The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

The Origins of Sociable Life Evolution After Science Studies

Myra J. Hird

The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

Also by Myra J. Hird SEX, GENDER AND SCIENCE ENGENDERING VIOLENCE SOCIOLOGY FOR THE ASKING (co-edited) QUESTIONING SOCIOLOGY (co-edited) QUEERING THE NON-HUMAN (co-edited)

The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies Myra J. Hird Queen’s University, Canada

© Myra J. Hird 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN-13: 978-0-230-20213-9 ISBN-10: 0-230-20213-6

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

Chapter 1 After War Introduction Sokal’s long fuse And now? A nonmodern microontology

1 1 3 7 19

Chapter 2 Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria ‘Big like us’ Domains Archaea and Bacteria Ancient hyperthermophiles and thermophilic green nonsulfurs Green sulfur bacteria Proteobacteria Gram-positive bacteria Cyanobacteria Spirochetes Archaea: methanogens, hyperthermophiles and halophiles Forms of life Thinking (with) microbes Perception Communication and self-engineering Communities Social intelligence Meeting with bacteria A difference which makes a difference Natural, cultural, social

21 21 26 27

Chapter 3 Evolutionary Theory and Its Discontents Introduction Symbiogenesis theory Symbiogenesis theory and neoDarwinism A tangled web, or ‘On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection and All Sorts of Other Things’ Conclusions

58 58 59 62 70

v

28 28 31 32 33 34 35 41 41 42 46 52 52 53 54

74

vi Contents

Chapter 4 Microontologies of Self Introduction Corporeal gifting, or the economic self The biological self Symbiotic generosity

77 77 78 81 88

Chapter 5 Microontologies of Sex Barnacle sex Post-mature discoveries and evolutionary theory’s problem An/Other glossary Sexual diversity Original frustrations, frozen accidents Quiet revolutions

91 91 93 96 103 105 109

Chapter 6 Microontologies of Environment Introduction Gaia’s filthy lesson, symbiosis from space Gaian meetings with science Flagships and the rest of us Toward an ecology of weakness

116 116 119 122 126 130

Chapter 7 Eating Well, Surviving Humanism H’ordeuvre Eating well with bacteria Remembering and forgetting Surviving humanism

133 133 137 140 142

Notes

144

Index

197

List of Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 2.2

Particle-Wave Duality. Image courtesy of Anthony Krivan ‘Big Like Us’ Centered Time Scale. Image courtesy of Anthony Krivan 2.2 Prokayote Centered Time Scale. Image courtesy of Anthony Krivan 2.3 Three Kingdom Tree of Life. Image courtesy of Carl Woese 2.4 Communication amongst P. dendritiformis. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society 2.5 C-B Morphotype Transitions. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society 2.6a,b ‘Busy’ Branching Morphology and Dendritic Growth. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob and the Royal Society 2.7 Bacterial Self-Engineering. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society 2.8 ‘Fruiting Body’ Morphogenesis in Myxococcus xanthus. Images courtesy of Dale Kaiser and the American Society of Microbiology 2.9 Hierarchical Colonial Organization. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society 2.10 Vortices’ Inheritable Self-identity. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society 3.1a,b Mixotricha paradoxa. Images courtesy of Lynn Margulis 3.2 Origin of Species through Symbiogenesis. Drawing by Kathryn Delisle. Image courtesy of Lynn Margulis 5.1 Trichonympha. Images produced by Dorion Sagan 5.2 Drawing of an Acrasia Cellular Slime Mold. Image courtesy of Anthony Krivan 5.3 Actinoastrum engaged in Reproduction (mitosis). Images courtesy of Lynn Margulis vii

8 23 24 39

43 44

45 47

48

50

51 60

63 96 97 99

viii List of Figures and Tables

Tables 2.1 Nature-Culture-Social Schema. Table courtesy of Garry Runciman 5.1 Levels of Sexual (and Para-Sexual) Unions. Table courtesy of Lynn Margulis

55 98

All attempts have been made by the author and publisher to contact copyright holders but please contact the publishers regarding any errors and we would be pleased to correct any oversights.

