Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms
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We make up these categories for convenience. They are not obligated to comply.
My favourite example is the "chicken and egg" problem. The difficulty of it is to define what a chicken is, everything is trivial afterwards. The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken".
Newtonian physics are very useful and less blurry than reality.
More relevant, categories are useful and less blurry than reality. There doesn't need to be a sudden major difference between a chicken and a not-chicken. They only need to have a clear distinction in the model.
For comparison, let's look at integers. 11 is very similar to 12, and 13 is at least as similar, but 11 and 12 are not-teen and 13 is teen. There's no ambiguity, there is only the definition of the category/model "teen".
The distinction is arbitrary, but there's still a distinction. You can easily "draw a line" as the sibling comment says.
If you stack these pictures, there is no single picture you can pull out and say: "Here I transitioned from child to adult" e.g. Likewise with animals and evolution. Changes are so minute that you can speak of a transition from one species to another happening at the point of birth.
Only when you look at pictures of yourself far away from each other in the pile can you start differentiating them. Likewise with animals.
Under that definition, humans make a species. Horses make a species, donkeys make a species, but mules do not. Apparently in the world of Star Trek, Klingons and humans make a species: Worf (Klingon) had a child with a half-human/half-Klingon woman, and Tom Paris (human) had a child with a half-human/half-Klingon woman. Not sure about Vulcans and Romulans...obviously they can mate, but I'm not sure Spock himself can have children, perhaps we'll find out in a future movie. In Futurama, Kiff reproduced with Leela.
As to the concept of a human as a "super-organism", the problem with bacteria being part of the equation is that they do not transmit their replicator payload through the germ-line transmission vector. They are not integrated into the next generation in whole or in part. Via the concept of the extended phenotype they may alter and extend their environment to improve their chance of success (and often mothers and children have the same bacteria flora), but it's better to think of it as symbiosis (or in the worst case, parasitism) than true "super-organism" reproduction. (Me thinks!)
That's what we learned in high-school too, but as you mentioned, it doesn't make sense for donkeys, nor does it work for ring species[1], or organisms that reproduce asexually[2]. Mules can occasionally become mothers[3].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexual_reproduction
3. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1226025...
Also, I hadn't considered to qualify "sexual reproduction", as asexual reproduction might be better thought of as strains (perhaps), the classification systems for simpler organisms tends to be more structural than fecund. In my defense, I tend to refer to organisms as assemblages of organs of which simpler biota can loosely be said to possess, though I always thought of the "organs" of single-cellular creatures as organelles as they are not made up of "tissue" as they are in multi-cellular organisms.
Rarely, sometimes mules are fertile.
And as far as humans, no one's entirely sure that chimps and humans aren't inter-fertile... at least at the level of horses/donkeys.
So for me rather than concepts like "species" being meaningless, they can have meaning (or at least value), but best not to think of them as iron laws. Mostly the point I was hoping to get to in my root response before I diverted myself reading my own text while typing it.
It's easier to create iron laws for categorical manipulation than it is to place observations into categories to begin with.
The thing about life boundries though in biology is that the more you know the less it makes sense. All bacteria are technically a single species, as are Archaea. Virus's aren't considered alive at all, though they do evolve. Then there are asexual creatures entirely. I vaguely recall a lizard that has no real genetic diversity because they are all females that reproduce without any sex, and there are no males. So... they're not a species either, but are still reproducing. Biology is screwy.
Post menopausal woman and some adult workers have both lost the ability to reproduce. But, they did have it in the past.
Which suggests the question; should we consider tribes a 'super' organism? As it includes and benefits from sterile members. What about things like monastic orders or wolf packs whose members forgo reproduction?
And the thing is, you could not determine when exactly the non-chicken became the chicken i.e. when it is chicken enough. You could not draw a line.
You mean.. the real reality? The reality that can't be easily explained through observation and empirical evidence? The reality that can't be perceived through our basic physical senses? The reality where causation and correlation don't mean a thing? If you mean that reality... there's no such thing, and even if there is, there's no point in talking about it, it's way beyond our reach.
If you mean the reality in which we've done most of the division and classification work very poorly due to lack of data... I know what you mean.
All of humanity's scientific progress has been a step-by-step widening of the circle of our knowledge into that vast universe of the unknown. There is certainly a point in acknowledging it, acknowledging its vastness in comparison to what we actually know, and looking for the next tiny pebble we can chip out of that wall of ignorance.
That's just my opinion of course.
Of course you can "prove"/"disprove" them, otherwise they wouldn't be discussed by scientists but by philosophers or theologians. For theories to be different, there must be an experiment that in principle could be done, for which each of them predicts different result. If we get around doing that expriment, we'll learn which theory is the right model.
