18 Philosophy Now ●^ August/September 2019Flora or Mona Lisa?
Predrag Slijepcevic asks if organisms are better seen as singular or as composites.
Science
T
he boundaries between the parts
and the whole are almost non-exis-
tent on the canvases of the Renais-
sance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo
(1527-1593). Arcimboldo composed portraits
of people out of pieces of fruit, sea animals, orflowers. Yet in spite of his unusual artistic
vision, Flora may be a more authentic portrait
than the Mona Lisa.
Here’s how I see it.
Arcimboldo’s vision is a good analogy for
understanding the concept of the organism,which has undergone a dra-
matic transformation in recent
decades. Symbiotic biology
understands organisms in a
similar way to Arcimboldo’s
paintings. Absolute individu-
als do not exist.
The Greek word symbiosis
means ‘living together’. Sym-
biotic biology is concerned
with the construction of bio-
logical systems through merg-
ers. On this understanding,
organisms are biological sys-
tems formed by the merger of
simpler organisms into more
complex ones. Each complex
organism is seen as a symbiotic
collective rather than an inde-
pendent individual. Group
selection principles apply,
such that natural selection
selects the collectives which
together form fit organisms.
By contrast, for earlier main-
stream biology, natural selec-
tion has been about the selec-
tion of individual organisms.
This approach treated organ-
isms as undisputed individuals,
and did not recognize the role
of collectives in the formation
or behaviour. It sees group
selection as a problematic con-
cept. From the perspective of
such mainstream biology, Lisa
Gherardini, the model for the
Mona Lisa, is one organism.
We are blind to the compo-
nents, the hierarchies, the
populations, that make up the
ecological collective of her
body. But Flora is more
authentic than Mona Lisa
because Arcimboldo’s coun-
terintuitive vision depicts the
wholes as composites. Life is a
set of transitional forms, or we
might even say an organic
composite form that is con-