Preface and Acknowledgments Even philosophers will be inspired to learn about motility proteins. Scientists and nonscientists will be motivated to learn enough chemistry, microbiology, evolutionary biology and paleontology to understand the relevance of these fields to the deep questions they pose.1 I felt a cleavage in my mind. As if my brain had split; I tried to match it, seam by seam, But could not make them fit. The thought behind I strove to join Unto the thought before, But sequence ravelled out of reach Like balls upon the floor.2 This book began in 1999 when I was on study leave at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Taking a break from my writing on Freudian pycho-analytic theory, I went for a walk and happened upon a used bookstore. There I found, for the sum of £1, Distinguished University Professor Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s book What is Sex?3 With full color pictures of bacteria, fungi, prokaryotes, invertebrates and vertebrates, this book initiated a sea-change in my intellectual horizon. At the time, my research focused on the ontology of gender difference, employing those theories so familiar to feminist social sciences – performativity, psychoanalysis and so on – with increasing frustration. Versed in feminist (and more broadly social theoretical) calls to return to ‘the body’, I wanted to engage with the materiality of bodies, and especially nonhuman bodies. And here it was, in a book written by an evolutionary theorist whose research I soon began to familiarize myself with. This interest culminated, eight years and many diversions later, in a sabbatical in the Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I wrote the bulk of this book. I am forever grateful to Liz Stanley, who not only graciously arranged my first sabbatical at the University of Manchester, and thus inadvertently started me on this path, but for giving me the idea of contacting ix

x Preface and Acknowledgments

the Margulis Laboratory. I never would have had the nerve to do this without Liz’s encouragement. I thank Celeste Asikainen, Research Fellow, PhD student and Margulis Laboratory Assistant, for using great tact and politeness in her attempt, for good reason, to dissuade me from pursuing my research. As I later came to understand, Margulis’s research has been misquoted, misconstrued and manipulated out of all context, as much by social as natural scientists. I thank and greatly appreciate the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for awarding me a generous grant with which to carry out the research contained in this book, and to Queen’s University for supporting my sabbatical leave. I thank my dedicated head of department, Rob Beamish, for keeping me in the teaching and administrative loop, while also allowing me to completely ignore it. Above all, I thank Lynn Margulis, who, against her better judgment I’m sure, graciously invited me to take her graduate course, Microbial Communities in 2006 (which I ended up taking twice because I liked it so much), and then to spend the 2007–2008 academic year in her laboratory. If her hundreds of books and articles have not inspired me, Margulis’s dedication to science has irrevocably changed the course of my life. She, like Horton who ‘hears a who!’, and more than anyone else I know of, has helped microbes yell (after all, a person’s a microbe, no matter how big). That most of us still don’t hear their vivid calling is our own fault entirely. The Margulis Laboratory is a place, to borrow from both Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, where naturecultures intra-act: pictures of Margulis amid rows of scientists at various meetings (she is typically the only woman in these pictures); scores of honors tucked behind fridges containing various microbial communities; scientists; cameras; termites; Petri-dishes; theories; unwashed dishes; solar rays; janitorial staff; undergrad and graduate students; runaway cockroaches escaping from neighboring labs; a murky Miller/Urey-type vat; generous amounts of dust; computers; music; pens and paper and so on. To all of these, I owe a debt I am not asked to, nor could I, repay. I thank Michael Dolan, Michael Chapman, Jim MacAllister, Sean Faukner, Carolina Galen, Emily Case, Kendra Clark, Idalia Rodriguez and Bruce Scofield for answering my horribly naïve questions about termite hindgut symbionts, electron microscopes, earthworms, forams, nematoads, karyomastigonts, microtubule-organizing-centres (MTOCs), and countless other subjects in the Garden of Microbial Delights. (I apologize, Mike Chapman, for harshing your mellow several times in my attempts to understand the microbial world.) Thank you Michael Dolan

