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Organisms and man-made organisms


MarieB

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Organism. In biology an organism is a contiguous living system, such as a vertebrate, insect, plant or bacterium. All known types of organism are capable of some degree of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development and self-regulation. (Wikipedia)

 

"we will explore the city as the most complex human-made “organism” with a metabolism that can be modeled in terms of stocks and flows."

 

What do they mean when they said "contiguous living system?" and in the quote above is it really, in a sense, right to say that a city is "the most complex human-made 'organism' with...?"

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With contiguous they mean it is a cohesive unit (which, if you delve deep into the subcellular level can get a bit complicated). With the city I presume that mostly use it as an analogy. A city obviously is not an organism or living per se but you can build a narrative to draw parallels.

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Part of the reason they make the contiguous distinction may be to exclude clones as "an organism". For example, there are populations of plants (and, i think, simple animals) which are all genetically identical. But because they are physically separate, they are counted as individual organisms.

Edited by Strange
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