The relativity of Darwinian populations and the ecology of endosymbiosis

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• 作者：Adrian Stencel
• 关键词：Endosymbiosis ; Population ; Relativity ; Transitions
• 刊名：Biology & Philosophy
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：September 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：31
• 期：5
• 页码：619-637
• 全文大小：432 KB
• 刊物类别：Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
• 刊物主题：Philosophy
  Philosophy of Biology
  Evolutionary Biology
  
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1572-8404
• 卷排序：31

文摘

If there is a single discipline of science calling the basic concepts of biology into question, it is without doubt microbiology. Indeed, developments in microbiology have recently forced us to rethink such fundamental concepts as the organism, individual, and genome. In this paper I show how microorganisms are changing our understanding of natural aggregations and develop the concept of a Darwinian population to embrace these discoveries. I start by showing that it is hard to set the boundaries of a Darwinian population, and I suggest thinking of a Darwinian population as a relative property of a Darwinian individual. Then I argue, in contrast to the commonly held view, that Darwinian populations are multispecies units, and that in order to accept the multispecies account of Darwinian populations we have to separate fitness from natural selection. Finally, I show how all these ideas provide a theoretical framework leading to a more precise understanding of the ecology of endosymbiosis than is afforded by poetic metaphors such as ‘slavery’.