Understanding what kind of relationships instantiate biological individuality is of great importance to synthetic bioengineering, regenerative medicine, exobiology, robotics and artificial intelligence.

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• The kind of relationships necessary to produce evolutionary individuality – the generation and heritability of fitness differences at the collective level – are the same as those required to produce organismic individuality – the information integration and collective action characteristic of a self.claim0.831
  Core conjecture linking evolutionary and organismic individuality.
• Functional relationships necessary for evolutionary individuality are the same as those required for organismic individuality and constitute cognitive architectures.hypothesis0.819
• Bioelectricity serves as a ‘cognitive glue’ common to collective and individual intelligence, binding cells into competent individuals in both behaviour and morphogenetic spaces.claim0.810
  Identifies bioelectric networks as the medium of basal cognition.
• Biology's robustness, open-endedness, evolvability, and unique complexity likely depend on the fact that evolution works with an agential material.claim0.803
  Central claim linking life's properties to the inherent competencies of its material substrate.
• Organismic individuality can be separated from genetics: integration and collective action occur in non-neural systems.finding0.803
  Empirical findings from developmental biology (Manicka & Levin, Lyon et al.) supporting mechanistic basis for individuality independent of genetic determination.
• Biology commits to optimizing salience and meaning, not fidelity, via high-level, agent-based interpretation.claim0.796
  Central claim that biological memory prioritizes gestalt over details.
• Genetic identity is insufficient to define biological individuality.claim0.795
  Argues against purely genetic definitions of the self.
• H1: Individuality requires a dynamical process (development), mediating the plastic expression of components in the context of one another, with the specific form of computing a collective character that is a non-linearly separable function of (embryonic) particle characters, with the effect of coordinating reproduction based on this collective character.hypothesis0.794
  Main hypothesis about the architecture of individuality