LIFE, LIVING INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANISMS

• Main Author: Krzysztof Chodasewicz
• Format: Article
• Language: Polish
• Published: Polish Academy of Sciences 2019-11-01
• Series: Filozofia i Nauka
• Online Access: http://filozofiainauka.ifispan.waw.pl/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Chodasewicz_29.pdf

This paper presents an outline of the relationship between the categories of living individual, organism and life. I argue that although these categories are related with each other and often treated as the same, we should strive for their separation. The main argument for the distinction between the individual and life is of a methodological character: the definitions of life are mainly interested for astrobiologists and scientists working in the field of origin of life or artificial life, while the individual is important, among others, in standard evolutionary biology and ecology. Among the concepts of living individual various forms of evolutionary definition (individual as a unit of selection) currently dominate. The living individual understood in this way is not identical with a structurally limited and functionally integrated self-sustained entity, which is usually called “organism.” Moreover, the explanatory success of the evolutionary concept of individual, in my opinion, implies the adoption of some version of the evolutionary definition of life. In the last part of this paper I propose a process-evolutionary definition of life, which also indicates a relationship between the three aforementioned categories.