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The individuality thesis (3 ways)

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Abstract

I spell out and update the individuality thesis, that species are individuals, and not classes, sets, or kinds. I offer three complementary presentations of this thesis. First, as a way of resolving an inconsistent triad about natural kinds; second, as a phylogenetic systematics theoretical perspective; and, finally, as a novel recursive account of an evolved character (individuality). These approaches do different sorts of work, serving different interests. Presenting them together produces a taxonomy of the debates over the thesis, and isolates ways it has been (and may continue to be) productive. This goes to the larger point of this paper: a defense of the individuality thesis in terms of its utility, and an update of it in light of recent theoretical developments and empirical work in biology.

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Notes

  1. Amundson (2000) provides a similar argument, from the perspective of evolutionary-developmental biology.

  2. My rejection of an absolute phylogeny against which all histories are measured is an extension of this argument (Haber 2012b).

  3. Sober (1980) can be read as offering a similar critique as Winsor, though one that ultimately defends the individuality thesis. Stamos (2005) argues that Winsor and other critics are mistaken about pre-Darwinian commitments.

  4. See Rowe (1987), discussed below, and Will et al. (2005) for more contemporary phylogenetic critiques of typology as embodying essentialist thinking. To their credit, even the foremost champions of numerical taxonomy, Sokal and Sneath (1963), saw the force of this criticism, and actively sought to distance their “empirical approach” (Sokal 1962) from charges of essentialism. In their 1963 monograph, they acknowledge that typology in the context of “Platonic Idealism” is “untenable in the context of modern biological theory” (p. 266), and reject the applicability of Aristotelian logic to biological taxonomy due to its essentialist commitments (pp. 12 and 19).

  5. There are other strategies available for resolving this triad, e.g., Walsh (2006) may be read as denying the third proposition by providing an Aristotelian account of contemporary developmental biology.

  6. An exemplar is the impact of Wilson and Sober (1989), “Reviving the superorganism”, which extends the individuality thesis to social insect colonies in the context of level of selection debates (Haber 2013).

  7. Thanks, in part, to Hull (1980).

  8. Generalizations about the production of these sorts of successive cohesions are often provided in terms of evolutionary transitions (e.g., Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1998; McShea 2001; Okasha 2006; Godfrey-Smith 2009; Clarke 2014).

  9. Similar to what O’Hara (1997) calls tree thinking.

  10. Padian expresses this commitment to history in other places as well, e.g., “First, taxa in a phylogenetic system are defined by their ancestry in several different ways. … Second, whereas taxa are defined by their ancestry, they are diagnosed by synapomorphy” (Currie and Padian 1997, p. 543).

  11. Notice the identification of pheneticists as the foil here, associated with relying on intrinsic defining characters. It is this perception of essentialist thinking in phenetics that is the target of Hull, Ghiselin, and other phylogeneticists.

  12. Though whether it is taxa or taxon names that are defined remains a debate in taxonomy (Stuessy 2000; de Queiroz and Cantino 2001; Haber 2012a). Regardless, taxon identity is tied to ancestry, though see Pedroso (2014) on why this does not entail origin essentialism.

  13. Diversity may be produced by mutation, acquisition of exogenous genetic material, developmental plasticity, etc.

  14. Importantly, the evolutionary lineages formed by these developmental modules may be discordant with the lineages of their containing organisms. This is one way these evolutionary systems generate complex and gradient boundaries and identities.

  15. Thanks to Celso Neto for this observation.

  16. On a pragmatist account we could eliminate this stipulation, instead letting the recursive definition play out as a tool and seeing how far down (or up) it may go and still be useful. (Thanks to Ken Waters for this observation.).

  17. Fagan 2016 provides another candidate enkaptic hierarchy in her account of stem cells.

  18. This is not to say those causal processes and interactions will always be well understood.

  19. This locates the individuality thesis in the biological tradition of central theorems and concepts whose utility lies, in part, in the limits of its applications, e.g., the conditions of the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium are never met by natural populations, an understanding of which provides explanatory resources; or, exceptions to biology's Central Dogma provide fruitful research problems that generate a deep understanding of biological systems.

  20. This mirrors a strategy adopted elsewhere by Griesemer (2000) and Godfrey-Smith (2015).

  21. As Jay Odenbaugh observed in comments on this manuscript, “mammals having more than one parent doesn’t deny their individuality, so presumably it needn’t in the case of the whole of life”.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Melinda Fagan, Jay Odenbaugh, Anne Peterson, Thomas Pradeu, and the University of Calgary Department of Philosophy. This project was supported by NSF Grant 1557117.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Center for Quantitative Biology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Matthew H. Haber

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Haber, M.H. The individuality thesis (3 ways). Biol Philos 31, 913–930 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-016-9548-9

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