Category:Organism

An organism (from Greek: ὄργανον organon "tool") is quite generally a system organised as a structured whole, developing in a living way, in which all the hierarchically structured parts not only mutually relate to each other in their form and function, but are decisively shaped by the whole itself. In the organism, the parts of the whole do not merely lie next to each other externally, as in a dead mechanistic structure, but they are internally connected to the whole and thereby mediate a unified process that relates to the whole itself.