Seminar on Thursday, 2nd of February at 11:15am at the Carlos Santamaria (IAS room)

Argyris Arnellos (UPV/EHU): From organization of processes to organisms and other biological individuals

The emphasis on the collaborative dimension of the living world overlooks the importance of biological individuals (conceived as highly integrated and self-maintaining organizations) as the very conditions of possibility for the subsequent buildup of more complex collaborative networks in the course of evolution. Acknowledging the importance of collaboration in life, I briefly explain a process-based organizational ontology for biology, according to which I suggest that the essential features of unicellular organismality are captured by a self-maintaining organization of processes that is integrated on the basis of a special type of collaboration (realized through regulatory processes entailing an indispensible interdependence) between its constitutive and interactive aspects. I then use this ontology to describe different types of unicellular collaborations and to argue that it takes a certain type of collaboration among cells to yield a multicellular organism. The suggested organizational framework is used to critically assess and provide clearer and specific alternatives for several implications raised from the consideration of a mainly and ‘excessively’ collaborative view of life, and especially, issues related to the identification of biological individuals and their boundaries, the distinction between biological individuals and organisms, the organismal status of symbiotic multicellular systems, and the distinction between life and not life, avoiding the problems of pluralism but without however ignoring, neither underestimating nor undermining the central role of the concept of collaboration in understanding the biological realm.