Biological Individuality
Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives
Biological Individuality
Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives
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. Charting an interdisciplinary research agenda that broadens the frameworks in which biological individuality is discussed, this book makes clear that in the realm of the individual, there is not and should not be a direct path from biological paradigms based on model organisms through to philosophical generalization and historical reification.
400 pages | 14 halftones, 2 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2017
Biological Sciences: Biology--Systematics, Evolutionary Biology
Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction: Working Together on Individuality
Lynn K. Nyhart and Scott Lidgard
l The Work of Biological Individuality: Concepts and Contexts
Scott Lidgard and Lynn K. Nyhart
2 Cells, Colonies, and Clones: Individuality in the Volvocine Algae
Matthew D. Herron
3 Individuality and the Control of Life Cycles
Beckett Sterner
4 Discovering the Ties That Bind: Cell-Cell Communication and the Development of Cell Sociology
Andrew S. Reynolds
5 Alternation of Generations and Individuality, 1851
Lynn K. Nyhart and Scott Lidgard
6 Spencer’s Evolutionary Entanglement: From Liminal Individuals to Implicit Collectivities
Snait Gissis
7 Biological Individuality and Enkapsis: From Martin Heidenhain’s Synthesiology to the Völkisch National Community
Olivier Rieppel
8 Parasitology, Zoology, and Society in France, ca. 1880–1920
Michael A. Osborne
9 Metabolism, Autonomy, and Individuality
Hannah Landecker
10 Bodily Parts in the Structure-Function Dialectic
Ingo Brigandt
Commentaries: Historical, Biological, and Philosophical Perspectives
11 Distrust That Particular Intuition: Resilient Essentialisms and Empirical Challenges in the History of Biological Individuality
James Elwick
12 Biological Individuality: A Relational Reading
Scott F. Gilbert
13 Philosophical Dimensions of Individuality
Alan C. Love and Ingo Brigandt
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index
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