Going beyond simple coordination, numerous examples can be found of the concentration of nerve centers, as with echinoderms, where there is evidence of a reflexive consolidation of both sensory and motor functions. But even here there is no justification for a description of anything more than a complex, consolidated coordination. Sensory pathways may be switched off to inhibit or dampen reflexes, enabling hierarchies of reflexes, as for example when an escape reflex takes precedence over feeding (Wiersma 1964). Consolidation thus allows for a more sophisticated coordination of behavior, but it remains, on analysis, a coordination among individual cells.

Once again, the question is: If a multi-cellular body is a qualitatively different level of association of cells than a colony, is it meaningful to refer to such a body as an individual organism, and if so, what are the criteria? How does the identification of a tree compare against the standard of organic unity? Multicellular plants may be specialized to the point of being highly coordinated, interdependent, and exclusive, but strictly speaking, the most intricate flowering plant is by all indications no more than a collection of highly organized cells. A tree is a vast society of specialized and interdependent cells, but there is no evidence of a systemic integration that would give it an individuality such as exists within the cells themselves.

I propose the concept of the cellular society to distinguish an organization of cells that goes beyond the organizational grade of the colony, beyond cooperation to coordination, but which offers no indication of a true integration and individuality such as is characteristic of the higher animals (discussed below). The concept of the cellular society can serve to resolve the present arbitrariness whereby, among organizations in which the many individuals are more easily discernible than the organization as a whole, the many are routinely identified as many organisms; and where in an organization in which the individuals are normally indiscernible, it is the organization as a whole that is commonly identified as a single organism. Regardless of the perceptibility of the entity and its constituents, a cellular society can be defined as an exclusive, coordinated association of individual cells which may be expressly treated as an individual, or a singularity, only by informal convention.

I have only suggested until now that multicellular individuality might be a legitimate concept. It is a meaningful issue, by scientific standards: For coordination to be transformed into integration, and thereby into a true super-cellular individuality, we would expect to find a structural basis, and we would expect to find evidence of behaviors that cannot be reduced (except by impetuous analysis) to discrete communications between individual cells. Some multicellular phenomena can be regarded as patently irreducible: There is no single cell in our bodies that perceives a mountain vista, and no one cell conceives "I am." By comparison, in the most highly centralized and coordinated body so far considered, the ctenophore, the cells of the apical organ draw from particular sensations (their own individual cilia) to coordinate cooperative reflexes (synchronized cilial motions or cellular contractions across the body). And in contrast to such discrete, coordinated activity between cells, a central nervous system – the brain and its accessory networks of sensory organs and nerves – provides for the integration of cellular communication and the subordination of the cells of the body to global considerations, facilitating and controlling integrated perceptions and patterns of behavior, rather than chains of reflexes.

The brain controls reactions and levels of arousal based on integral situations, and it provides the basis of adaptive behavior by storing and subsequently utilizing memory as a supplemental source of information. As the integrative organ of sensory and motor nerves, as the unifying organ of the body, the brain is capable of exercising overriding control of reflexes based on global conditions – not just moderating the intensity of activity or inhibiting it, but actually initiating and conducting behavior, subordinating reflexes to integral considerations, responding more or less resourcefully to the uniqueness of present circumstances. The brain thus integrates, not just coordinates the activity of the organism. One might say it involves the integration of experience and the formulation of response. And it is this capability that may justifiably be said to constitute actual super-cellular individuality.

The brain and its central nervous system enable a relationship of an animal with its environment on an entirely new level, no longer as a society of organisms, but as an organism of organisms, to initiate individual activity in its constituent cells and organs – not specific activity in response to specific conditions, but individual behavior in response to global conditions. As such, super-cellular individuality involves a most significant transformation of cellular interaction, an innovation that can be easily overlooked in dissection and analysis, but which cannot perhaps be overestimated for its importance in the understanding of life forms.

My hypothesis is that the central nervous system – the brain and its sensory and nervous extensions – forms the structural basis of actual super-cellular individuality, for the constitution of a distinct level of existence. By this definition, an animal can be said to be formed as an individual when there is a full integration of a sensory system with a motor system in a unified level of experience and determination above (transcendent of) cellular interaction. Unlike societies of cells, where interactions are between individual cells or between membranes and molecules, true animals, as individuals, have a super-cellular presence, a capacity for interaction with larger, more complex structures, as determined by an integral perceptibility. An animal, defined as a super-cellular organism, thus relates to its environment on a higher level that its constituents, of which it is in some degree distinct, and it manipulates them as a subsystem of givens in its projection as an individual body.

It is worth noting that this hypothesis is no more presumptive than the established alternatives, which either presume, however implicitly, that individuality simply happens, or that individuality is some sort of subjective, epiphenomenal delusion. (Is it conceivable that a delusion could have a delusion?) In view of the evident development from cells and colonies to societies of cells, and from societies of cells to the consolidation of societies into wholes, it appears that individuation is something that nature does, or rather that nature is able to achieve, provided there is a developed structural foundation for integration. In our own immediate self-awareness, individuality is the I, the original basis of thought, which may either be accepted as a natural occurrence or excluded from nature by some philosophical mind/body dualism, or even denied entirely by some form of reductionism. But by established, impartial scientific standards, our own subjective awareness of individuality is privileged as the most immediate sort of evidence, and the inference of objective individuality as existing in nature at large is preferable as the least complicated hypothesis among the dualisms of mind/body or objective reality/subjective delusion, and compared to the belief in human consciousness as being somehow uniquely unprecedented.

Although there is still much to learn about the biotic cell, we might gain a more objective, more consistent perspective on individuality by regarding the centralization of the cell in the nucleus as being analogous with the centralization and integration provided by the brain. The cell operates as if on an individual level, making what may come to be accepted as global determinations for its maintenance in a way that cellular societies, lacking integrative structures, do not. We might therefore hypothesize that animal individuality is essentially the same as cellular individuality – a distinctive feature of nature, the characteristic way that life tends to be constituted in ever larger and ever more integral structures.

In this hypothesis, the level of individuality – not the manner of feeding, not relative motility, not even phylogenetic kinship – is the most significant character of living organisms. It qualifies as a difference of grade as significant as that between procaryote (bacteria and archaea) and eucaryote, and indeed, as a difference of taxonomic level.

The consideration of the difference between individual organisms and their associations profiles both the remarkable coordinated capabilities of cellular societies and the special significance of actual individuality. If individuality is something nature does, if evolution can be described as a process of developing from one level of individuality to a society of increasingly interdependent and mutually supportive individuals to another level of organization, then individuality is a natural phenomenon worthy of appropriate classification and deliberate investigation.

It has been widely acknowledged in the field of taxonomy that there is a practical value to admitting grades, or levels of development, to the consideration of classifications. If individuality distinguishes organisms from societies of organisms, it seems reasonable that individual cells and their societies should be considered together as one level of organisms and their relations, and that animals are best treated as a distinct level of organisms in the same manner.

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