Preface and Acknowledgments xi

and Carolina for also letting me shadow you in your termite symbiont experiments, all the while clogging your ears with my incessant questions. Thanks also Michael Dolan for letting me audit Social Biology – a thought-provoking course indeed. I thank Dorion Sagan too, for graciously putting up with my nagging company. I thank Professor James Walker at UMass for allowing me to audit Cosmos to Humanity, a course that most definitely changed my view of the universe. My regular lunches with Jim, in which we discussed a gamut of topics from cells to the solar system, were certainly a highlight of my sabbatical experience. When I began my research in the Margulis Laboratory, I was aware of Lynn’s eminent research career. I was unaware of her dedication to teaching; that is, the unstinting enthusiasm with which Lynn routinely stimulates epiphanic moments. I fear these ‘ah ha’ moments are uncommon in the jaded academic’s life. Thanks to Lynn and her colleagues, I had several such moments while at the University of Massachusetts. Nevertheless, I am conscious of the fact that my job as a sociologist drew me to social theories, to ways of thinking about symbiogenesis, evolutionary theory and Gaia, that, for natural scientists, may well seem beside the point. And so, as is custom, I take full responsibility for the connections I make in this book between science and social theory, and I respect that much of what I say here is what Lynn succinctly calls ‘he said, she said’. I thank Michael Dolan for reading through this manuscript and correcting, at least, my most obvious misreadings of microbiology. I am assuming that much of what I present here will invoke disagreement, debate and challenge (and rightly so). My aim is not to present this material as either all-encompassing, or from a ‘magisterial viewpoint’. What initially drew me to What is Sex? and over the years to Margulis’s other publications, is that her research takes matter very seriously. For a social theorist, this is refreshing in and of itself. My overall goal in writing this book has been to harness theories and evidence from Margulis’s research to think through themes familiar to social scientists: paradigms, epistemic cultures, individuality and subjectivity. Although trying to understand and then use this research on nature has required that I interrogate my reliance upon particular configurations of realism, representationalism and social constructionism, I have come to appreciate that one can understand philosophy of science issues such as paradigms and epistemic cultures, and also study and appreciate nonhuman matter. Indeed, if we want to find out anything outside of culture, what other choice do we have? My overall goal is to begin to think about some of the issues that preoccupy social scientists – identity, selfhood, the environment, sexual

xii Preface and Acknowledgments

difference, consciousness – from nonanimal perspectives. I have tried, as much as I can, to think with bacteria. The more I learn about the biosphere, the more I understand that bacteria are clearly running the show. We can only be grateful that they do not harbor the same animosity toward us that we, for the most part, offer them. My concern is also with the modern synthesis, for the very self-serving reason that its message obviates the need for sociology. I thank my graduate team at Queen’s University: Martin French, Melissa Houghtaling, Christopher Canning, Sandra Robinson, Rebecca Scott and Lee Silver. Our lively reading group helped me to sort out my thoughts on several of the topics included in this book. Moreover, this book would not have been completed without Christopher Canning’s careful referencing checks and overall proof-reading skills. I also thank friends and colleagues whose encouragement I have depended on: Jane Kubke, Betsy Donald, Doug Morrow, Alec Ross, Graeme Smith, Brian McKercher, Gail and Billy Ows, Lucina Danielson, Mary Dudley, Liz Grier and Jay Piercy, Dara and Walter Lloyd, Sonya Swift and Susan Phillips, Lois McCammond, Brigita Stockinger, George Pavlich and Carla Spinola, Noreen Giffney, Jami Weinstein, Barbara Marshall, Liz Frazer, Lynda Williams, Karen Weisbaum, Deborah White, Momin Rahman, Ian Buchanan, John Protevi and Eugene Holland, Bronislaw Szerszynski, John Urry, Celia Roberts, Lucy Suchman, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad and Anna Tsing. During my beached whale phase (heavily pregnant and with a broken ankle, thirteen screws and two metal plates) a number of friends helped me out: I thank Annette Burfoot for bringing me my mail and lattés even though it hurt her back and took her away from her own hectic life; and Cathie Krull, Laureen Snider and Roberta Hamilton for science magazines, novels and nonobligating support. I thank Nigel Clark for being such an inspiring friend and fellow traveler in nature and for commenting on chapters of this book. I thank Peter VanWyck who also encouraged me in my research, asking just the right questions at the right time. I am grateful to my editor, Philippa Grand, editorial assistant, Olivia Middleton and copy editor Shirley Tan for their enthusiasm in the book, their guidance, and unstinting support. I thank my parents, Barbara and Brian, for understanding my distraction over the past year, for doing overtime grandchild care on many occasions, and for taking me seriously. I thank my sister Janet for believing in me. That it has taken me this long to realize her inspiration is my own shortcoming entirely. I thank Inis, Eshe and Anth whose corporeal generosity fills me with wonder. Their lives may not be symbiotic with mine, but it sure feels that way. Finally, I dedicate this book to my Mum. With a nod to Ian Falconer, I thank my Mum who, for better or for worse, always encouraged me.

