Re: Other half of: The difference between organism and ecosystem...

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Judith,

Your comments below reminded me of the quote
at the bottom:

DF wrote:

> How is an organism a community? Do you mean inwardly,
> or outwardly?

Judith Rosen wrote:

> *Well, my comment was based on your reference to a series of 
> "proto-biotic" complementary processes as "a community". I then 
> suggested that this definition was a synonym of "system".  It also 
> struck me that an organism could be viewed as basically the same 
> thing... The stuff organisms are made up of is not alive, the processes, 
> themselves, aren't alive; in fact life is not IN the parts, but in the 
> whole. *
> ** 
> *I guess I was playing with the words, trying to see if perhaps the 
> different definitions were somehow just a perspective problem-- that 
> perhaps we were both describing the same exact "thing".*

a quote:

"When we attempt to define life, or living, we immediately
come up against a fundamental and apparently irreducible
paradox: living organisms are composed of inanimate
molecules...Must we then say that 'life' is the interaction of
all the inanimate components of this whole? In other words,
that nothing is alive in a cell except the whole of it?"

Martin Olomucki, The Chemistry of Life,

end quote

cited from, read in Biogenesis - Theories of Life's Origin by
Noam Lahav.



So if as you say this same issue holds true for a cell or
organism and I say it holds true for a community of cells
or organisms (neither autotroph nor heterotroph alone
is alive in the sense of capacity for sustained, indefinite,
open-ended life), then it seems that the organizational,
relational aspect as connected to life (from these two
similar but different perspectives) spans these two
scales of organization. Perhaps it spans more and is
scale-independent like fractals or holograms?

Dan