This is an universal principle of science and applies at every level - both fundamentals and macro/practical.
As Celia Green says: "Only the impossible is worth attempting, in everything else one is sure to fail."
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...
The name that can be named isn't the real name.
etc.
Personally, I like to imagine concepts as boundaries in the abstract multidimmensional "thingspace" - you can cast and recast them as you like, but some are more useful than others. Some things naturally group together along one axis but spread out when you look along another one. The most important point is, concepts are tools of understanding and communication that we invent, not parts of reality itself. They're multiple ways of drawing a map, each with different focus, but each representing the same territory.
[0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words
i.e. integers are commutive under addition and multiplication but not under subtraction or division.
In reality it's all patterns overlapping other patterns with no clear divide other than the one language forces upon it.
I mean, on one hand these categories are uncomfortably loose. Not just obviously made up ones like race or species. Things like molecules and galaxies are uncomfortably loose categories rather than actual things. Thingness seems to be a matter of degrees everywhere.
On the other hand, reality seems to make use of these close enough categories just like we do. It's building stuff out of molecules, stars and galaxies. It's evolving new species and problem solving using organisms and species despite the leaks in the abstractions.
I don't think its just a matter of crutches for our puny human perception. Something fishy is ging on.
[1] http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
If humans are higher-order animals on top of cells and bacteria (us not caring much about them and them not being aware of us), are humans also the cells of some super-er animals?
Apparently the Buddha said that one of the characteristics of reality is that there is no such thing as "you", no unchanging entity that could be called the perceiver of all these perceptions. I guess we're like the boat whose parts are all replaced over time.
Just as a neuron acts in concert with other neurons, but does so independently, so do we act in concert with our surroundings. If not for our memory, that creates identity, how are we separate from the rest of the universe?
Though having said that, there are many other explanations which people believe in very strongly. I'm not attempting to challenge those notions. I'm just musing out loud.
Humans are starting to look slightly more like eusocial insects the last few hundred years than they did previously. I see quite a few sterile worker drones around lately (they congratulate themselves on being DINKs and "childfree").
That's just another metaphor, and you have to be very careful with your choice there. To paraphrase Lakoff & Johnson[1]: the metaphors we use shape the thoughts that we understand through them. A very common one is thinking of arguments as war ("his viewpoints got attacked but he defended them well", etc). Imagine what would happen if we think of arguments as a dance?
[1] http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992...
I'm not saying kmonad's explanation is wrong, just that it's dangerous to not be aware of the underlying metaphor.
I always look at language as a reduction of reality not a one to one relationship with reality. I.e. we as pattern recognizing feedback loops notice some phenomena and then try trough language to express it. But because we are limited beings and our language is limited in expression we end up only expressing perspectives rather than truth.
This could, I believe, also be one of the reasons why we have such a hard time finding a way to describe QM and general relativity in a unified manor. Our language really doesn't do well with paradoxes.
The exception is in zen-buddhist philosophy that actually are much more accepting of paradoxes (wisdom lies in paradox)
But thats another discussion. The primary point I am trying to make is that this reduction of reality leads to our perspectives and can both provide clarity but also trap us in a certain way of thinking.
> I actually think it's much more important to realize what metaphors are exactly because they are derived through language which by default is framing our perspectives and is limited in it's ability to express more complex reality. (Hence a picture is worth a thousand words).
I agree with everything you say - but I would like to give an opposing view to the "derived from language" bit. It's very likely to go in the other direction! One thing Lakoff & Johnson discuss - especially in their later work - is how our metaphors originate from our physical senses and our body (look up "embodied cognition" and "conceptual metaphor"). In short, they argue that we derive fundamental metaphors from the embodied experience, and inject what would otherwise be a otherwise purely symbolic language with meaning through a complex web of metaphors.
Dawkins.
And indeed, shaping the way we think about what's happening in our bodies as "battles" was exactly what I intended to convey, risking the inevitable misunderstanding that comes with any analogy. Of course I do not mean to imply any form of intentionality, only the inevitability of competition, or "battle".
I can give a clear example of a mistake like this: based on Paul Ewald's TED talk[1] I once was talking about the evolution of lethality in diseases with some friends. They are all highly educated, some of them doctors as well.
Turns out, the less a disease depends on its host to find new hosts to infect, the more lethal it tends to be. The reason is that the mutations that maximise reproduction - even at the cost of the host's life - have the advantage over less lethal pathogens. This gives it a clear short-term advantage, but of course it does not work in the long term because it runs out of hosts. And yet some of those friends insisted that this did not make sense because it would not be in the best interest of a disease to maximise lethality, thinking in terms of intentionality that is not present in evolution.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate...
