What kind of things exist in the biological world?

Lynn Chiu, New Series: blogging about Biological Individuality! Medium, Dec. 31, 2019.

Those promoting process biology (e.g. John Dupré), dialectical biology (e.g. Richard Lewontin), feminist biology (see SEP entry) have long accused biology and philosophy of subconsciously adopting a capitalist, individualist, atomic, reductionist, determinist, nested hierarchical view of individuals (all the “bad” words!). This is particularly apparent in evolutionary biology, where Darwinism evolution is understood as driven by the competition & strategic alliances between “selfish” entities & the survival of those with the fittest dispositions. These alternative takes seem to converge on a common enemy, but in what way does this “enemy” persist and flex it’s power? What counts as a truly alternative approach?

The more specific question I’m concerned here is whether these alternatives properly entered the debate over biological individuality in the past decade. The debates, to a large extent, were driven by the need to incorporate “weird" ways of being (e.g. bacterial colonies, social insects, fission & fusion, symbiosis) into standard theorizing in biology and philosophy. Did the attempts draw on radically different approaches or were they mostly squeezing weird beings into the same standard mold (either by expanding the referents of those molds or generalizing the molds to better accommodate a larger reference set)?