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What Is a Biological Individual?

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Old Questions and Young Approaches to Animal Evolution

Part of the book series: Fascinating Life Sciences ((FLS))

Abstract

This paper addresses the concept of individual and its role in biological theory and practice. The ability to identify individuals, paradigmatically organisms, is central not only to address them as coherent units of variation or selection. The criteria chosen to define individuality directly affect which entities we consider worth investigating, which kind of methods and models we chose, which properties (like agency) these units possibly can have, and what kind of questions we ask about them. In this paper, first, the history of the concept of biological individuality as well as underlying criteria such as indivisibility are described. Second, it is shown that in the light of rapid developments in high-throughput technologies and novel organism-centered views of evolution in the so-called extended evolutionary synthesis (including evo-devo, epigenetics, and niche construction theory), answering the old question what a biological individual is becomes more important than ever before. This is the case as it turns out to be increasingly difficult to identify individuals, as organisms come to be understood as deeply embedded in their environment. Sometimes, they are even part of other organisms (in holobionts). The answers given to these challenges have not only theoretical and methodological consequences, such as for choosing model organisms, but also affect human life in a number of ways.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    At least since this time, the two concepts of individual and organism were often used interchangeable.

  2. 2.

    Scaffolding describes hybrids between organisms and a living or nonliving scaffold for the use of reproduction or development. These scaffold resources are not used for fueling metabolism. Examples of scaffolds are nonliving byproducts, or leftover, of metabolism such as wood in trees (a leftover of previous living cells allowing the development of the surviving living tissues) or organisms of the same species (e.g., in viviparous animals, mothers temporarily scaffolding the development of the offspring) or different species (e.g., in symbionts and hosts of parasites).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Jan Baedke

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  1. Jan Baedke
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Correspondence to Jan Baedke .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    José M. Martín-Durán

  2. Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany

    Bruno C. Vellutini

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Baedke, J. (2019). What Is a Biological Individual?. In: Martín-Durán, J., Vellutini, B. (eds) Old Questions and Young Approaches to Animal Evolution. Fascinating Life Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18202-1_13

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