A number of forms that appear at first sight to be individuals turn out to be colonies - and many forms cannot survive at all unless they create colonies which operate as individuals.
The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham
Arrangements such as this can be seen in many organisms even beyond insects, such as coral and bacteria, and is, in my opinion (which is still right), one of the best examples of the ingenuity of evolution.
Wasn't that nice? Some solid science, all backed up by evidence and everything (well, not here, but it does exist, I've been assured), with a relevant quote from The Midwich Cuckoos, which, by the way, is a brilliant book, even if the quote was a little shoehorned in. Wouldn't it be nice if I ended it here, and didn't use this introduction as a tenuous ramp into a meaningless theory. Tough.
This colony model, called 'collective individualism' in The Midwich Cuckoos, seems very simple when you look at the larger animals, such as bees and ants, because we find it easy to class one bee, or one ant as an individual. However, when you move down to the level of bacteria, it gets a bit more complicated. Each individual single celled organism works as an essential part of the whole colony, and each bacterium would have no chance of survival without the rest of its colony. Our human bodies are comprised of many cells which are essential to the whole, and each cell would have no chance of survival on its own. Why then do we define a human body as an individuals made of lots of tiny parts, but a bacteria colony as a group formed from many individuals? People don't consider the idea of an individual a difficult concept, probably because most organisms at the level we can easily perceive fit comfortably into the traditional concept of an individual. For example, most people would be able to easily say where on elephant ends and where another begins. However, tucked away in the nooks and crannies of life lie many examples which serve to blur this concept.
Lichen, that stuff, a bit like moss, which grows on rocks and benches, was thought for a long time to be one species, presumably some time of plant, but relatively recently it was discovered that there were in fact two species in a form of symbiosis. Every 'species' of lichen is formed from a different combination of a fungal and an algal components. The fungus gives structure to the organism, and the algae provides energy for the partnership through photosynthesis. I don't know exactly where the scientific community stands on whether a patch of lichen is one, two or more individuals, but either way, it is obvious that it is difficult to tell. Other forms of symbiosis can also make individualism difficult to define. In our bodies, there are various colonies of bacteria which we could not live without, nor they without us. They may have a different genome to us, but can any organism truly be an individual if it is entirely dependent on another for every purpose? Probably, yes, given that every organism is dependent on every other by extension, and none can exist in a vacuum. However, allow me to give one more example. Animal cells contain mitochondria, small organelles which serve the purpose of producing energy for the cell. These organelles are unique in that they are smaller than most of the other parts of the cell, around the same size as a bacterium, but mostly in that they contain their own fragments of DNA, separate from the main DNA of the organism. It has been proposed, in a theory known as the endosymbiotic theory, that these mitochondria were once a separate organism to the animal cells, perhaps they were a colony already in symbiosis, but over the years they were assimilated into animal cell, until they could no longer be considered an organism in their own right. As a result of all of these cases, I think it is reasonably evident that the concept of an individual organism is a lot less simple than it originally appears, and at present, there is no appropriate way to define when one organism ends, and another begins.
It's not going too bad so far; I've pretty much stuck to established theories, presented some evidence. It sure would be a shame if I were to ruin it by proposing something new.
I hereby propose that, given the difficulty of defining the individual in the cases given above, and, since due the the variety of life I expect it will be impossible to find any other rule, there is no individual beyond an individual strand of genetic code. This individual DNA molecule will be able to replicate itself to pass on it's own structure, in the same way animals attempt to reproduce, and the DNA which codes for physical structures which prove advantageous to the colony of DNA (for example, what we would call a cat) will be able to continue it's line by reproducing with another colony (another cat), to found new colonies. Of course, although this may technically be the only way to define an individual which holds true for all life, it is clear, if only from the difficulty of phrasing the previous sentence that it is nigh on useless for almost all purposes, for example the describing process of evolution, as many individual DNA molecules will not actually be involved, at least directly, in traditional reproduction, only the ones which undergo meiosis to form gametes. Thus, I propose that it is necessary to form a second definition of individualism, a practical individualism as opposed to the previous technical individualism, which can be used for more general scientific and trivial purposes, while technical individualism may be used only for classification of individuals, or when someone wants to sound pretentious. As the main problem with technical individuals was that not all the individuals were directly involved in reproduction, causing difficulties with describing evolution, my suggestion for a definition of practical individualism is as follows: a pragmatic individual is a group of technical individuals (strands of DNA) which contribute towards a constant part of the groups acts of reproduction to form a similar groups.
