Concept
Organism
Overview
An organism is any living thing that functions as an individual. Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Several criteria, few of which are widely accepted, have been proposed to define what constitutes an organism. Among the most common is that an organism has autonomous reproduction, growth, and metabolism. This would exclude viruses, even though they evolve like organisms.
Other problematic cases include colonial organisms; a colony of eusocial insects is organised adaptively, and has germ-soma specialisation, with some insects reproducing, others not, like cells in an animal's body. The body of a siphonophore, a jelly-like marine animal, is composed of organism-like zooids, but the whole structure looks and functions much like an animal such as a jellyfish, the parts collaborating to provide the functions of the colonial organism.
The evolutionary biologists David Queller and Joan Strassmann suggest that "organismality", the qualities or attributes that define an entity as an organism, has evolved socially as groups of simpler units (from cells upwards) came to cooperate without conflicts. They propose that cooperation should be used as the "defining trait" of an organism. This would treat many types of collaboration, including the fungus/alga partnership of different species in a lichen, or the permanent sexual partnership of an anglerfish, as an organism.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Just in the same way that the growth of an entire organism is carried on by abstracting from the environment substances like those composing the organism; so the production of each organ within the organism is carried on by abstracting from the substances contained in the organism, those required by this particular organ. Each organ at the expense of the organism as a whole, integrates with itself certain kinds and…
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, Volume 1
Names Organism several times; states what Organism is.
These four parallelisms will appear the more significant the more we contemplate them. While the points specified, are points in which societies agree with individual organisms, they are also points in which individual organisms agree with one another, and disagree with all things else. In the course of its existence, every plant and animal increases in mass, in a way not paralleled by inorganic objects: even such…
Herbert Spencer, Essays
The chapter “THE SOCIAL ORGANISM.” is titled for Organism; names Organism several times.
ORGANISM.—An organised being, whether plant or animal. ORTHOSPERMOUS.—A term applied to those fruits of the Umbelliferæ which have the seed straight. OSCULANT.—Forms or groups apparently intermediate between and connecting other groups are said to be osculant. OVA.—Eggs.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
States what Organism is; names Organism several times.
Philosophers who discussed Organism
Related ideas
- Cognition
- Animal
- Addison-Wesley
- Princeton University Press
- Homeostasis
- Immanuel Kant
- Ancient Greek
- Life
- Autonomy
- Virus
- Mutation
- Metabolism
- Microorganism
- Natural selection
- Species
- Richard Dawkins
- Individual
- Reproduction
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- The Monist
- Elsevier
- Cell (biology)
- Gene
- Group selection
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Enactivism.