11.09, Monday 31 Oct 2005

The Extended Phenotype gives good concept. Here's a favourite, when Dawkins is discussing different opinions of what an "individual" should be considered as, for plants:

Janzen (1977) faces up to the same difficulty, suggesting that a clone of dandelions should be regarded as one 'evolutionary individual' (Harper's genet), equivalent to a single tree although spread out along the ground rather than raised up on the air on a trunk, and although divided up into separate physical 'plants' (Harper's remets). According to this view, there may be as few as four individual dandelions competing with each other for the territory of the whole of North American. [p254]

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