using them.  Well, that at least is the story as it has been believed since the whole single-gene per neuron expression and highly variable, numerous OR genome was discovered--a striking finding for which Axel and Buck deservedly won a Nobel prize in 2004.  But does the system actually work that way?

Flies, the standard laboratory Drosophila species, are easy and quick to work with compared to mammals, and one can do genetic engineering to test ideas like these.  And a recent paper in PLoS One by Tharada et al. reports just that, their test of whether the single-neuron unique-address system actually works in insects as has been thought.

Dorsal view of a cutaway fly head showing the main elements of the olfactory pathway. Odours are sensed by olfactory receptor neurons in the antennae and maxillary palps. These neurons project axons along the antennal nerve to the antennal lobe glomeruli, where they are sorted according to chemosensitivity. From there the information is relayed by projection neurons in the inner and medial antennocerebral tract (iACT and mACT) to the mushroom body and to the lateral horn. Gustatory stimuli are sensed by gustatory receptor neurons in the labellum on the tip of the proboscis, the elongated fly mouthpiece.  Source: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Keene and Waddell 2007

Basically, they found that flies engineered to co-express more than one OR in a given neuron were less able to detect and find a secondary food source in their experimental chamber, compared to control flies expressing only a single OR per neuron (the normal pattern). The experimental group that were forced to search for secondary food had lower survivorship and were thus less fit.
While any experimental study of this sort is somewhat artificial relative to the real world, and perhaps specialists will raise various methodological questions beyond our ability to judge the study, this does seem to be the first direct evidence that the presumed single-expression neural bookkeeping hypothesis about odorant detection, and its evolutionary basis, are supportable.

This is important first to the degree that it confirms prior ideas, suggesting that we understand at least major elements of this system.  More importantly, perhaps, it further opens doors towards understanding the mechanism by which single gene per cell expression patterns are achieved.  One can't automatically extrapolate from flies to vertebrates, but the similarity in gene families and expression pattern suggest that such extrapolations are  not entirely fanciful.

Or, put another way, when a fly's smell is bad, its life stinks!

When the answer is, "It's hard to say...."

Often in science, physical as well as biological, when one asks an important question, the answer given by the expert who may be expounding on his/her research or on the state of play in the field, is "Oh, it's hard to say!".

Examples would be how much risk will be associated with a given environmental exposure, how much life expectancy will change by the year 2050, how many planets there are per galaxy, or how high ocean levels will be by 2050, and so forth.

Science is stuck with what we know today, and we don't know what we'll know tomorrow.  But our society has high regard for experts (perhaps, experts favoring a given person's personal interests or viewpoint), and of course in many areas we need to make policy.

But we scientists are proud and we don't advance our careers by saying what the truth is in these circumstances:  "We don't know!"   Most of the time, that is how we should properly translate "It's hard to say."  Or, perhaps, better, "It is currently impossible to know that."  That is the honest answer and if we did our jobs better we'd be saying that, clearly, more often.

One might respond to this by arguing that while we don't literally know the answer, we at least can give some estimate of it, some approximation.  So the typical hedging answer isn't all that wrong.  Indeed, often the expert in question would say something like  "It's hard to say, but based on current data it will be about xxx...."  Or they'll give a range of possibilities ("it will likely be between xxx and yyy...").

Now, there is nothing ethically wrong with giving such vague or approximate answers, but in many if not most situations, the expert doesn't really even know these xxx and yyy values and is just giving his/her personal opinion.  Sometimes the answer is simply a very wild guess (how many planets in the stars in an average galaxy?), with almost no connection to real data.  How did upright posture evolve?  We typically can't predict the future values of causal variables, or really know what they were in the past (as in evolutionary adaptation reconstructions), or what new technology might let us see.  Often, we can't predict such things even in principle.  Yet we see such things said almost every day in the popular media and even in Discussion sections of science journal articles and the like.

Science is largely about what we don't know.  We should acknowledge that so that the public is aware of it, and so we keep ourselves aware of it.  Instead, too often we act as if "hard to tell" means we basically know but not very precisely, and too often that kind of connotation is used for self-interested purposes.

It is unnerving to realize how much we don't know, even if it is rather inspiring to realize how much science has learned, and even how much for the first time just in our own lifetimes.  But a more sober, slow and carefully considered examination of what we don't know--and why we don't know it--might lead to even more inspiring attempts to push ahead.

Of course, it's hard to tell how well that might work!

