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Size doesn’t matter: towards a more inclusive philosophy of biology

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Abstract

Philosophers of biology, along with everyone else, generally perceive life to fall into two broad categories, the microbes and macrobes, and then pay most of their attention to the latter. ‘Macrobe’ is the word we propose for larger life forms, and we use it as part of an argument for microbial equality. We suggest that taking more notice of microbes – the dominant life form on the planet, both now and throughout evolutionary history – will transform some of the philosophy of biology’s standard ideas on ontology, evolution, taxonomy and biodiversity. We set out a number of recent developments in microbiology – including biofilm formation, chemotaxis, quorum sensing and gene transfer – that highlight microbial capacities for cooperation and communication and break down conventional thinking that microbes are solely or primarily single-celled organisms. These insights also bring new perspectives to the levels of selection debate, as well as to discussions of the evolution and nature of multicellularity, and to neo-Darwinian understandings of evolutionary mechanisms. We show how these revisions lead to further complications for microbial classification and the philosophies of systematics and biodiversity. Incorporating microbial insights into the philosophy of biology will challenge many of its assumptions, but also give greater scope and depth to its investigations.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to our anonymous referee for very helpful advice and detailed comments; to Staffan Müller-Wille, Jane Calvert and Jim Byrne for feedback; and also to the audiences at the first International Biohumanties Conference (Queensland, 2005) and the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology conference (Guelph, 2005). We gratefully acknowledge research support from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and Overseas Conference Funding from the British Academy. The research in this paper was part of the programme of the ESRC Research Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis).

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O’Malley, M.A., Dupré, J. Size doesn’t matter: towards a more inclusive philosophy of biology. Biol Philos 22, 155–191 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-006-9031-0

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