The Senior Common Room at St Anselm's
Morning. Sunlight falls through the windows. Professor Quillibrace is reading beside the fire. Miss Elowen Stray is arranging notes. Mr Blottisham bursts through the door carrying several flowerpots, a watering can, and an expression of triumphant certainty.
Quillibrace: Good heavens.
Blottisham: Ah! Excellent.
Quillibrace: Why are there plants in the common room?
Blottisham: Biology.
Quillibrace: I feared as much.
Blottisham: Observe.
He places a potted fern onto the table with ceremonial satisfaction.
This—
is an individual organism.
Entirely self-contained.
Born.
Lives.
Reproduces.
Dies.
Simple.
Quillibrace: Mm.
Blottisham: What?
Quillibrace: One notices certain familiar symptoms.
Blottisham: Symptoms?
Quillibrace: You have once again mistaken a stabilisation for a primitive.
Blottisham: I have done no such thing.
This is plainly an organism.
Quillibrace: It is plainly organismal.
That is rather different.
Blottisham: Nonsense.
Where else could biology begin except with organisms?
Quillibrace looks at the fern.
Quillibrace: Ah yes.
The tiny sovereign state theory of life.
Blottisham: The what?
Quillibrace: The conviction that organisms are little biological republics:
clear borders,
internal administration,
external affairs,
and complete independence.
Blottisham: Entirely reasonable.
Quillibrace: Entirely misleading.
Blottisham: But organisms have boundaries.
Membranes.
Skin.
Immune systems.
Things end where they stop.
Quillibrace: Do they?
Blottisham: Obviously.
Quillibrace picks up the fern.
Quillibrace: Then where precisely does this end?
Blottisham: There.
He points vaguely at the leaves.
Quillibrace: And the microbial communities within it?
Blottisham: Well—
Quillibrace: The fungal interactions in the soil?
Blottisham: Mm—
Quillibrace: Atmospheric exchanges?
Pollinators?
Developmental dependencies?
Evolutionary histories?
Blottisham's expression begins slowly deteriorating.
Blottisham: I dislike the direction of this conversation.
Quillibrace: Biology increasingly shares your concern.
Blottisham: But surely the organism itself remains primary.
Everything else surrounds it.
Quillibrace: Ah.
There we arrive at today's assumption.
You imagine individuals first and relations afterwards.
Blottisham: Naturally.
Quillibrace: Biology appears increasingly reluctant to cooperate.
What it repeatedly describes are not isolated units but continuities:
metabolic exchange,
developmental coupling,
ecological dependencies,
reproductive trajectories.
Life appears rather less like separate things and rather more like distributed processes.
Blottisham: Processes.
Again.
Reality has become worryingly process-oriented lately.
Quillibrace: Reality rarely consults us on these matters.
Blottisham: Then individuals disappear?
Quillibrace: No.
They become less important.
Blottisham: Less important?
Quillibrace: Individuals remain real.
But they cease being primary.
They become temporary coherence zones within larger biological continuities.
Blottisham: Coherence zones.
Good heavens.
Organisms have become weather.
Elowen: Not weather exactly.
More like stabilisations.
Blottisham: Stabilisations?
Elowen: We usually imagine populations as collections of individuals.
But perhaps individuals are stabilisations occurring within populations.
Silence.
Quillibrace lowers his teacup.
Quillibrace: Yes.
Quite so.
Elowen: The population then becomes less like a container full of organisms and more like a field of developmental and ecological actualisations distributed across time.
What we call organisms become relatively stable local configurations within that field.
Quillibrace: Exactly.
Blottisham: No no.
Absolutely not.
Populations are made of organisms.
That is simply obvious.
Quillibrace: Ah yes.
The bead theory of life.
Blottisham: The bead theory?
Quillibrace: One imagines organisms as little biological beads threaded onto evolutionary string.
Blottisham: That sounds perfectly sensible.
Quillibrace: It also appears increasingly false.
Blottisham stares unhappily at the fern.
Blottisham: Then what exactly is an organism?
A long pause.
Quillibrace: A relatively stable interruption.
Blottisham: A what?
Quillibrace: A temporary coherence within broader relational processes.
A locally maintained pattern of biological organisation.
Blottisham: Good Lord.
He looks down at the plant.
Blottisham: You mean this isn't really a thing at all.
Quillibrace: Oh, it is perfectly real.
The difficulty is that it may be real in the wrong way.
Silence.
Blottisham sits heavily into his chair.
After a while:
Blottisham: I preferred organisms.
Quillibrace: Why?
Blottisham: One always knew where they stopped.
Quillibrace: Ah.
Quillibrace looks thoughtfully at the fern.
Quillibrace: And life, Mr Blottisham, appears to possess the rather inconvenient habit of continuing beyond its containers.
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