Jack A. Wilson

What makes a biological entity an individual? Jack Wilson shows that past philosophers have failed to explicate the conditions an entity must satisfy to be a living individual. He explores the reason for this failure and explains why we should limit ourselves to examples involving real organisms rather than thought experiments. This book explores and resolves paradoxes that arise when one applies past notions of individuality to biological examples beyond the conventional range and presents an analysis of identity and persistence. The book's main purpose is to bring together two lines of research, theoretical biology and metaphysics, which have dealt with the same subject in isolation from one another. Wilson explains an alternative theory about biological individuality which solves problems which cannot be addressed by either field alone. He presents a more fine-grained vocabulary of individuation based on diverse kinds of living things, allowing him to clarify previously muddled disputes about individuality in biology.

This dissertation is an argument that past attempts to explain the criteria for individuating living things have failed because they have not assimilated the full range of biological examples or have been misled by common examples and thought experiments. I present a new analysis of identity and persistence based on the resolution of paradoxes that result from applying past notions of individuality to unusual living entities. The same intuitions that guide us in counting puppies and tomato plants result in paradox though when used to count Portuguese man-of-war. ;I assume that living things are finite three dimensional persisting objects. On this basis I argue for an ontology of substantial kinds and substantial individuals. A living thing must be a member of a substantial kind throughout its existence. Transubstantiation, the passage of a living thing from one substantial kind to another with incompatible conditions of identity, is impossible. I argue that identity is absolute rather than sortal relative. The substantial sortal picks out the object about which we are making an assertion of identity but plays no further role in the identity relation. ;The substantial kinds I suggest are the developmental individual, the functional individual, the genetic individual and the unit of selection. A living thing must be a member of one of these substantial kinds and persists if and only if it continues to meet the identity criteria for that kind. I also discuss the problem of vagueness and the possibility of life after death

Biology lacks a central organism concept that unambiguously marks the distinction between organism and non-organism because the most important questions about organisms do not depend on this concept. I argue that the two main ways to discover useful biological generalizations about multicellular organization--the study of homology within multicellular lineages and of convergent evolution across lineages in which multicellularity has been independently established--do not require what would have to be a stipulative sharpening of an organism concept

Biology lacks a central organism concept that unambiguously marks the distinction between organism and non-organism because the most important questions about organisms do not depend on this concept. I argue that the two main ways to discover useful biological generalizations about multicellular organization—the study of homology within multicellular lineages and of convergent evolution across lineages in which multicellularity has been independently established—do not require what would have to be a stipulative sharpening of an organism concept.