WHAT IS A NESTED HIERARCHY?

Animals are immensely complex and their ordering in a hierarchical manner, with a number of levels of organisation, is what helps make their understanding possible. It is almost as if life was structured as a hierarchy so as to divide up biology for the convenience of those who study it. Thus we have molecules, organelles, cells, tissues and organisms, each of which is a specialist area for different kinds of biologists, who observe the distinction between levels of biological organisation as the boundaries to their own disciplines. This is convenient, as different specialists require different technologies related to the scale and level in the hierarchy at which they work. Typically, specialists in the various fields receive different training, attend different conferences and even work in different buildings. In this way the complexities of the biological sciences have been separated by natural boundaries between them. These boundaries handicap our understanding of organisms as multi-levelled systems, and sever links between the disciplines.