On Individuality: The Constituents of Distinctiveness

Abstract

The notion that each organism has a certain degree of uniqueness is not new. Most biologists, however, do not much appreciate interindividual variability. It seems to blur our view of the “typical” or “ideal” case, which becomes more clear only after the raw data have been refined with statistical procedures. In fact, much of the difficulty in analyzing living systems seems to derive from an apparent lack of congruence within a set of replicas. Genetics is one of the few fields in which variability is investigated systematically. But, in spite of the fact that individuality is blatantly obvious in most organisms, and found on all levels from the biochemical to the morphologic (Williams, 1956), we tend to suppress its existence, and keep it, as a professional secret, from entering into textbooks.