Biological Individuality Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The theme about individuation and persistence of living entities is one of the central issues in the philosophy of biology. Embrace the different types of entities inhabiting the biological world, as the tentative to define their limits well, question biological ontology directly. In this perspective, it is important to focus first on the place occupied by the organism in biology. In the life sciences, the organism represents traditionally the paradigmatic example of the biological individual. However, it is important to emphasize that, despite the intuitive connection between the organism and the individual, contemporary biology has been able to make wider use of the concept of the individual. Thus, the contours of what was apprehended as belonging to the living world has been enlarged by the recognition of several types of biological individuals, among which we find not only so-called "traditional" organisms, but also a variety of entities such as protists, RNA molecules, prions, viruses and bacteria of all kinds. In addition, this new vision of the biological individual has been used to illustrate the different levels of biological organization. This idea is confirmed by the logical structure of the principle of natural selection, which is sufficiently abstract to be applied at all levels of biological organization. Thus the notion of “unit of selection” has become the most common criterion as defining a biological individual, emphasizing its evolutionary character. An individual corresponds, according to this vision, to an entity subject to the force of natural selection, whose causal power acts on this unity as a whole. In this sense, the discussion focuses on the level - genes, cells, organisms, superorganisms, species, ecosystems - where selection acts, in which the organism can be considered a simple level between a variety of levels of selection.
Consequently, the extension of the limits of biological ontology allowed, on the one hand, to question the concept of the individual by releasing it from the reference to the organism, and on the other hand, to relativize the importance of the organism within the biological discourse. From there, philosophers and biologists question the necessity of erecting organisms as an indispensable category for thinking about life. However, we argue that, to contribute to the development of biological individuality theme, we must give voice to another discourse on individuality, which emerges from discussions on the ontology of organisms. It is towards the systemic tradition that we must turn our attention, in order to extend research on the nature of biological individuality in the light of a renewed definition of the organism. Thus, we assumes an important distinction between two non-exclusive biological tendencies about the problem of the biological individual: the Darwinian individual on one side, and the ontogenetic individual on the other.
In an ontogenetic approach, an individual, far from being the entity that undergoes the action of selection during evolutionary time, corresponds to the entity that self-determines during its individual life time. Thus, this approach is not based on a hierarchical evolutionary vision in which the organism represents a simple level of analysis between a plurality of biological individuals. On the contrary, it is based on a more physiological conception, centered on biological organization. The question of the ontology of organisms then takes the form of an inquiry into the peculiarity of this form of biological individuality which is, since Kant, characterized by natural objects made of things related into “the unity of a whole by being reciprocally cause and effect of their form”.