Varieties of Living Things: Life at the Intersection of Lineage and Metabolism

By J. Dupré, Maureen A. O’Malley. 2009

264 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We address three fundamental questions: What does it mean for an entity to be living? What is the role of inter-organismic collaboration in evolution? What is a biological individual? Our central argument is that life arises when lineage-forming entities collaborate in metabolism. By conceiving of metabolism as a collaborative process performed by functional wholes, which are associations of a variety of lineage-forming entities, we avoid the standard tension between reproduction and metabolism in discussions of life – a tension particularly evident in discussions of whether viruses are alive. Our perspective assumes no sharp distinction between life and non-life, and does not equate life exclusively with cellular or organismal status. We reach this conclusion through an analysis of the capabilities of a spectrum of biological entities, in which we include the pivotal case of viruses as well as prions, plasmids, organelles, intracellular and extracellular symbionts, unicellular and multicellular life forms. The usual criterion for classifying many of the entities of our continuum as non-living is autonomy. This emphasis on autonomy is problematic, however, because even paradigmatic biological individuals, such as large animals, are dependent on symbiotic associations with many other organisms. These composite individuals constitute the metabolic wholes on which selection acts. Finally, our account treats cooperation and competition not as polar opposites but as points on a continuum of collaboration. We suggest that competitive relations are a transitional state, with multi-lineage metabolic wholes eventually outcompeting selfish competitors, and that this process sometimes leads to the emergence of new types or levels of wholes. Our view of life as a continuum of variably structured collaborative systems leaves open the possibility that a variety of forms of organized matter – from chemical systems to ecosystems – might be usefully understood as living entities.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b70950b8fbc597592991775c1cab314b9c6f9c4c

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Citations in the corpus

Everything Flows : Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology (2018, background): “But the extent of symbiosis goes well beyond associations between multicellular organisms (Dupré and O’Malley 2009).”
What’s so special about model organisms? (2011, background): “These are important topics within contemporary philosophy of biology (e.g., see Lewens, 2004; Dupré & O’Malley, 2009) and it would be extremely interesting to discuss further the relation between these issues and the modeling strategies (and associated ideas about what constitutes life, functional…”
Holobionts and the ecology of organisms: Multi-species communities or integrated individuals? (2016, background): “Dupré and O’Malley (2009) was an important early step in this direction, suggesting that microbial biology has radical implications for the future development of many areas of philosophy of biology.”
Holobionts as Units of Selection and a Model of Their Population Dynamics and Evolution (2018, background): “1992; Wade 2016), or in holobiont selection models (see frameworks in Dupre 2012; Dupre and O’Malley 2013).”
Biological individuality: the case of biofilms (2012, background): “Consequently, biofilms do not form 2 Here our work overlaps with the work of Dupré and O’Malley (2009).”
How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket (2017, background): “18 See also (Dupré and O’Malley 2009), and for a general introduction, (Seibt 2016).”
Microbiome definition re-visited: old concepts and new challenges (2020, background): “As phages, viruses, plasmids, prions, viroids, and free DNA are usually not considered as living microorganisms [55], they do not belong to the microbiota.”
Organisms or biological individuals? Combining physiological and evolutionary individuality (2016, background): “Are also concerned those who want to insist that natural selection acts sometimes on collaborative units of living entities (e.g., a symbiotic consortium) which are so tightly integrated that they are strictly dependent one on the other for their survival and reproduction (Dupré and O’Malley 2009).”