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Can't see the colony for the bees: behavioural perspectives of biological individuality
Author(s) -
SmithFerguson Jules,
Beekman Madeleine
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
biological reviews
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.993
H-Index - 165
eISSN - 1469-185X
pISSN - 1464-7931
DOI - 10.1111/brv.12542
Subject(s) - perspective (graphical) , epistemology , organism , ecology , interpretation (philosophy) , biological organism , field (mathematics) , psychology , sociobiology , cognitive science , biology , philosophy , computer science , biological materials , artificial intelligence , paleontology , linguistics , mathematics , pure mathematics , biological system
ABSTRACT The question ‘what is an individual’ does not often arise in studies within the field of behavioural ecology. Generally behavioural ecologists do not think about what makes an individual because they tend to use intuitive working concepts of individuality. Rarely do they explicitly mention how individuality affects their experimental design and interpretation of results. By contrast, the concept of individuality continues to intrigue philosophers of biology. It is interesting that while philosophers of biology debate definitions of individuality, biologists generally use the concept of individuality every day without much thought. Here we review the philosophical approaches to defining biological individuality, and illustrate how the biological individuality concepts used by biologists are affected by their study question and choice of organism. We clarify the behavioural perspective of biological individuality by introducing the concept of the behavioural individual. The notion of the behavioural individual is particularly interesting when explored in less‐conventional study organisms. By including less‐conventional organisms, it becomes clear why the concept of biological individuality is usually intuitive in behavioural ecology.