Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 364, Issue 1533, Pages 3143-3155Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0095
Keywords
organism; organismality; individuality; social evolution; cooperation; conflict
Categories
Funding
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [1204352, 0918931] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [0816690, 1201671] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The evolution of organismality is a social process. All organisms originated from groups of simpler units that now show high cooperation among the parts and are nearly free of conflicts. We suggest that this near-unanimous cooperation be taken as the defining trait of organisms. Consistency then requires that we accept some unconventional organisms, including some social insect colonies, some microbial groups and viruses, a few sexual partnerships and a number of mutualistic associations. Whether we call these organisms or not, a major task is to explain such cooperative entities, and our survey suggests that many of the traits commonly used to define organisms are not essential. These non-essential traits include physical contiguity, indivisibility, clonality or high relatedness, development from a single cell, short-term and long-term genetic cotransmission, germ-soma separation and membership in the same species.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available