Ellen Clarke, "The Units of Life: Kinds of Individual in Biology" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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What is the central problem with defining biological individuals that the episode introduces?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Sarah Tyson and Blaine Newfeld. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry.
How does Ellen Clarke’s personal academic journey lead her to study biological individuality?
Today's interview is with Ellen Clark, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. Her new book, The Units of Life Kinds of Individual in Biology, is just out from Oxford University Press. While we tend to think of biological individuals in terms of paradigmatic cases a dog, a starfish, a bacterium, our ordinary criteria for distinguishing one individual from another are often inadequate for making these distinctions in general. For example, if a starfish can literally split itself in two and each half regenerates into a new starfish, why hold that there was just one starfish to begin with rather than many? In her book, Clark defends the idea of the evolutionary individual, a unit created and maintained by mechanisms that ensure that the parts share a common fate.
Such individuals enable good evolutionary bookkeeping, and in particular, our ability to predict which variations in these individuals will enable natural selection to occur. Clark considers the merits of her view in relation to alternatives, how her view explains the emergence of new levels of biological individuality. and how the need for idealization and scientific choice of individual boundaries can avoid conventionalism about biological individuals. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Ellen Clark. Well um welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Hi, Carrie. Thanks for having me. Um, I'm super excited to be talking about your book, The Units of Life, Kinds of Individual in Biology. Um, before we get to the book, tell us a bit about yourself.
I mean, how you came to be a philosopher. how you got interested in this topic and and how the book came about.
Okay, so how I
came
to be a philosopher.
Well you you don't have to start from birth, it's okay.
Well, I'm I'm I'm curious uh to know if you get this answer a lot, but how I came to be a philosopher has to be um just completely by accident, really. Aye. I I science was always my my my love really at school. Um And I think there was just a sort of series of like contingencies, kind of accidents about which A-level topics I chose and stuff. I really, really loved um physics. Um And I really loved biology kind of until I did it for A level and then and then and then found that like quite killed my enthusiasm. Um, but I was leav I was reading um things like The Selfish Gene when I was at school and, you know, just just kind of falling in love with that.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central problem with defining biological individuals that the episode introduces?
0:00–1:43
2
How does Ellen Clarke’s personal academic journey lead her to study biological individuality?
1:43–4:41
3
Why do common‑sense “folk” categories of organisms fail for cases like starfish regeneration?
4:41–11:07
4
What is the starfish fission example and how does it illustrate the limits of ordinary individuation criteria?
11:07–18:15
5
How does Clarke define an “evolutionary individual” and what mechanisms give its parts a common fate?
18:15–26:31
6
In what way do mergers of cells explain the emergence of new levels of biological individuality?
26:31–34:08
7
Can social groups like human societies be treated as evolutionary individuals, and what conditions would be required?
34:08–40:59
8
What are the broader philosophical implications of Clarke’s view for personal identity and scientific practice?
40:59–1:06:50
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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