Abstract
This paper addresses the question of what organisms are and therefore what kinds of biological entities qualify as organisms. For some time now, the concept of organismality has been eclipsed by the notion of individuality. Biological individuals are those systems that are units of selection. I develop a conception of organismality that does not rely on evolutionary considerations, but instead draws on development and ecology. On this account, organismality and individuality can come apart. Organisms, in my view, are as Godfrey-Smith puts it “essentially persisters.” I argue that persistence is underpinned by differentiation, integration, development, and the constitutive embeddedness of organisms in their worlds. I examine two marginal cases, the Portuguese Man O’ War and the honey bee colony, and show that both count as organisms in light of my analysis. Next, I examine the case of holobionts, hosts plus their microsymbionts, and argue that they can be counted as organisms even though they may not be biological individuals. Finally, I consider the question of whether other, less tightly integrated biological systems might also be treated as organisms.
Highlights
Some things are living and some are not
My approach to what I call the organism question—the question of what organisms are—is inspired by Peter Godfrey-Smith’s distinction between biological individuals and organisms, which he describes as essentially persisters
Whether presupposed or explicitly used, some notion of the organism is hard to avoid in the biological sciences (Pepper and Herron 2008; Huneman and Wolfe 2010), and is significant for philosophers of biology
Summary
Some things are living and some are not. Under the heading “living things” come entities at various levels of biological organization. Some are called “organisms.” the term “organism” does not pick out organismal entities uniformly—that is, among all the things that are considered to be whole living systems, some are regarded as indisputably organisms, and others are accorded only qualified organismic status Perhaps this is because it is not clear why some biological systems should count as organisms and others should not. My approach to what I call the organism question—the question of what organisms are—is inspired by Peter Godfrey-Smith’s distinction between biological individuals (bearers of fitness, units of selection) and organisms, which he describes as essentially persisters. Persistence, in this sense, is an ontogenetic rather than a phylogenetic notion. It is intended as a contribution to the enrichment of the vocabulary and conceptual repertoire of theoretical biology rather than as a set of claims that form the basis for empirical predictions
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