Hidrogênio, carbono e oxigênio em DeLanda (2019 [2006])

In addition to sharing the contingency of their enduring properties, organisms and species are also alike in that both are born and die: reproductive isolation marks the threshold of speciation, that is, the historical birth of a new species, and extinction defines its equally historical death. What this implies is that a biological species is an individual entity, as unique and singular as the organisms that compose it, but larger in spatiotemporal scale. In other words, individual organisms are the component parts of a larger individual whole, not the particular members of a general category or natural kind. [Nota de rodapé 4: Michael T. Ghiselin, Metaphysics and the Origin of Species (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1997), p. 78] The same point applies to any other natural kind. For example, chemical species, as classified in the periodic table of the elements, may be reified by a commitment to the existence of hydrogen, oxygen or carbon in general. But it is possible to acknowledge the objectivity of the table while refusing to reify its natural kinds. Atoms of a given species would be considered individual entities produced by recurrent processes (processes of nucleosynthesis) taking place within individual stars. Even though, unlike organisms, these atoms display much less variation, the fact that they were born in a concrete process gives each of them a history. This implies that there is no need to be ontologically [29] committed to the existence of ‘hydrogen in general’ but only to the objective reality of large populations of hydrogen atoms. (DeLanda 2019 [2006]:28-9)

DELANDA, Manuel. 2019 [2006]. A new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity. London: Bloomsbury Academic.