I wouldn't necessarily include kudzu as something in which humans act as passive agents. You could argue that we are passively enabling it by not throwing copper salts all around its roots and actively exterminating it. But then it seems likely to survive in more or less its current form if humans suddenly disappeared from the planet one day. The same could not be said for the legal system or government.
I'm not exactly thrilled by the definition either. Although I do like the idea of separating the concept of intelligence from our human-centric notions. I do think that, as a species, we're going to kill ourselves off all the sooner if we don't raise our collective intelligence and more people start seeing many of our established traditional institutions as blind robots/robot factories.
A critical point, and one which I think is misjudged by the paranoid conspiracy-theory types, is whether he starts seeing any backlash for trying to establish these mechanisms in scientific terms. Because if the legal system and government did have greater survival intelligence than one human, and if our awareness of these notions is a threat to their supremacy, then they would surely squash him flat? Unless of course, the organisations invested in principles of science are more "intelligent" than the rest. In which case, yay?
On another level you could just suppose that organisations are containers for memes, and the containers are memes in of themselves, with as much recursion as you wish. But perhaps those terms are overused to the point of meaninglessness and ridicule?