But it turns out, nature is cheating. There are things that human cells can't make. We depend on other, smaller organisms to make them. For instance, we can't make vitamins ourselves, we need to source them from outside. It turns out that even for replication, cells need to have proper prefabs available in the environment. For instance, we're swimming in nitrogen, and plants can't use it anyway because it's not in a proper form.
Which means that if we want to copy this ability, we need to just focus on "vitamins". That is, all the hard-to-make stuff that requires large-scale, high-tech industry to be produced. If we can tile the area where a robot operates with universal microcontrollers and accept that as a part of its environment, then the problem of self-replication becomes much easier. There's a big volcano^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfactory operating somewhere, pumping out those small prefabs, and robots are "eating" them and incorporating into themselves and their children.
Yes, it's cheating. But nature cheats too.
How about we figure out which species are unitary individuals and give them a word? Mono-organisms or something.
There is no Platonic ideal of the word "superorganism" to worry about here. There's Aspens[0] and Ants[1] alike, and plenty in between.
No, really, there's no such thing. Everything alive is part of one ecosystem, and the only thing that really evolves is the ecosystem itself.
Don't agree? Completely disconnect any apparently unitary individual from the planetary ecosystem and see how long it survives.
This has practical implications, especially for extended space flight. It turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to build a functioning and stable micro-ecosystem. Thinking at the species level is almost no help at all, because what actually happens is that chemicals, energy, and information propagate through the system space, and modify each other.
We don't have good models to describe what happens at that level, which makes it very hard to build or maintain systems that are stable.
The Origin of the Species was a huge improvement on biblical creationism, but it would be disappointing if it was the last word on biological systems.
Well,... excepting unicellular ones, no? ;)
(You might be able to found some weird exception to the rule out here. This is a generalization -- nothing in biology shocks me anymore.)
Even for unicellular eukaryotes, it would be incorrect to claim they're separate organisms from their membrane-bound organelles just because of the organelle's evolutionary origin.
Unicellular organisms really are "unitary."
Edit: A biologist should always be humble. I just thinking of lichens, which are "composite organisms" consisting of fungi, bacteria, and algae, which can be an instance of what you're getting at. Still, some organisms really are "unitary."
Do you think that the author was writing this to somehow elevate your self-esteem? :)
But you are raising a good point. When talking about such concepts we should not forget that there are other animals that would also share it.
We are still animals, only with a little smarter brains.
It's not a stretch to think of human groups who act in a coordinated way as meta-organisms... In fact, we do it every day. "Google" does not exist -- it's a coordinated group of people acting as a corporation.
Even though they're spatiotemporally discontinuous, these organisms seem to be obviously real, even though this leads to some observations that sound really pagan. These entities (like Google, or governments) exert their own wills and controls over our actions and environments... We're basically their subjects.
If you're right-brained at all, try visualizing these entities. It can make for some interesting impressions :)
Oh, and on terminology: I think it's fair to refer to ourselves (or any higher-order but spatiotemporally continuous organisms) as "super-organisms." I think of higher-order, spatiotemporally _discontinous_ organisms "meta-organisms"
To me the prison system of countries feels a bit like the cancer prevention in bodies. I mean, it even got something like auto-immune problems, you just have to look at the USA.
You probably have to go back 3.5 billion years, to the dawn of life, to find organisms that did not depend on any other organism to grow and/or reproduce. And maybe not even then; it's possible that early life arrived on Earth from somewhere else, on a meteorite or comet.
Have a look at a stadium full of people watching a football match. It really does from some angle look as if there are two giant organisms. Or nation states at war as observed on a map (the latter reminds me of amoeba moving around).
> Have a look at a stadium full of people watching a football match. It really does from some angle look as if there are two giant organisms.
Moreover, if you look at the phenomena like "the wave" (aka. Mexican wave), it seems that the "lower" individuals do experience something more in such a group than they do in small crowds. I've heard that being in a big crowd can in some way override individual instincts and reasoning patterns.
UPD: more than 80% of Japanese people (living in Japan) have worms untreated and Japanese people life expectancy is dramatically better than in any other nation.
It's only the constant feedback and proximity of my parts that makes me feel unitary.
Interesting article, but I think it should be careful with exaggerations like this, "a large number of humans" is something entirely different than "possibly one if you had a born or unborn twin"
Meanwhile many comments in this thread remind me of this bit by Paul Graham:
If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.