Skip to content

The kangaroo is the first organism, but the fungus is not the biggest

Last updated on 24 Nov 2022

So the record for the “world’s largest organism” has again been claimed for a fungus, something Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his wonderfully titled essay “A Humongous Fungus Among Us” back in 1992, and which was included in his volume A Dinosaur in a Haystack.

The previous fungus, Armillaria gallica, is now replaced by a related mushroom stand, Armillaria ostoyae, in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. But I have my doubts. The term “organism” here has a meaning rather different to “relatively undifferentiated mass of related stands”. In fact, I want to talk about the notion of an organism, and how it has developed over the years.

It may surprise folks to learn that for the bulk of western history, there was no such concept as an “organism”. Sure, there were things that grew, and things that could move, and so on, but until around 1800 or so there was no general category of living things as such. Instead, the prior classification began with unmotivated matter, as it were, and rising through Aristotle’s levels of “soul”, shown below as “mineral” (e.g., petra, or rock), “vegetable” (grows and reproduces; arbor or tree), “sensible” (reacts to its environment and moves of its own accord; equus or horse), and “rational” (is capable of using reason; homo or human). The moral equation to these souls is shown on the right hand side: in descending order, virtue (studiousness), luxury (sensuality), gluttony (feeding) and despair (like a rock – literally, “stoned”).

Chain-1

You can see the addition: things have being (est), and perhaps growth or life (vivit), and perhaps sentience (sentit) and perhaps thinking (intelligit).

This was the view bequeathed to the renaissance from the middle ages (the figure is from the 16th century). By the end of the 18th century, however, something had happened. It began with Francis Bacon asserting in The New Organon that final causes – accounts of things in terms of what they are there to do – were barren except when dealing with life and mind, and in particular human life and mind.

Shortly after this, the tradition that came to be known as natural history (the word “history” comes from the Greek term historia, which means “investigations”; the sense of it being about the past is due to the use of the word in the opening words of Thucydides’ History) began, but even here, no great distinction was made between living and other things, and “natural history” was used indifferently for geology, biology, meteorology, and psychology.

The medieval view held sway until the end of the 18th century – it’s last great exponent was Charles Bonnet in 1764; Lamarck adopted it but turned it on its side to form a temporal sequence. But by this time, it was becoming clear that life was sui generis – its own kind. Lamarck himself, independently of Treviranus, in 1802 coined the term “biologie”, and life took on an independent intellectual history, although many of the subsequent researchers, including Charles Darwin, thought themselves to be geologists first and naturalists second for some time, until geology had become a separate discipline.

Bonnet is crucial for another reason – he is the fellow who begins to talk about “les corps organisées” (organised bodies) when referring to living things, in an 1762 book. Bonnet was a preformationist, and believed that the germ (the term for that which germinates in living things) had to be at least as complex as the final adult form of an organism, and so for him, organisation was central.

About this time, in the early 19th century, then, logicians began to speak of “natural beings”, or “organised beings” to distinguish between them and inorganic objects. Richard Whately, in a text that is the great reviver in English of the treatment of formal logic, Introduction to Logic, referred to “organized beings” when talking about living things (Bk IV ch5 §1, p309 this edition). “Human beings” is of course a subset of this category of things that have organs, or are organised. By 1833, the word “organism” was being used to refer to these sorts of beings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary [subscription required], in a paper [JSTOR subscription needed] in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, by Richard Owen, on the generation of marsupials. I like the Antipodean connection here, and this is what gives the first part of my title (that, and Paul Griffiths’ suggestion). Owen writes

[p]erhaps it is more philosophical to consider generation as having reference rather to the whole nature of the thing generated, and its relative perfection as compared with other species, than to partial modifications of the mother.

and goes on to say

Now it is in the Mammalia that the brain is perfected: we can trace through the different orders the increasing complication of this organ… And if the introduction of new powers into an organism…

And so it is that “organism” means, and has always meant, that which has organs, or is organised.

In recent years E. O. Wilson among others has used the term “superorganism” to mean a colony or group of organisms in which there is a differentiation of role. It may suprise him (although given his erudition, perhaps not) that the term “organism” itself has meant exactly that in the years since Owen used the term. The much older doctrine of the macrocosm/microcosm, which used analogy between the organisation of the organism and the cosmos to argue that the entire universe was a kind of organism is also relevant here. And today, of course, some argue that earth itself, under the rubric Gaia is also an organism.

All of this notwithstanding, I think that it is at best loose talk to call the gallica stand an “organism”. You can chop off almost any sized part of that mass and grow from it. This means that it lacks the kind of coherence and differentiation of parts that a (classical) organism has. This is not true, however, of plants that can be vegetatively propagated – not all parts of a tree can be encouraged to grow. But there are enough contrary cases to test our intuitions and exemplars.

