Ontogenesi e individualità biologica

Abstract

This article initially intends to analyze the concept of biological individuality by recourse to philosophical reflections of classical matrix and epistemological investigations covering various scientific models that have followed, in biology, from the first half of the Twentieth century. Epistemological reflection was prompted by the doctrine of autonomous morphogenesis of Monod to reach the semantic revolution in biology and review of the proposed channeling theory of C.H. Waddington in the Forties of Twentieth century and today more and more current. The individuality is probably one of those notions that allows a rapprochement between philosophy and biology encouraging interdisciplinary research inspired to a systemic approach to reality. It is undeniable infact that in the history of the ideas of Occident, the individuality was almost always connected, both in philosophical terms and in terms of scientific experimental, with a new concept and still ancient, that is to say, the concept of interdisciplinary self-organization. The hierarchical organization of living systems represents, still today, a challenge for philosophy. It is therefore necessary to question about the nature of these semantic relations to escape the risk of moderate domestic teleonomy of living systems at the mere molecular syntax that it could be studied through the use of simple investigations type formal or algorithmic.