ABSTRACT
The uniqueness or individuality must at some stage reflect either individual differences in molecular and genetic composition, environmental influences during growth, or development noise. One of these physicists, Davies, has expressed a characteristically different view of nature of life. He lists as the important properties, complexity, organization, uniqueness, emergence, holism, unpredictability, openness, interconnectedness and disequilibrium, evolution, and teleology. The chapter considers the data to represent genuine biological variation in internal ethylene accumulation between different individual fruits. Individual fruits and subripening processes also vary in their sensitivity to ethylene. This can easily be deduced by experiments in which ethylene is applied to individual fruits and the appearance of various fruit characteristics recorded. The seed gibberellin content is also individualistic, as indicated earlier for ethylene in fruit ripening. Individuality in ethylene content or the accumulation of any growth regulator is to be expected and most importantly concentration will not be a good predictor of the overall cellular process to which they contribute.
