[Re:] types of organization

[Prof. Dov Por]

Thomas,

You are right in your criticism. One-celled  beings are not organisms.   I
have been used to know that there are three
levels:cell-tissue-organism.Organisms for instance  have an embryology
which the unicells do not have. Organisms are complex structures in which
many different cells participate. It is one of the expressions of modern
reductionism to equate a bacterial organism (!!!) and a mammal organism.  It
is today  politically correct to say that an amoeba and Homo represent just
different strategies to cope with natural selection. Just two different ways
to transmit genes.. What a terrible and dry evolutionary desert!
Dov Por
-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Schlemmermeyer <termites at usp.br>
To: TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG <TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG>
Date: 05 February 2000 21:32
Subject: [Re:] types of organization


>Hello, my cents into these exciting evolutionary debates...
>
>>And humans are mearly a strange sort of terrestrial fish, or a colony of
>>protozoans. In a strange sort of way the creationists are right - there
>>really has been no "macroevolution" - we are still single celled animals
>>and so we have not evolved from one "kind" to another etc.
>
>1.) There are significant differences between single celled animals and us,
>and every educated evolutionist would agree with me in that point.
>
> a.) We (Homo sapiens) constitute a natural, monophyletic lineage to be
placed
>somewhere in Mammalia. Single celled animals, on the other hand, represent
a
>generalization which refer to the way the individual is organized, it is a
>level of organization. Namely, single celled animals are those organisms
which
>have one cell only each and which do not do a lot of phototrophy
>(otherwise they would be plants)
>
> b.) the decisive differences between colonies of protozoans and humans are
>many: for example humans can have cancer, virus diseases, and somatic and
>sexual cells are separated.
>All three of these characteristics cannot be found, to my knowledge,
>in colonies of protozoans.
>
>
>>"Taxonomy was just a necessary counterpart of the work I was doing. You
>>must call a certain plant by a certain name, a certain animal by a certain
>name.
>>Naturally you come along and you dabble into taxonomy out of necessity.
>>The laws of nomenclature are imposed upon your attention by that. In other
>>words, you try to reorganize, or better to say, organize your thoughts
along
>>definite lines and anming things properly; a regard for semantics of a
>>particular kind in this particular field is connatural to the work."
>
>This is an interesting statement. It implies, to my view, that the true
>taxonomist works naturally. What, however, is THIS NATURE made of?
>I mean I just wrote some stuff by Popper about the philosophy of science,
where
>he opposes the Hegelian view (which states that every individual ultimately
will
>reaveal and express itself due to some strange inherent laws of nature in
the
>sense of some spiritual essence which tends to reveal and express itself)
with
>the view of critical rationalism (which states that there are simply some
>problems in our universe which are solved by scientists because they
receive
>payment or get an opportunity to combine their problem solving capacity
with
>their needs to survive.)
>
>  OK, let's do the garden   Thomas
>