Biological individuality : integrating scientific, philosophical, and historical perspectives /
Scott Lidgard and Lynn K. Nyhart.
- Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, (c)2017.
- 1 online resource
Includes bibliographies and index.
Introduction: working together on individuality / The work of biological individuality: concepts and contexts / Cells, colonies, and clones: individuality in the volvocine algae / Individuality and the control of life cycles / Discovering the ties that bind: cell-cell communication and the development of cell sociology / Alternation of generations and individuality, 1851 / Spencer's evolutionary entanglement: from liminal individuals to implicit collectivities / Biological individuality and enkapsis: from Martin Heidenhain's synthesiology to the völkisch national community / Parasitology, zoology, and society in France, circa 1880-1920 / Metabolism, autonomy, and individuality / Bodily parts in the structure-function dialectic / Commentaries: historical, biological, and philosophical perspectives -- Distrust that particular intuition: resilient essentialisms and empirical challenges in the history of biological individuality / Biological individuality: a relational reading / Philosophical dimensions of individuality / Lynn K. Nyhart and Scott Lidgard -- Scott Lidgard and Lynn K. Nyhart -- Matthew D. Herron -- Beckett Sterner -- Andrew S. Reynolds -- Lynn K. Nyhart and Scott Lidgard -- Snait Gissis -- Olivier Rieppel -- Michael A. Osborne -- Hannah Landecker -- Ingo Brigandt -- James Elwick -- Scott F. Gilbert -- Alan C. Love and Ingo Brigandt.
Individuals are things that everybody knows or thinks they do. Yet even scholars who practice or analyze the biological sciences often cannot agree on what an individual is and why. One reason for this disagreement is that the many important biological individuality concepts serve very different purposes defining, classifying, or explaining living structure, function, interaction, persistence, or evolution. Indeed, as the contributors to Biological Individuality reveal, nature is too messy for simple definitions of this concept, organisms too quirky in the diverse ways they reproduce, function, and interact, and human ideas about individuality too fraught with philosophical and historical meaning. Bringing together biologists, historians, and philosophers, this book provides a multifaceted exploration of biological individuality that identifies leading and less familiar perceptions of individuality both past and present, what they are good for, and in what contexts. Biological practice and theory recognize individuals at myriad levels of organization, from genes to organisms to symbiotic systems. We depend on these notions of individuality to address theoretical questions about multilevel natural selection and Darwinian fitness; to illuminate empirical questions about development, function, and ecology; to ground philosophical questions about the nature of organisms and causation; and to probe historical and cultural circumstances that resonate with parallel questions about the nature of society.