(Cf. the phenomenon of the «runners» at first connected with the mother plant and then separated from it; the fluid transition between various plants and
animals which appear to be one; the germ - cell inside and outside the parent organism, etc.) Living
forms which present what are apparently very great differences in space and time can ontologically have the same morphological principle, so that enormous differences of external
form can derive from the material substratum and chance patterns of circumstance without change of
substantial form (caterpillar - chrysalis butterfly).
In 2013, scientists amassed
substantial evidence that people and other
animals form a unit with their resident bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses — the collection of microbes known as the microbiome.