pumpkinstrokemarrow

The text for the day is the notion of an individual, which one might start by thinking was entirely straightforward. Not worth talking about whether there are four apples or fifteen apples. Three people or two people.

The thesis for the day is the notion that this concept, like all others, breaks down at the margin. One can always find cases which bend the rules or frustrate the intention of the rules. Something that people who write laws for literal interpretation - this being the Anglo-Saxon custom - should bear in mind.

The first awkward case is that of the siamese twins. Something that occurs, for example, amongst apples as well as amonst people. Two apples which have fused together. To my mind, the answer is that we have two or more individuals here. But it gets more awkward when the siamese twins are not simply two entire people joined by a band of flesh. Maybe the two people share a lower half. More rarely, but I think that it does happen, the two people share an upper half. More speculatively, one person might be entire but have a few extras derived from something that might have become somebody else but in the event got subsumed in the first person. So I might have an extra leg. But I think in this case that I would count as one person, not two.

One option, in the absence of much knowledge of these matters, is that we started with two distinct eggs, fertilised by distinct sperms, which are distinct genetically, but which got a bit mixed up for some reason. Another option, is that we start with one fertilised egg which at some point splits into two clones. But the two clones fail to separate properly and instead of two identical twins we get two siamese twins or worse.

Clones bring me on to the second awkward case. Suppose one has an abandoned beech hedgerow, something that one comes across quite often in the lanes and woods to the south and west of Dorking. So we have a lot of distinct beech trees planted rather close together which grow both upstairs and downstairs. Their roots get all mixed up. Maybe one root from one tree fuses with another root from another tree. Maybe the roots start suckering all over the place. Who is to say how many individuals there are now? Would saying that once a sucker is severed from the mother ship it becomes an individual in its own right work?

A third awkward case arises when this sort of thing happens as a result of gardener intervention. When a bud from one tree is budded onto the trunk of another. When this works one chops the trunk off immediately above the now growing bud and one has roots from one tree and a tree from another. One has fused one individual with another, while preserving the genetic characteristics of both. Suckers from the roots would carry on the line of one tree, seeds from the tree would carry on the line of the other. So both are alive in some sense. A wheeze that does not work in the case of people as we cannot, as yet, reproduce asexually, let alone blend. A much easier trick with plants and one which with larger animals seems to require a wheeze called cloning. Although my understanding is that we probably could do it if it were to be allowed.

A variant, which I was told about many years ago, is that if you put sausages from a good butcher in a suitable growing medium, they will grow. The cells in the meat in the sausages are not so dead that they will not grow and reproduce. At the cell level that is, not the sausage level. I don't know how long the cells will keep this up. Can they carry on forever if you keep feeding it, like a tumour? Not sure that I know what question to ask Mr G. to get the answer to this one. Will have to try a person.

A fourth awkward case arises from collective animals, when it is not clear whether it it better to regard the colony as an individual or the members of the colony. Not thinking here of bees, rather various marine animals where the members are more intimately connected than the bees are in a hive. Mr G. tells me that these things are properly called bryozoans, a term sufficiently obscure not to appear in his spell checker.

An entirely different problem arises with the idea that one should be able to say of any bit of matter whether it is part of some nominated individual or not. That there is a clear sense of this is of the individual and that is not. A scheme which works well enough at a safe distance. But again, breaks down badly close up. So viewed at a suitable magnification, our skin is a rather rough and holey thing. Lots of pot holes and worm holes. Maybe the ruling here is that once a molecule crosses the cellular boundary it becomes part of the individual to which that cell belongs. Sounds well enough, but cells frequently detach themselves from the parent individual and may remain in it's vicinity for some time. Then there are lots of small animals which live in the alimentary canal and sometimes elsewhere - although the first is essential and the latter undesirable. They might spend their entire life swanning around our small intestine. Do we claim them as part of us or are they individuals in their own right?

And now, having exhausted the time allowed to listen with mother, time for the post prandial snooze.