Abstract
In the first of two articles on the ontology of biological entities (appeared in Resonance, Vol.29, No.8, pp.1111–1126), I had discussed how young students of biology intuitively imagine the biosphere, constructed from the bottom up by physical material entities that act as its building blocks. The nature of being, or ontologies, of these entities, it would seem, depend upon the machination of parts and processes confined within their material demarcating structures like membranes, walls, and skins. I suggested that perhaps there is precedence to this view due to the influence of reductionist and mechanical philosophies upon the early development of biological thought. Additionally, this view is mirrored in the way biology is taught in academic institutions today that could reinforce this part–whole, hierarchical imagination of the biosphere. In this article, I discuss the development of biological thought that took shape in the early part of the 18th century that was influenced by and borrowed from contemporary developments in disciplines outside the natural sciences. It arose primarily as a response to the reductionist and mechanical descriptions of living bodies, and may be seen as a move toward a more holistic understanding of the biosphere. These frameworks bring forth the idea of conceptual unities whose ontologies are dynamic and influenced by changes outside their boundaries. Taken together, both these perspectives are useful and necessary for a student of biology to appreciate the diverse and dynamic nature of the biosphere. A useful guide to understanding material and conceptual boundaries is provided. Once again, I take recourse to Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” to guide our discussions on the topic.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors?’ Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
–An extract from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” [1].
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
Suggested Reading
S Poggi and M Bossi, Romanticism in Science – Science in Europe 1790–1840, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, Springer, Netherlands, p.54, 1994, ISBN 9789048142842.
GR Treviranus, Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur, Johann Friedrich Rower, Gottingen, Germany, 1802.
CR Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms’ Benediction Classics, Middlesex, UK, 2009, ISBN 978-1849029285.
E L Peterson, The Life Organic – The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics, Pittsburgh University Press, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 2016, ISBN 9780822944669.
C H Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes: A Discussion of Some Aspects of Theoretical Biology, Routledge Publications, London, UK, 1957.
Maureen A O’Malley, From endosymbiosis to holobionts: evaluating a conceptual legacy, J. Theor. Bio., Vol.434, pp.34–41, 2017, ISSN 0022-5193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2017.03.008
J Dupré and S Leonelli, Process epistemology in the COVD3-19 era: rethinking the research process to avoid dangerous forms of reification, Eur. J. Philos. Sci., Vol.12, No.1, p.20, 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-022-00450-4
J Dupre and D J Nicholson, Everything Flows – Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2018, ISBN 9780198779636.
B Smith, On drawing lines on a map. In: Spatial Information Theory: Proceedings of COSIT’95, A U Frank, W Kuhn and D M Mark (eds), Springer, New York, pp.475–484, 1995.
Aristotle, Metaphysics; transl., by H Lawson-Tancred, Penguin Classics, Penguin Publications, London, UK, 2004, ISBN 9780140446197.
G Ryle, Concept of the Mind, Routledge Publication, London, UK, 2009, ISBN 9780415485470.
Ofra Magidor, Category Mistakes. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds), Summer 2024 edn. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/category-mistakes/
A Rosenblueth and N Wiener, The role of models in science, Philos. Sci., Vol.12, No.4, pp.316–321, 1945.
S Surendralal, Fiction and philosophy of science, Resonance, Vol.28, No.7, pp.1065–1073, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-023-1637-x
G Anderson, J Dupré and J G Wakefield, Drawing and the dynamic nature of living systems, eLife, Vol.8, p.e46962, 2019. doi:https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.46962
N Myers, Rendering Life Molecular, Duke University Press, Durham, USA, 2015, ISBN 9780822358787.
N Myers, Performing the protein fold. In: Simulation and Its Discontents, S Turkle (ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2022, ISBN 9780262546799.
Acknowledgements
The substance to this article was inspired by banter on “what are objects in the natural world” at the SSLA faculty office with Dr Sumithra Surendralal and Dr Kumud Bhansali, who also provided valuable suggestions to the documented form. Thanks also to the students of the biology minor program at SSLA for interesting debates and discussions around philosophical and historical aspects of the life sciences. Immense gratitude to the reviewers of the manuscripts for their comments and suggestions, especially for ironing out both the tone and lacunae in the historiographies in this article. The figures used in this document are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License and are permitted to use freely with proper attribution.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Vasudev Ramdas Menon is an Assistant Professor at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune, teaching undergraduate courses in biology and performing arts (theater). His areas of interest lie in the ontological questions concerning biological individuality and in the use of process metaphysics to address them, as well as in undergraduate education/pedagogy in biology, especially cross-disciplinary engagements of humanities and life sciences, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4845-3861
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Menon, V.R. On the Ontology of Biological Entities. Reson 29, 1231–1253 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-024-1231-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-024-1231-x