In botany, clonal stands are not called “organisms”, but neither are they called a mass. Instead, special terminology has been devised to deal with these border cases – the entire clonal stand is a genet, while the individually viable “organisms” are called ramets. You can divide a genet into many ramets (this is how the Wollemi pine is being propagated for commercial sale); it is hardly fair, then, to call the entire ramet an “organism”. And the divisibility of early stage embryos into viable individuals is itself an indication that they are not yet organisms either. This may have implications for the abortion debate, but I won’t enter into that quagmire here.

So, what is the biggest organism in the world? I think it has to be the sequoia trees – they function as a whole, are differentiated into organs, and have a threshold of damage that will kill them. Apologies to Gould and to Oregon.

18 Comments

  1. Anonymous Anonymous

    Organism or individual would be about as fluid as species or life, wouldn’t it? So I see a new list coming, on 20+ “organism” concepts (or “conceptions” :-).
    Sort of like the difficulty to define (an individual) computer. Is it the individual core of a multiprocessor? Or the multicore? Or the minimal chip set? Or the mother board? … Or the internet IP multicluster? Or with the addition of the NASA interplanetary IP protocol, the asynchronous ‘planetnet’?
    Hmm. What was the question again? Oh, “individual.” Wouldn’t that depend on the “species” definition together with an acceptable population description?

  2. Anonymous Anonymous

    Organism or individual would be about as fluid as species or life, wouldn’t it? So I see a new list coming, on 20+ “organism” concepts (or “conceptions” :-).
    Sort of like the difficulty to define (an individual) computer. Is it the individual core of a multiprocessor? Or the multicore? Or the minimal chip set? Or the mother board? … Or the internet IP multicluster? Or with the addition of the NASA interplanetary IP protocol, the asynchronous ‘planetnet’?
    Hmm. What was the question again? Oh, “individual.” Wouldn’t that depend on the “species” definition together with an acceptable population description?

  3. Peter Ellis Peter Ellis

    Hum. Would it be possible to make a distinction based on whether the organism can exhibit any whole-“body” responses? That is, it is capable of acting as a single unit?
    Identical twins have two bodies. Each body can individually exhibit a whole-body response (e.g. systemic rise in blood pressure when angry). A tree can exhibit a whole-body response (e.g. shedding of leaves in autumn, transport of materials from leaves to roots and vice versa).
    The fungal genet – well, can it? If you poke one side of it, is the other side able to know in any way that the poking has happened? Certainly it can’t if you chop a chunk off and transplant it.
    It’s almost the same question as to how to address ring species – how many different species are there, given that you can in theory interbreed between any set of neighbours until you try to “close” the ring and find that the opposite ends of the chain are incompatible?

  4. jeffw jeffw

    Some claim that the largest known organism is a stand of aspen in Utah called “Pando” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_%28tree%29), all connected by an underground root system. I think Larry had a post on this a while ago.

  5. John Wilkins John Wilkins

    Still a genet, not an individual…

  6. windy windy

    All of this notwithstanding, I think that it is at best loose talk to call the gallica stand an “organism”. You can chop off almost any sized part of that mass and grow from it.

    Not from the fruiting bodies, though.
    I don’t think the gallica stand is an “individual” organism either, compared to a sequoia tree, but I’m not sure that this “argument from regeneration” is entirely successful. Is a willow tree less of an organism than a sequoia, since it grows from chopped-off parts more successfully? How about planaria?

  7. J-Dog J-Dog

    Nice post, but you are soooo toally wrong.
    The biggest organism is the talking heads at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. They are able to generate words sounds that almost have meaning, and are able to do this despite actually having no brains, or in some cases brain-cases filled with feces. I give them credit for being the biggest pile of smelly organism, because of the dangerously wide range of this organism, going all the way to Washington DC.
    We can not forget about this deadly organism, and must continue to do what we can to eradicate it in all it’s changing forms, to make the world a safe place for our children.

  8. J-Dog J-Dog

    Nice post, but you are soooo toally wrong.
    The biggest organism is the talking heads at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. They are able to generate words sounds that almost have meaning, and are able to do this despite actually having no brains, or in some cases brain-cases filled with feces. I give them credit for being the biggest pile of smelly organism, because of the dangerously wide range of this organism, going all the way to Washington DC.
    We can not forget about this deadly organism, and must continue to do what we can to eradicate it in all it’s changing forms, to make the world a safe place for our children.

  9. Anonymous Anonymous

    Hum. Would it be possible to make a distinction based on whether the organism can exhibit any whole-“body” responses? That is, it is capable of acting as a single unit?