1 After War

Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself King of infinite space.1

Introduction This book is about microontologies. Microontologies describes my interest in beginning to think through the parameters of bringing the microcosmos to bear on our approach to social scientific topics. Microontologies refers to a microbial ethics, or, if you will, an ethics that engages seriously with the microcosmos. This book considers microontologies using an interdisciplinary nonmodern epistemology. Along this path I have some excellent company within biophilosophy: Keith Ansell Pearson’s germinal and viroid life, Bruno Latour’s pasteurization of France, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s creative involution; Donna Haraway’s species-meeting, Karen Barad’s meetings with the universe, Vicki Kirby’s telling flesh, Manuel De Landa’s nonlinear history, Elizabeth Wilson’s neural geographies, Alphonso Lingis’s foreign bodies, Elizabeth Grosz’s time travels, Rosalyn Diprose’s corporeal generosity, and more besides.2 Within the fields of earth systems science and microbiology, the researchers at the Lynn Margulis Laboratory where I spent a year introduced me to laboratory techniques, samples and literature concerned with various forms of microbial life. And, of course, the unfathomable numbers of microbes with which I affiliate contribute to my story. (I do not exaggerate to say that my microbial companions in some ways write this story). The basic premise from which this book proceeds is that social scientists must find ways to begin to theorize an ethics of the microbial – particularly outside pathogen histories and characterizations – and 1

2 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

that this is fundamental to our future disciplinary enterprise. I believe this is a tall order: considering an ethics of human-animal relations already seems to confront implicit and enduring humanist foundational assumptions. Given that humans are animals, this says something important about the vast expanse of life (and nonlife) that exceeds our current theoretical horizon. To situate my efforts, this preliminary chapter considers familiar philosophy of science terrain that seeks answers to fundamental questions about the constitution of matter and of knowledge, and the relationship between observer and observed. These are unsettling questions for me. On one hand, I have delighted in observing and identifying symbionts under an electron microscope. On the other hand, I have attended to the ways in which scientific and political models co-mingle in reductive ways. Even though I recognize that I only see symbionts with the aid of a classification scheme, electron microscope, air, solution, pincers, nervous system, light, eyes, research grant, fingers, human instruction, brain and slides – not to mention the symbiont itself, let’s say a termite with thousands of different microbes within its gut – I do not want to argue that prokaryotes and eukaryotes exist only through my social and/or technological construction of them, or that my entanglement with microbes is more important than (or worse, determines) their entanglements with each other. Philosophers from Plato onwards have offered escapes from this epistemological conundrum. Moreover, the scientists in whose company I engage with these questions are well versed in Kuhnian paradigms, Fleckian social construction of scientific facts, the science wars and the entanglement of science and politics. They know about Cetina-Knorrian scientific epistemic cultures, Bloorian symmetry, and Latourian laboratory life: indeed, in important ways, they live these concepts and approaches through their scientific work. They also take the biosphere seriously as an entangled actant. These scientists study matter that existed before animals (human or otherwise). In this laboratory, matter has its own ontology apart from human observation and intervention (indeed, given the current environmental crisis, there is a sense born of frustration that the sooner human extinction occurs, the better for planet earth.) For these scientists, the biosphere has its own agency, its own liveliness, which far exceeds any human purview: bacterial inventions and interventions defy the healthiest human imagination.3 I belabor these points because they continuously re-occur in evolutionary theory and studies of the microbial. A handful of scientists (whose work is the focus of Chapter 3) lay claim to both expositing contem-

