Bacteria forming macro scale structures in nearly every wet ecosystem studied. Perhaps we need new definitions for 'organism'.
In reality it's neither, it's a disparate bunch of organisms in a complicated web of iterated cooperation and defection in a cutthroat battle for individual (and therefore often communal) survival.
Of course in our dystopian internal society any unsanctioned individuality is quashed by the militarised police... unless of course it isn't at which point it metastatizes and everyone dies.
(The question about shared DNA is really interesting - so much of our individual drive for survival is a result of our K-strategist genetics and the resultant selection pressures over the years. If we spawned like octopi or grew from spores like orks, how much different would our worldview be?)
If we imagine that intelligence and comprehension involves information compression, it might be an unavoidable strategy.
Not only are we intensely focused on categorizing, we also have the need/instinct to identify "things" and "units" and "selves" -- when in reality those lines 'between things' don't really exist except as a tool for cognition.
In my thinking, a reductionist thought process goes something like this: we observe oxidation of the hydrogen sulfide in mud, even when there are no apparent electron acceptors in the immediate vicinity. We then identify bacterial filaments which appear to allow electron transport from the reducing agent to the electron acceptor. Furthermore, we will then attempt to isolate the bacteria making up the filaments, and then attempt to identify what structures they synthesize to allow this feat.
And a few follow up questions to your comment: what do you think population dynamics have to do with the current phenomenon, or was that more a related thought? When you talk about "destination states," are you insinuating that there is some design occurring, or that we can observe states in the state space that seem to be stable, and that random walks tend to end up in those stable states? If it is the latter, I totally agree, and I don't see how that is outside of the purview of science as traditionally practiced. It might be an interpretation or model for how the parts of a system fit together, but an attempt at synthesis is basically in the conclusions section of any paper ever written in biology. So I guess it boils down to the same question I posed earlier: how exactly are scientists failing to describe natural phenomena?
Yes categorization implies putting things in boxes, and the box chosen is often the incorrect abstraction. However i think the answer is to make better boxes; not throw out the idea of categorizing things. Similar to how if your code base is full of bad abstractions, you wouldn't try to fix it by having no abstractions.
Ah, yes, because the alternative to 'always' is 'never', not 'sometimes when appropriate.'
Categorisation is great and helps us make sense of the world. It's just sometimes misleading and we should always be on guard against category errors.
Sure category errors are a thing, but the error is not in the act of categorizing something at all. They are errors in using an inapropriate schemata.
On another level and somewhat figuatively, is the Internet a society of its own or simply a bridge among societies? Is it a bunch of communities (definitely yes at some level) or one big community with several sub-communities and cliques? Is it a culture, a subculture, a counterculture, a blending of cultures, a point of contact between distinct cultures? Yes, it's all that, and in certain contexts more one than another.
Interested why the difference between cell count and cell weight is so different in the human and non-human parts? Most of the total weight is water, right? So why is all of the water stored in the human cells but not in the non-human cells?
In general eukaryotic cells are much larger than prokaryotic cells, and most of the non-human cells in a human are prokaryotic. All bacteria for example are prokaryotic.
I don't think the fraction of water is higher in eukaryotic cells than in prokaryotic cells. I think water constitutes about 70% of both types of cells.