Ontological Butchery: Organism Concepts and Biological Generalizations
Philosophy of Science2000Vol. 67(S3), pp. S301–S311
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Abstract
Biology lacks a central organism concept that unambiguously marks the distinction between organism and non-organism because the most important questions about organisms do not depend on this concept. I argue that the two main ways to discover useful biological generalizations about multicellular organization—the study of homology within multicellular lineages and of convergent evolution across lineages in which multicellularity has been independently established—do not require what would have to be a stipulative sharpening of an organism concept.