Excerpt: The capacity of selfreproduction, although omnipresent in the animate world, is tied up with a host of other characteristics of living organisms and cannot claim to be a fundamental principle. I propose to consider as a fundamental principle of living things their capacity to form coalitions. Thus, sexual reproduction appears to be only a particular manifestation of this capacity. What I call a “coalition” is an aggregate of elements which jointly can do things which all of them separately could never achieve.