The deep epistemological problem in 'personalized genomic medicine' . . . that nobody wants to acknowledge

Two recent studies, both published in The Lancet, one from Denmark, and reported in this BBC story, and the other from England and reported by Gina Kolata in The New York Times, clearly illustrate one of the most important issues in personalized genomic medicine. The BBC writes, "People born in 1915 scored higher in cognitive tests in their 90s compared with those born a decade earlier, according to the study in The Lancet."  People now living into their 90s are experiencing a substantially higher quality of life than in the recent past, or that could have been predicted in any reliable way.  They are experiencing much less loss of mental function as well.  And the story in the NY Times says dementia rates are dropping as 'predicted'.  Senility, clearly, is not inherent in the human genome.

Also on the BBC site there's a story reporting that air pollution is harmful for people with at-risk hearts.  This is tragic for those people, and had been suspected but not specifically predicted.  The point is not just that we should pay heed to the quality of our air, but that we can't really predict where there will be more, or less air pollution, nor pollution by what mix of agents, and so on.   Yet, if there are genomic factors affecting heart vulnerability (regardless of whether there are other genomic factors related to how we respond to airborne pollution), we cannot reliably estimate the risk associated with those genomic factors.

These stories are interesting, given that we are being promised, with few and often rather hidden caveats, that if you just let investigators sequence your genome, they'll be able to predict your future disease risks (and companies and various advocates of genomics-everywhere, promise that other personal traits like academic ability, musical or athletic ability, or tendency to abuse drugs or commit violent crimes etc., will also be predictable from your DNA sequence).

The longevity study is great news for those of us in the dotage range!  But it has much deeper meaning when it comes to the promises being made by the genomics industry.  The aging experiences of two cohorts were very different, but surely their genotypes were not.  Thus, the genotypes of neither cohort, those born in 1905 or those born in 1915, could have been used to predict either healthy or less healthy aging.  That is, neither result was predictable from genes.  That the result was 'predicted' as described in the NY Times story doesn't mean that it was or could have been predicted in any precise way, for the reasons we discuss here, and of course this has nothing to do with specific genetically based predictions, nor can it, in any useful way.

This is what it means to point out that environment, whatever that includes, is not just a trivial variable to be regressed out in terms of genotype effects.  It also shows the hollowness of the rationale that epidemiologists often use to justify big genomics studies, that they just want to be able to regress out genotype effects so as to identify the more important environmental effects.  That assumes, inherently, that genotype-based risks are stable and well-estimated.

Clearly, and to an important extent, most predictions based on GWAS and other related omics approaches, cannot be taken seriously except for very clear-cut strong effects--most of which do not and did not require massive genome-wide studies to identify.

Since environments--physical and lifestyle, etc.--cannot be predicted, not even in principle, this is why we  repeatedly say that the promises used to justify much that is going on today in genomics and biomedical genetics is more to satisfy the investigators than to deliver the promised benefits.  The point that environmental effects are estimated retrospectively (based on today's GWAS subjects' past history), but personalized medicine is about prospective (future) risk, and that future risk cannot be predicted when environments are important.

Every week there are studies showing these points.  This is not mysterious, nor new, nor technically subtle.  But the problem is fundamental.  So is it being conveniently ignored by those who want to continue with current approaches?  Is it wrong to question their underlying motives?

Progress in gene therapy: a promise that could come to pass?

We often write about the excesses and over-promising of human genetics, but here are two stories on something genetics seems to have gotten right.  Successful gene therapy stories both, they represent, to us, a use of money and expertise that fulfills the promises of the field and actually changes lives.

Both reports are in the July 11 issue of Science.  The first (paywalled, but here's one summary and here's another) describes gene therapy for MLD, metachromatic leukodystrophy, an inherited neurological disease caused by deficiency in an enzyme that is required for maintenance of the myelin sheath, the protective lipid layer around nerve fibers.

The disorder is caused by variants in the ARSA gene, as described in the paper:

ARSA deficiency causes accumulation of the enzyme substrate, sulfatide, in oligodendrocytes, microglia and certain neurons of the Central Nervous System (CNS), and in Schwann cells and macrophages of the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS). This build-up of sulfatide leads to widespread demyelination and neuro-degeneration, which is ultimately manifested in patients as severe progressive motor and cognitive impairment.

Without myelin, nerves in the central and peripheral nervous systems eventually cease to function properly.  MLD becomes progressively worse and patients usually die not many years after onset.  Incidence is from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 160,000 worldwide, with some populations having much higher rates.  

Researchers used a lentivirus to introduce the corrected form of the gene into cells, first demonstrating proof-of-principle in their mouse model of MLD in which they showed that disease could be both prevented and corrected.  They report that transferring the strategy to people was a challenge, and one major potential set-back is leukemia as a consequence of the treatment, although they have altered the method for introducing the virus into cells in an effort to circumvent this.

They have now treated 9 patients with early-onset MLD, and report the outcome for the first three patients after 24 months for one and 18 months for the other two. The children's cognitive and motor skills development is currently age-appropriate, they have no signs of demyelination and no signs of leukemia. That's very encouraging.

