![[Flora-20240808073309393.webp|1178]] Flora is an oil painting created by Giuseppe Arcimboldo in 1589. In his book [[Biocivilisations]], Predrag Slijepcevic makes the claim that this painting deserves more acclaim than Leonardo's Mona Lisa because it depicts the symbiotic nature of life, which doesn't have any hard boundaries around individuals. > The Greek word symbiosis means ‘living together’. Symbiotic biology is concerned with the construction of biological systems through mergers. On this understanding, organisms are biological systems formed by the merger of simpler organisms into more complex ones. Each complex organism is seen as a symbiotic collective rather than an independent individual. Group selection principles apply, such that natural selection selects the collectives which to- gether form fit organisms. By contrast, for earlier mainstream biology, natural selection has been about the selection of individual organisms. This approach treated organisms as undisputed individuals, and did not recognize the role of collectives in the formation or behaviour. It sees group selection as a problematic concept. From the perspective of such mainstream biology, Lisa Gherardini, the model for the Mona Lisa, is one organism. We are blind to the components, the hierarchies, the populations, that make up the ecological collective of her body. But Flora is more authentic than Mona Lisa because Arcimboldo’s counterintuitive vision depicts the wholes as composites. Life is a set of transitional forms, or we might even say an organic composite form that is constantly changing. Evolution is the process of the change of the composites.