Talk:Organism

Article Checklist for "Organism"

Workgroup category or categories	Biology Workgroup [Categories OK]
Article status	Developed article: complete or nearly so
Underlinked article?	No
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	David Tribe 22:17, 12 April 2007 (CDT)

To learn how to fill out this checklist, please see CZ:The Article Checklist.

---

"What is an organism?"

Perhaps in trying to answer the question, "what is an organism?", we encounter the same problem we do in trying to answer the question, "what is life?". With the latter question, we really want to know about the nature of an activity, namely the activity of living. Perhaps with the former question, we also really want to know about the nature of an activity, but we have no verb-form to substitute for "organism". Therein might lie the problem. We might solve it by coining a verb: 'organisimizing' [OR--guh-NIHZ-ih-MY-zing], from 'to organisimize'. It seems a mouthful, yet so do 'systematizing' and 'operationalizing'. We familiarize ourselves to a new word after a while (aside: as we did with Citizendium).

What characterizes 'organisimizing'? I would answer: the activity of working together as a living collection of observable interrelated units of provisionally ignorable internal structure. That answer applies to the behavior of single cells, the internal structure of whose constituents we can provisionally ignore, but it generalizes to the behavior of any collection of cells that satisfies the criteria of living from the perspectives of open system nonequilibrium thermodynamics, information processing, self-reproduction and evolution, self-organization, and autonomous functioning in its own behalf. To organisimize means to form a living community of some kind that allows of interpretable description (i.e., modeling).

If the suggestion of neologizing the activity of organisms to better understand organisms seems unconventional or radical, we might take heart from Goldenfeld and Woese, who reminded us of the father of chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier’s words:

We cannot improve the language of any science without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.

--Anthony.Sebastian (Talk) 16:42, 16 April 2007 (CDT)