    Now we are entering science fiction territory of unfamiliar real or imagined possibilities. Is a hive a single individual? Or, looking at the computer or gaia analogy, why would asynchronous and distributed responses be any less “bodified”?
    I’m still curious if not evolutionary modeling would be appropriate to pick out the best definition(s). The genet would ‘lose’, as I understand it, being harder to replicate (and replicate faithfully in some sense).

  10. Anonymous Anonymous

    Hum. Would it be possible to make a distinction based on whether the organism can exhibit any whole-“body” responses? That is, it is capable of acting as a single unit?

    Now we are entering science fiction territory of unfamiliar real or imagined possibilities. Is a hive a single individual? Or, looking at the computer or gaia analogy, why would asynchronous and distributed responses be any less “bodified”?
    I’m still curious if not evolutionary modeling would be appropriate to pick out the best definition(s). The genet would ‘lose’, as I understand it, being harder to replicate (and replicate faithfully in some sense).

  11. Bob O'H Bob O'H

    Perhaps I’m revealing my mycologist past, but I want to claim that the biggest organisms are Armillaria. They do have differentiated structures – they’re called mushrooms. I would bet that they have others too, even though I’m not into that sort of fungus (mildew was more my thing). The individual is almost certainly a contiguous whole (in the paper on this I looked at they sampled along a peninsula, and only found one genotype), in which case it’s only not one organism because our approach to growth and development is biased against fungi.
    I once got into an argument with DaveScot over this.
    Bob
    P.S. John – are all cats from Melbourne incredibly hairy?

  12. Bob O'H Bob O'H

    Perhaps I’m revealing my mycologist past, but I want to claim that the biggest organisms are Armillaria. They do have differentiated structures – they’re called mushrooms. I would bet that they have others too, even though I’m not into that sort of fungus (mildew was more my thing). The individual is almost certainly a contiguous whole (in the paper on this I looked at they sampled along a peninsula, and only found one genotype), in which case it’s only not one organism because our approach to growth and development is biased against fungi.
    I once got into an argument with DaveScot over this.
    Bob
    P.S. John – are all cats from Melbourne incredibly hairy?

  13. wafer wafer

    “So, what is the biggest organism in the world? I think it has to be the sequoia trees – they function as a whole, are differentiated into organs, and have a threshold of damage that will kill them. Apologies to Gould and to Oregon.”
    function as a whole…
    differentiated into organs…
    damage threshhold that will kill them…
    Seems like the definition of an organism suffers from overt anthropomorphism. An argument could be made for “differentiated into organs” based on the original idea of the concept of an organism. However, this begs the question, What is the definition of an organ?

  14. The term “superorganism” originated with Frederic Clements, a plant ecologist who argued that the various species and organisms in an ecosystem interact and interrelate so precisely as to function as a superorganism.

  15. Peter Ellis Peter Ellis

    Surely you can’t insist on “differentiation into organs” as a criterion for being an organism! Otherwise there are no unicellular organisms.
    Even then, even if you accept the (obviously bogus in my view) position that only multicellular organisms count, I can’t see any clear distinction between the sequoia and the stand of aspen, except that the stand of aspen could be divided and go on to survive.
    So does it really in the end come down to divisibility? In that case, what about planarian worms, who will regenerate the whole body even from a comparatively small fragment? I’d defy you to look at a formed adult planarian wriggling through the mud and say that it’s not an organism – but then what of the aspens and the fungi?

  16. Peter Ellis Peter Ellis

    Surely you can’t insist on “differentiation into organs” as a criterion for being an organism! Otherwise there are no unicellular organisms.
    Even then, even if you accept the (obviously bogus in my view) position that only multicellular organisms count, I can’t see any clear distinction between the sequoia and the stand of aspen, except that the stand of aspen could be divided and go on to survive.
    So does it really in the end come down to divisibility? In that case, what about planarian worms, who will regenerate the whole body even from a comparatively small fragment? I’d defy you to look at a formed adult planarian wriggling through the mud and say that it’s not an organism – but then what of the aspens and the fungi?

  17. John Wilkins John Wilkins

    Just noting the origins, and general meaning. Of course, on this definition, a cellular organism is still an organism, because it has organelles – at the very least all microbes are complex organised structures that cannot be easily divided without disruption.
    A nice discussion of this is Leo Buss’s 1987 book The Evolution of Individuality. Historical note – Julian Huxley also wrote about it.

  18. David Harmon David Harmon

    In the end I’d say that the idea of an “organism” is simply a distinction we choose to make. We do so because it covers most of the lifeforms in our familiar environment. But as always, “the map is not the terrain”.

Comments are closed.

Optimized by Optimole