After War 3

porary evolutionary theory and its valid interpretation for public digestion. Each scientist makes claims about the use of evidence (fossil records for example) and theory in ways that are dependent on sociopolitical ideas that are obscured precisely because the subject matter – evolution – is assumed to be natural.

Sokal’s long fuse Alan Sokal’s 1996 hoax re-ignited a long fuse of unresolved debates within and between social and natural scientific disciplines about the ontology and epistemology of matter. The two extreme positions – dichotomized presumably to erect those straw assertions we are so fond of philosophically dismantling – are realism and social constructivism. Sokal and Bricmont stake their flag to realism: There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths.4 Philosophers of science tend to be more circumspect, states Evelyn Fox Keller: ‘scholars in science studies who have turned to post-modernism have done so out of a real need: Truth and objectivity turn out to be vastly more problematic concepts than we used to think, and neither can be measured simply by the weight of scientific authority, nor even by demonstrations of efficacy’.5 Plato’s Dialogues defined this debate as a battle between the gods and the earth giants.6 Plato’s gods were on the side of certain knowledge, truth, reason and reality. That is, knowledge as Certain, Universal, Necessary and True. The work of the philosopher and contemporary scientist is, paraphrasing Einstein, to ‘lift a corner of the veil’. For Plato, this kind of knowledge is exemplified by mathematics because it follows a strictly deductive form of reasoning. Against these gods of certain knowledge, Plato pitted the earth giants (Sophists), who understood knowledge as a certain type of belief. Science is replete with larger-than-life figures firmly on the side of Plato’s gods. Galileo Galilei’s equation for a freely falling body, s=1/2gt2, where the distance covered by a freely falling body and the time is directly proportional to the time squared, exemplified the orderly nature of reality revealed through mathematics. Galileo’s telescope

4 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

observations of the moons of Jupiter and his numerous gedankens were directed at discovering true knowledge of reality.7 Isaac Newton, born the year Galileo died, is, next to Plato, most securely associated with the side of the Gods. As Alexander Pope once remarked ‘And God said, “Let Newton be”, and there was light’.8 Newton’s equation for gravity began with a set of principles from which could be derived universal, certain, necessary and true knowledge. For instance, Newton defined space and time as uniform and infinite in all directions.9 Kant’s Idealism was an attempt to philosophically corroborate Newtonian physics in the face of skepticism born of the earth giants (in the form of David Hume’s empiricism). At the core of Kant’s tome Critique of Pure Reason is the idea that while absolutely true knowledge might be impossible to ascertain, we may come as close as possible (as close as we would ever practically need) by recognizing that experience is constructed by the mind, and the mind conforms to certain universal, uniform and consistent rules. Time and space are examples of such rules, and they are, as one philosopher once described it to me, ‘hard-wired’ (Kant called this intuition) in our brains. Intuition produces our judgment of the truth of knowledge prior to experience. In other words, we do not acquire our knowledge through experience per se, because our experience is always already created through our intuition. With Kant, we get knowledge that is certain, universal, necessary and true – knowledge of thingsin-themselves – because our intuition is based on time and space that are not invented by us. But we forego absolute knowledge, knowledge that is independent of our response to it. As Goldman puts it ‘the mind originates its own activity.’10 I like Cavell’s summation: To settle with skepticism…to assure us that we do know the existence of the world, or rather, that what we understand as knowledge is of the world, the price Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant that human knowledge is not of things as they are in themselves. You don’t – do you? – have to be a romantic to feel sometimes about that settlement: Thanks for nothing.11 Which bring us full swing to the side of the earth giants. The Sophists argued that knowledge is a form of belief, and a position of skepticism concerning the impossibility of True knowledge has filtered down through philosophy ever since. George Berkeley, David Hume and John Locke championed empiricism, the theory that all knowledge derives from our

