Day 359 .............it's in!!!!!

Let me know if you're willing to comment on the draft for me!

Here's the outline:

Part 1 Finding our target

Chp 1: What is the problem?

Key puzzle: Why is it hard to say what an organism is? The objective of this chapter is for the reader to be able to differentiate a few key ways in which defining a biological individual is problematic.

Summary: We are pulled in different directions about individuality. Concepts can be valuable in lots of different ways. To arbitrate, we need to choose criteria.

Chp 2: Setting the stage

Key puzzles:   Should we assume that metaphysical assumptions about ontology are authoritative over biological ontology? (How) can we lean on general criteria for evaluating the naturalness of kind categories in general, to evaluate the category of the biological individual?

Summary: We can arbitrate the competing definitions, by comparing the breadth of their value – the range of purposes that they are able to serve well – and by prioritising concepts that idealise property clusters in ways that support empirical success.

Part 2: Model concepts

Chp 3: Evolutionary individuality

Key puzzles: What features does a concept need in order to act as the bearer of fitness in evolutionary theory? What is the relation between that concept and the objects participating in the evolutionary process?

Summary: We can define evolutionary individuals in terms of their capacity for participating in evolution by natural selection, thanks to the action of various individuating mechanisms.  I also explained how particular idealisations at work in generating this concept enable it to play crucial supporting roles in evolutionary theory.

Chp 4: Individuals in the making (Afra)

Key puzzles: How do new, higher-level individuals come into existence? How can we address the apparent paradox between defining evolutionary individuality as a theoretical kind category, on the one hand, and declaring it a property that varies continuously, on the other?

Summary: Goldilocks organisms are the culmination of Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality, via the gradual accumulation of a property we can call ‘evolutionary potential’, thanks to the evolution of increasingly effective policing mechanisms.

Chp 5: Other kinds of biological individual (Maureen)

Key puzzles: Why have we developed so many different ways of thinking about living things? Are they all useful? What are they useful for? How do they relate to one another?

Summary: Distinct sorts of biological individuality perform quite different functions, some of which are more context-limited than others.

Part 3: Learning lessons

Chp 6: Identity and other metaphysical problems (Samir)

Key puzzles: Do (any of) the previously surveyed kinds of biological individual imply identity conditions, as expected by metaphysicians? Can biological individuality ground personal identity? Can it help with puzzles about origins, counterfactuals and persistence?

Summary: The evolutionary account can provide certain sorts of identity criteria – especially concerning the birth conditions of new individuals. But that, just as with individuality in general, the answers provided can be deemed successful or not only in the context of a given aim. This is a more pragmatic, conventional view of identity than is usually expected by metaphysicians, and it undercuts the project of appealing to biological theory to settle metaphysical puzzles about identity. It also takes some of the worry out of maintaining multiple different accounts of individuality that imply different identity conditions.

Chp 7: Omissions, problems and non-problems

Key puzzle: Can the foregoing chapters help us to make sense of the status of all candidate organisms, or are we left with some serious problems?

Chp 8: Broader implications (Celia)

Summary: Work on biological individuality, and especially evolutionary individuality, could be applied to much broader problems concerning people and the societies that they live in, in so far as it captures different ways of solving cooperation problems.