ABSTRACT:
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Current biology struggles to settle a disagreement concerning the best way to conceptualise one of its key entities - the organism. In this talk I try to show that philosophers have tools they can offer to science\, by utilising a simple story about natural kinds to build justification for a particular account of what it is to be a member of the class 'organism'.
I offer a justified organism concept by tying it to scientific success in a way which offers us confidence that the class picked out is not merely a matter of taste but is\, in a sense I will specify\, the right answer. I argue for a characterisation of the organism problem as concerning the identification of the units we need to count if we want our models of \;the selection of traits in real populations to truthfully capture the dynamics of evolutionary change.