After War 5

senses that formulate our experiences and knowledge of the world onto the mind. We achieve knowledge about nature by applying reason to ‘primary sensations’ such as size and shape that belong to things-inthemselves. Our knowledge is a derived one, based on the accumulation of experiences, and thus can never be certain, universal, necessary and true. Francis Bacon’s The New Organon argued that knowledge is best achieved through meticulous, thorough and detailed observation of the natural world – a very practical ‘hands on’ method distinct from knowledge through esoteric reasoning. Bacon believed that knowledge was discerned by the ‘quieting of the mind’.12 Bacon’s idols – of the tribe, cave, marketplace and theatre – all describe ways in which knowledge is contaminated through prejudices of the mind. Hume exposed this problem through his focus on causality, which he argued did not define certainty and truth, but rather ‘uniformities in our experience’ that we ‘project into the future and…expect those patterns to exist in the future.’13 For Hume, empiricism is on the slippery slope to skepticism: not surprisingly Kant said that Hume had roused him from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’. Moreover, the earth giants have at their disposal a social scientific critique focused on the premise that all natural sciences depend upon one or more initial propositions, and that, contra Plato and Socrates, these propositions are born of the social enterprise that is science itself. Two well-known examples from the history and philosophy of science illustrate one of the major enterprises of contemporary science studies. The Copernican revolution required the adoption of Copernicus’s system of the planets and rejecting Ptolemy’s. It required a leap of, however rationally guised, faith: Copernicus’s theory requires us to believe contrary to all experience that the Earth is rotating on its axis at approximately 1,000 miles per hour. The Earth’s circumference is about 24,000 miles, so in a 24 hour period, we have to cover 24,000 miles. If you throw a ball up in the air, how come it isn’t blown backwards? If a bird takes off at the equator, why doesn’t a 1,000 mile-an-hour wind blow it backwards? Why don’t we see any evidence of this motion? If the Earth circles the Sun, then it means that in June and December, the Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun. Then how do two stars that are lined up in a row in June still line up in December?14 Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer (whose research Kepler was purported to have stolen after Brahe’s death), came up with a theory of the heavens

6 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

in which the earth rotates on its axis but is stationary and the sun orbits the earth, Mercury and Venus, the inner planets orbit the sun as it orbits the earth, and Mars, Jupiter and Saturn orbit both the sun and the earth. History being on the side of the winners, we take Newton’s vindication of the Copernican system (which he ironically substantiated by using Kepler’s ideas that were based on Brahe’s research). However, Galileo did not (nor could he have) come up with an experiment that would have disproved Brahe’s system while substantiating Copernicus’s. Although Galileo knew of both Brahe’s theory and Kepler’s idea that the planets orbit the sun in ellipses, he ignored both. Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems (1632) is a conversation between Ptolemy and Copernicus, with Copernicus in the clear lead. In fact, we now accept Kepler’s theory that, not only do the planets orbit in ellipses, but that they do not move at uniform speeds. Retrospectively, we can reasonably say that Galileo, Newton and Descartes were all wrong and that they did not really have a purchase on the Truth, even though they all thought, and we maintain today, that they engendered knowledge. So the scientific enterprise is more complicated than we typically allow. Galileo deleted some information, emphasized other ideas and based his work on a combination of theoretical speculation, creative gedankens and witty argument. Just as we now agree that a great deal of the science during this period, including that of Galileo and Newton, is erroneous, it is reasonable to assume that what we now hold to be scientifically substantiated will, 400 years from now, be considered incorrect. The second example concerns the invention of the airpump. Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke developed a series of experiments on air using an air pump invented in the seventeenth century.15 These experiments were widely acclaimed and caught the critical attention of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes argued that experiments could not reveal causes because it is impossible to separate facts of nature from any given artifact produced by the machine/experiment itself. As Goldman points out, it is one thing to agree that an x-ray is a valid and accurate depiction of a bone; it is another to agree that a particular shadow represents an aneurysm.16 To agree on the latter requires specialized training with the measuring instrument, which necessarily introduces a social dimension (classification scheme and so on) into the determination of truth. While Hobbes is usually regarded as the loser in the ‘air pump debate’, in fact he had a rather good point. Since machines necessarily

