How to Count Organisms

Ellen Clarke (Oxford University)

ABSTRACT:

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.