Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives. "I" passes insensibly into a "we," "my" becomes "our" and individual faith loses its central importance. I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.

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Incidentally, this provides an easy rebuttal to the "corporations are already superintelligent" claim - while corporations have a variety of mechanisms for trying to provide their employees with the proper incentives, anyone who's worked for a big company knows that they employees tend to follow their own interests, even when they conflict with those of the company. It's certainly nothing like the situation with a cell, where the survival of each cell organ depends on the survival of the whole cell. If the cell dies, the cell organs die; if the company fails, the employees can just get a new job.

This seems to be a testable claim: Are military groups more efficient than companies at jobs companies typically do, given equivalent money/resources? For extra credit, do the same test for life-threatening jobs in which cooperation is paramount, such as coal mining, or working on overhead power lines. I don't think this is the case, or the military would want to contract for such jobs with private-sector businesses.

Police corps and fire departments may qualify here, since they do exhibit some similarity with military. But they occupy small niches - they surely do not justify a claim that "superorganisms" are always more efficient.