Organic life is unique amongst all extant objects. It alone consists of interrelated systems structured in such a way to ensure the continued propagation of the whole. I do not mean to ascribe to it any special or ‘favored’ status in the cosmos, but merely to approach it from an as-yet unexplored perspective.
We know very well how life adapts, grows, and thrives; this we call the evolutionary process. Though it may remain controversial in certain circles, I hardly think that this point requires belaboring on my part. What is contentious, however, is the nature of ‘the individual’ as such. For it is my conceit that there are no individuals, however strange or foolish that may sound to some ears. And yet I don’t believe it such as all (obviously, since I’m expounding it). Consider:
I have a dog, Molly, a Brazilian Molosser. As I watch her sleeping at my feet, seeing her chest heave up and down, I’d never know - if I hadn’t been taught in school and never made the deduction based upon our similarities - that there’s an entire ‘subterranean’ process at work in her keeping her alive. I cannot see from the ‘surface’ her heart as it beats away in her chest, or her stomach as it digests the food I pay so much for. By all appearances, she ‘looks’, to put it rather esoterically, like a ‘oneness’.
But I know she really isn’t. Unlike other objects which, when reduced to their most basic constituent parts, become simple swirls of charged particles, organic life cannot be so reduced: it ceases being ‘life’ on the level of the organs. Doubtless there are tissues made up of clumps of carbon-based compounds, but these alone would not be considered by anyone to constitute ‘life’ as such. Furthermore, observing the evolutionary process informs us that adaptation, the single defining ‘process of life’, occurs at the organic level - Darwin’s finches did not themselves undergo some radical metamorphosis under problematic environmental conditions; merely their offspring’s beaks changed in accordance with the demands of the environment. Despite what comic book authors would have us believe, mutation never occurs throughout the entire body. Instead, it is almost invariably limited to the organs which interface with the environment and which, through the influence of changing external conditions, undergo selective breeding which results in alterations to the particular appendages responsible for a given function of the organism.
I am neither a biologist nor a geneticist. I have very little training in either field; I am by pedigree a philosopher and pedagouge. Nevertheless, it seems to me that mereological reductivism must inevitably lead one to the conclusion that organic life is precisely that - organic. Though we are biased towards a holistic conceptualization of organic life (perhaps by nothing more than accident: one could here advance a thesis that the mere existence of skin - another organ! - might skew our perception towards this conclusion), we perhaps ought to look instead towards a fundamentally different understanding of just what it means to be both ‘organic’ and ‘life’.