598 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
in a larger "totality" like a beehive or ant colony with a single queen? Wilson and
Sober (1989) have urged a revival for the old concept of "super-organism" in such
circumstances.
As so much uncertainty surrounds the issue of how we define an "individual"
at the supposedly unambiguous level of Darwin's own intent, we should not be
surprised that attempts to restrict the concept to organic bodies have yielded more
confusion than resolution. Perhaps we should try a different and more general
approach. Perhaps we should attempt to specify a set of minimal properties
required to designate an organic entity as an "individual"—and then ask whether
any objects at levels above or below traditional bodies possess these properties,
and therefore qualify for inclusion under an expanded concept of individuality. If
so, we might obtain a useful definition divorced from the happenstances of scale,
and therefore sufficiently general to provide a deeper (and clearer) understanding
for this central concept in Darwinism.
This subject has generated an enormous and often confusing literature
throughout the history of Darwinian thought—and more so than ever before during
the past twenty years. Some colleagues may wish to throw up their hands and
brand the entire enterprise with labels usually invoked pejoratively by scientists—
merely "semantic" or "philosophical." Indeed, several of the finest contemporary
philosophers of science have devoted considerable attention to this issue—see, for
example and in alphabetical order, Brandon (1982), Hull (1980), Lloyd (1988),
Sober (1984), and Wimsatt (1981). But I believe that both the volume and the
confusion arise for two reasons that compel primary attention to the subject: the
issue is both exceedingly difficult and enormously important. * The best scholars
tend to gravitate to the most fascinating and portentous questions—and the
confluence of extensive consideration by the most prominent philosophers of
science (as mentioned above) and the most thoughtful evolutionary biologists from
early days (Darwin, Weismann, de Vries, as discussed above) to current times
cannot be accidental or wrong-headed. As a testimony to this current concern, and
again in alphabetical order, I cite as a small sample: Arnold and Fristrup
*I have struggled with this issue all my professional life, and have often wondered
why the questions raised seem so much more recalcitrant, and so much more cascading in
implications, than for any other major problem in Darwinian theory. I don't think that
mere personal stupidity underlies my puzzlement—or rather, if so, the mental limitations
must be largely collective, because other participants share the same struggle and express
the same frustrations. I don't mean to sound either grandiloquent or exculpatory, but I
seriously wonder if some of the difficulties might not arise largely from limitations in the
common mental machinery of Homo sapiens. Levi-Strauss and the French structuralists
may well be correct in holding that human brains work best as dichotomizing machines at
single levels. We make our fundamental divisions by two (nature and culture or "the raw
and the cooked" in Levi-Strauss's terms, night and day, male and female), and we
therefore experience great mental difficulty with continua, and with any system other
than a two-valued logic (hence Aristotle's law of the excluded middle, and other similar
guides). We are especially ill-equipped to think hierarchically, and to juggle simultaneous
influences from several nested levels upon the foci of our interest. The hierarchical theory
of natural selection rests upon all these intrinsically difficult modes of reasoning.