Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
beings' (as Buffon referred to them) organisms - was a new focus on just that
feature, i.e., on their conspicuous property of being organized and in a particular
way. As Francois Jacob observes, by the end of the eighteenth century, it was:
[b]y its organization [that] the living could be distinguished from the non-living.
Organization assembled the parts of the organism into a whole, enabled it to cope
with the demands of life and imposed forms throughout the living world.
(p. 74)
Only by that special arrangement and interaction of parts that brings the well-
springs of form and behavior of an organism inside itself one could distinguish
an organism from its Greek root, organon , or tool. A tool requires a tool-user,
whereas an organism is a system of organs (or tools) that behaves as if it had a
mind of its own, i.e., that governs itself.
Indeed, these two words, organism and organization, acquired their contem-
porary usage more or less contemporaneously. Kant gave one of the first modern
definitions of an organism in 1790 - not as a definition per se, but rather as
a principle or 'maxim' which, he wrote, 'serves to define what is meant as an
organism' - namely
an organized natural product is one in which every part is reciprocally both end
and means. In such a product nothing is in vain, without an end, or to be ascribed
to a blind mechanism of nature.
(p. 558)
Organisms, he wrote, are the beings that
first afford objective reality to the conception of an end that is an end of
nature and not a practical end. They supply natural science with the basis for
a teleology that would otherwise be absolutely unjustifiable to introduce into
that science - seeing that we are quite unable to perceive a priori the possibility
of such a kind of causality.
(p. 558, 66)
As he elaborates:
In such a natural product as this every part is thought as owing its presence to the
agency of all the remaining parts, and also as existing for the sake of the others
and of the whole, that is as an instrument, or organ. [T]he part must be an
organ producing the other parts - each, consequently, reciprocally producing the
others. Only under these conditions and upon these terms can such a product
be an organized and self-organized being , and, as such, be called a physical end .
(italics in original; 65, p. 557)
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