Javier Suárez (University of Barcelona)
Biological individuality is a central problem in biology and philosophy of biology. A recent revolutionary view on this field claims that holobionts, biological assemblages composed by a multicellular host plus all its symbiotic microorganisms are biological individuals and units of selection. This view has recently been criticized on the basis that there is not enough reproductive alignment or fitness alignment among the entities that compose a holobiont for it to be considered a unit of selection. In this paper, I argue that this type of criticism is wrongly construed, as it assumes a cooperation/conflict view of biological individuality that, I claim, is inadequate for analyzing whether a biological object is or not a unit of selection.
