CONCEPT
Holobiont
An organism understood not as an individual but as a community of symbiotic partners — the host plus its microbiome, mitochondria, and other residents functioning as a coordinated whole.
The holobiont is Margulis's concept for the organism redefined as an ecological community. A human being is not merely human cells but human cells plus ten trillion bacteria, plus mitochondria carrying their own DNA, plus viruses, fungi, and archaea — the entire community functioning as a coordinated system. The immune system does not simply distinguish self from non-self; it manages a community, tolerating beneficial symbionts while defending against pathogens. The holobiont's health depends on the diversity and functional integrity of its microbial residents. This framework dissolves the Cartesian individual into a distributed network, challenging assumptions about identity, autonomy, and agency. Applied to AI, the holobiont concept suggests that the human-AI practitioner is not a person using a tool but a cognitive community — biological and computational systems integrated into a functional whole whose capabilities are emergent properties of the collaboration.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Margulis developed the holobiont concept in her later career as an extension of endosymbiotic theory. If the eukaryotic cell is a community