Rethinking individuality: the dialectics of the holobiont

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Scott F. Gilbert ; Alfred I. Tauber
• 关键词：Immunity ; Individuality ; Holobiont ; Organism ; Symbiosis ; Ecosystem
• 刊名：Biology & Philosophy
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：November 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：31
• 期：6
• 页码：839-853
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
• 刊物主题：Philosophy of Biology; Evolutionary Biology;
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1572-8404
• 卷排序：31

文摘

Given immunity’s general role in the organism’s economy—both in terms of its internal environment as well as mediating its external relations—immune theory has expanded its traditional formulation of preserving individual autonomy to one that includes accounting for nutritional processes and symbiotic relationships that require immune tolerance. When such a full ecological alignment is adopted, the immune system becomes the mediator of both defensive and assimilative environmental intercourse, where a balance of immune rejection and tolerance governs the complex interactions of the organism’s ecological relationships. Accordingly, immunology, which historically had affiliated with the biology of individuals, now becomes a science concerned with the biology of communities. With this translocation, the ontological basis of the organism is undergoing a profound change. Indeed, the recent recognition of the ubiquity of symbiosis has challenged the traditional notions of biological individuality and requires a shift in the metaphysics undergirding biology, in which a philosophy of the organism must be characterized by ecological dialectics “all-the-way-down.”