The other report is of gene therapy in children with Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, an immunodeficiency disorder caused by mutations in the WASp gene, which codes for a protein that regulates the cytoskeleton of the cell.  The platelets of affected children are small and function improperly, and children are at high risk of autoimmune disorders and malignancies.

Researchers used the same method of introducing the functioning version of the gene into patients and report results after 20-32 months of follow-up, and again, they are encouraging.  The patients now have healthy immune systems and no signs of leukemia.

This is good news for people with these disorders, but it's also good news for the field of gene therapy.  The field has held great promise for decades, but the challenge has been to develop methods for safely introducing genes into the cells where they are needed.  It sounds as though progress has been made.

Engineering: Where science really works
Science as an exploration of the unknown has to juggle various aspects of its agenda.  These include the difficulties of the problems themselves, technological limitations, costs, and of course various professional and other vested interests. Sometimes 'we like sheep' follow fads and current thinking without really considering what we're doing.  When nature is complex, or causation unclear or highly complicated, we often falter.  And we sometimes wish that things were actually simple, even when we know very well that's incorrect.

But one thing that can be said about human beings: we are great at technology.  Technology tends to work.  So when a cause really is known, and there is a clear objective, there's a good chance we can figure out how to achieve it.  We are terrific at engineering solutions for known problems. That's the case with strong genetic causation of a disease.  The objective is to intervene to prevent or treat the disease.

The challenge may be great, but we have a way of getting there eventually with technological advances.  The two examples we see in the current literature seem hopeful in that sense.  They also constitute what we think are unexceptionably good ways to invest health-related funds.

This won't change the fact that Nature is not compelled to yield easily to us, even in engineering.  Nor is there any reason that success in engineering will guarantee that the rest of science will yield to what are essentially engineering approaches that, as is these days so often basically the case.

But it is gratifying that many times we are able to solve problems, once we have properly identified them.

Aeon essay

For today's post we're sending you over to Aeon Magazine, a new, free, open access, online publication that posts a new essay every weekday.  The essays fit one of five themes, from science to memoir to musings on society. The editors have done a stellar job inviting pieces from an incredibly diverse and talented group of writers.

It's a fine publication.  And I am honored to say that today's essay is mine.

This article is for my sister and brother-in-law, dairy goat farmers in Vermont.  The hardest working people I know.

Music and synchronized heartbeats

I once heard the otherworldly baroque cellist Anner Bylsma in concert.  It was many years ago, but I remember that he played some of the Bach cello suites, some of the most challenging and beautiful pieces of music that a cellist can play.  He commented with bemusement that he found it ironic that soloists were expected to sound like many musicians at once, while the many musicians in an orchestra section are expected to sound as one.

Here he is playing Suite no 1. It is simply majestic.  I know people who want to hear Bach as they lay dying, and this is why. 



Now comes a paper saying that musicians together may do more than sound as one.  Their hearts may beat as one.  Or rather, synchronize.  This is choir members, who apparently control their breathing enough that it affects their heart beat, and when they are singing in unison their hearts accelerate and decelerate together.  The authors of this paper discuss the implications of this for the health and well-being of the singers, but I prefer to think of it less prosaically.

Dictyostelium discoideum, slime mold, are amoeba that live in the soil. Their life cycles are interesting; at some stages they are single celled organisms going it alone, but when conditions are right (or wrong -- when the individuals sense that nutrients are being depleted, generally because there are too many amoeba consuming them), the individuals mass together, eventually becoming a fruiting body that releases spores and starts the cycle again. 

Dicty life cycle; Wikimedia Commons

Each aggregate may be comprised of multiple species.  Once they've come together, some cells will undergo apoptosis (that is, programmed cell death -- kill themselves) for the good of the group, even when it includes cells they aren't as close kin to as others.

But this phenomenon is not just a strange evolutionary quirk of slime mold.  Most if not all bacteria can do this.  They have what's called "quorum sensing" which allows them to detect the population density around them.  They respond to high population density in numerous ways, but one common response is to group together into a biofilm, a group of often diverse bacterial species that has a modicum of structure, and can do things that each cell cannot do alone, such as better resist antibiotics.  They have been doing this since before there were multicellular organisms as we know them.

Hive insects, ants, termites, wasps, bees, and so on, are similar.  Individual insects each contributing to the good of the hive, and each surviving only because of the hive.  Enough so that hives are often considered to be superorganisms.  This behavior probably evolved before vertebrates like us did.

Maybe choirs are superorganisms too.  As singers aggregate into groups, specializing as bass, alto, tenor, soprano, they can reach ethereal heights that those of us who sing in the shower cannot.  Perhaps it is good for the singers' health, but I think more, it is good for our souls.