O Organism, Where Art Thou? Old and New Challenges for Organism-Centered Biology
O Organism, Where Art Thou? Old and New Challenges for Organism-Centered Biology
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DOI：
10.1007/s10739-018-9549-4
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发表时间：
2019-06-01
影响因子：
0.8
通讯作者：
Baedke, Jan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Baedke, Jan
本文讨论了在二十世纪的头几十年里出现的与有机体概念有关的理论挑战，这些挑战今天仍然相关。在此期间，对生物体的可塑性和鲁棒性以及它们之间复杂的相互作用的新见解推动了呼吁，特别是在英国和德语世界，将生物学理论建立在生物体的概念上。这种新的以生物体为中心的生物学（OCB）将生物体理解为生物学研究中最重要的解释和方法单元。在这一运动中至少可以区分出三种理论：有机主义、辩证唯物主义和（德国）整体生物学。本文表明，组织公民行为的一个主要挑战是将个体有机体描述为一个具有一致边界的因果自治和离散单元，同时与其环境密不可分。换句话说，组织公民行为必须调和个人主义与反个人主义的观点。这一挑战是通过发展一种包括功能和代谢元素以及生物化学和物理元素的生命概念来解决的。它允许将生物体指定为主动将自己与环境隔离的生命形式。最后，本文表明，最近返回到有机体的概念，特别是在所谓的扩展进化综合，是类似的反个人主义的倾向的挑战。然而，与其世纪早期的先驱相比，今天的以有机体为中心的方法还没有提供解决这个问题的方法。
This paper addresses theoretical challenges, still relevant today, that arose in the first decades of the twentieth century related to the concept of the organism. During this period, new insights into the plasticity and robustness of organisms as well as their complex interactions fueled calls, especially in the UK and in the German-speaking world, for grounding biological theory on the concept of the organism. This new organism-centered biology (OCB) understood organisms as the most important explanatory and methodological unit in biological investigations. At least three theoretical strands can be distinguished in this movement: Organicism, dialectical materialism, and (German) holistic biology. This paper shows that a major challenge of OCB was to describe the individual organism as a causally autonomous and discrete unit with consistent boundaries and, at the same time, as inextricably interwoven with its environment. In other words, OCB had to conciliate individualistic with anti-individualistic perspectives. This challenge was addressed by developing a concept of life that included functionalist and metabolic elements, as well as biochemical and physical ones. It allowed for specifying organisms as life forms that actively delimit themselves from the environment. Finally, this paper shows that the recent return to the concept of the organism, especially in the so-called Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, is challenged by similar anti-individualistic tendencies. However, in contrast to its early-twentieth-century forerunner, today's organism-centered approaches have not yet offered a solution to this problem.