This doesn't seem to be clear, so I'll give some examples. But firstly, to make things clearer, I'm going to put forward a quick code to make things less confusing with three different types of individualism floating around. I should have done this ages ago. Here goes. From here on, a 'c-human' refers to a human with conventional individualism (one person), a 't-human' refers to a human with technical individualism (a strand of human DNA), 'p-human' refers to a human with practical individualism and 'human' on its own refers to the human species. Since c-humans can reproduce with more than one other c-human in their life, the only constant group of t-humans which are involved in the reproductive process of humans are those in one c-human. Therefore, a p-human is the same as a c-human. The mitochondria found in a human cell do not undergo individual reproduction (they do replicate within cells, but the only ones which are propagated are the ones present in human gametes), so they are considered part of the p-human. However, the other colonies of c-bacteria present in the human body can, and do reproduce separately to the c-human, so they are not considered to be part of the p-human. As for the c-bacteria themselves, each c-bacterium (in most species of bacteria that I know of that is; I'm sure there are examples where this is not true) can self replicate, so the only constant group of t-bacteria in a c-bacterium's reproductive acts are those in one c-bacterium. Therefore, a p-bacterium (at least for those which self replicate independently) is the same as a c-bacterium. As can be seen, in many cases, practical individualism will yield the same results as traditional individualism. However, this is not always the case. For example, in a colony of c-ants, as far as I understand, the vast majority of the c-ants will not, or in some cases are not even capable of reproducing themselves, so one c-ant of this kind clearly cannot be a p-ant. Furthermore, as in each colony there is only one queen c-ant, the only female capable of reproduction, and as there is no interbreeding between colonies as far as I know, the entire colony's chances of reproduction are inexorably tied together, or in other words, all of the t-ants in the colony of c-ants are constants in all of its acts of reproduction, directly or indirectly, the colony of c-ants is only one p-ant. Some species of ant, when fighting colonies of other species, capture their pupae and raise the young c-ants to be their own slaves, which also work enthusiastically towards the, eventually, reproductive goals of their community, without breeding themselves. These c-ants, due to these conditions, would also form part of the p-ant, and let this act as a clarification: a practical individual can be composed of more than one species of technical individual. The example of ants also serves to show why I feel that practical individualism is a more accurate way to classify life, due to the following. In c-ant colonies, female c-ants which are sterile are very regularly produced, which, while they form an important part of the colony, does not seem to make evolutionary sense, as surely a c-ant which is sterile would not be able to pass down the genes which make it sterile. However, based on the pragmatic model of individualism, the sterile c-ant has the same relationship to the queen c-ant as a human arm or leg does to human reproductive organs; while not directly involved in the process of reproduction, it does aid it to get into a position where it is able to reproduce, and therefore, it makes just as much sense for a fertile c-ant to have the genes to regularly produce sterile ants as it does for human genes to contain the information to build arms and legs, as oppose to solely reproductive organs. All in all, pragmatic individualism would have to be applied separately to each species, taking into mind it's reproductive habits, but I do find it can be more helpful to explain some aspects in the areas where it differs from conventional individualism.
Well, if you got through all of that, you should: a) offer yourself a hearty handshake in congratulation (which, if successful, would itself be worthy of merit), and b) reconsider your priorities in life (which, by the way, is a joke; reading things I write is an excellent use of time). In conclusion, since I feel the current method of distinguishing between individuals is flawed, I have proposed a new method, technical individualism, which works for all life has uses for classification of species (I'll expand on that another time) and being pretentious, but is not so useful for studying evolutionary processes and the like, for which I have proposed practical individualism, which likely will not work for all of life, but appears more useful than either conventional or technical individualism for some purposes. Of course, if by some crazy, random, happen-stance these ideas were ever to become widely accepted, they would be almost unique among accepted scientific theory in that they mean absolutely nothing, given that all life pretty much exists as one big squishy-mushy mess, and humans trying to put labels on certain parts of it is nothing more than meaningless pedantry.
