Abstract

For a long time, the competitive picture behind the classical natural selection paradigm and the cooperative picture behind biological symbiosis have been in conflict, and biologists have adopted two approaches. Mainstream European and American evolutionary biologists have chosen to avoid the issue of biological symbiosis in their practical work, while certain scientists concerned with microbes and symbiosis have tried to challenge the orthodox Darwinian natural selection paradigm with the concept of symbiosis. These conflicts represent the interplay of two different views of nature and scientific traditions in modern biology. Dupré and others have proposed the concept of “collaboration” to reconcile the two pictures of life. In the author's view, the holobiont is what Dupré calls the collaborative unit, and in the collaborative framework, the two pictures are not in conflict with each other, but can complement each other.