This paper addresses theoretical challenges, still relevant today, that arose in the first decades of the twentieth century related to the concept of the organism. During this period, new insights into the plasticity and robustness of organisms as well as their complex interactions fueled calls, especially in the UK and in the German-speaking world, for grounding biological theory on the concept of the organism. This new organism-centered biology (OCB) understood organisms as the most important explanatory and methodological unit in biological investigations. At least three theoretical strands can be distinguished in this movement: Organicism, dialectical materialism, and (German) holistic biology. This paper shows that a major challenge of OCB was to describe the individual organism as a causally autonomous and discrete unit with consistent boundaries and, at the same time, as inextricably interwoven with its environment. In other words, OCB had to conciliate individualistic with anti-individualistic perspectives. This challenge was addressed by developing a concept of life that included functionalist and metabolic elements, as well as biochemical and physical ones. It allowed for specifying organisms as life forms that actively delimit themselves from the environment. Finally, this paper shows that the recent return to the concept of the organism, especially in the so-called “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” is challenged by similar anti-individualistic tendencies. However, in contrast to its early-twentieth-century forerunner, today’s organism-centered approaches have not yet offered a solution to this problem.

中文翻译：

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哦，有机体，你在哪里？以有机体为中心的生物学的新旧挑战

本文解决了 20 世纪最初几十年出现的与有机体概念相关的理论挑战，这些挑战在今天仍然具有相关性。在此期间，对生物体的可塑性和健壮性及其复杂相互作用的新见解激发了呼吁，特别是在英国和德语世界，将生物理论建立在生物体的概念上。这种新的以有机体为中心的生物学 (OCB) 将有机体理解为生物学研究中最重要的解释和方法单元。在这场运动中，至少可以区分出三个理论分支：有机主义、辩证唯物主义和（德国）整体生物学。本文表明，OCB 的一个主要挑战是将个体有机体描述为具有一致边界的因果自主和离散单元，同时又与其环境密不可分。换句话说，OCB 必须调和个人主义和反个人主义的观点。这一挑战是通过发展一种生命概念来解决的，其中包括功能主义和代谢元素，以及生化和物理元素。它允许将生物体指定为积极将自己与环境分隔开的生命形式。最后，本文表明，最近对有机体概念的回归，尤其是在所谓的“扩展进化综合”中，受到了类似的反个人主义倾向的挑战。然而，与其 20 世纪初的先驱相比，