After War 7

already embody the theories used to build them (x-ray machines are built to provide x-ray images; air pumps were invented to create vacuums), how can we with any certainty differentiate between the measuring instrument and the theory? In other words, ‘the expectation of what the machine is going to show you is already there. How can you use that as a confirmation of the expectation?’17 And how can we know, with certainty, that the data collected from measuring instruments are a faithful, exact and consistent reflection of the object of study? Norman Campbell notes that the fundamental laws of nature do not correspond to the world we discern (we are moving at a rate of 24,000 miles every 24 hours).18 What we have is a network of theories and an understanding of how the measuring instruments we have created work.19 For this reason, Ian Hacking argues that phenomena are created in the laboratory, and Steve Fuller writes, ‘discovery favors the prepared mind’.20

And now? A contemporary form of the gods versus earth giants debate is distilled in the famous discussions that took place at the genesis of particle physics between Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein and several other physicists. I have been intrigued by the way in which philosophy of science and physics have coalesced in various forms: the Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger’s Cat, quantum theory and so on. The wave-particle duality sets the stage.21 Particles are material objects insofar as each particle occupies a particular point in space and time. Waves, on the other hand, are not things per se, but ‘disturbances (which cannot be localized to a point) that propagate in a medium (like water) or as oscillating fields (like electromagnetic waves such as light)’.22 Waves, under the right conditions, produce diffraction patterns when they combine, overlap and/or encounter an obstruction. Newtonian physics predicts that only waves will produce diffraction patterns. But when Niels Bohr adapted Thomas Young’s ‘two-slit’ experiment in which particles are propelled through a series of gaps, they display a diffraction pattern. Further: if we ‘track’ the particle with a ‘which-path apparatus’ (i.e. to observe the electron to see where it goes), the electron’s resulting pattern will appear as one that characterizes particles. If we do not track the electron, the resulting pattern appears in a diffraction (wave) pattern:

8 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

Figure 1.1

Particle-Wave Duality. Image courtesy of Anthony Krivan

This result has been observed with electrons, neutrons, atoms and other matter, and even occurs when a single particle at a time is propelled through the slits. So how does a single electron ‘interfere’ with itself, in a wave sense? How can a single electron go through both slits at once?23 Classical Newtonian physics holds that electrons, atoms and so on are either waves or particles, independent of their observation or other experimental circumstances, and that experiments reveal objects in themselves. One obvious way to try to explain these results is that they only apply to really small things. But the Correspondence Principle states that quantum and Newtonian mechanics must correspond – that there cannot be two (macro and micro) conflicting realities.24 That is, while a sense of ‘blurring’ (probability) makes sense at the microscopic level, it makes no sense at the macroscopic level. Things measured at the macroscopic level are not blurry or probabilistic; they produce definite values.25

After War 9

What we get, according to the more conservative interpretation (it conforms to Occam’s Razor), is an epistemological explanation. For Werner Heisenberg, quantum theory distills an epistemological concern about how we know what we know (known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). The particle-wave duality empirically demonstrates that we can only make probabilistic predictions about energy/time and position/ momentum. ‘Uncertainty’ here refers not to our lack of understanding so much as ‘a precisely calculable theoretical minimum spread in the results from repeated measurements, or predicted range of values from a single measurement’.26 Thus, for Heisenberg, Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen and others, quantum theory raises epistemological issues insofar as the measurement of matter and matter itself co-produce results (our understanding of the world), what Schrödinger refers to as the ‘entanglement of our knowledge’. To the question ‘does the moon exist apart from human observation?’ the answer here is that we can only make meaningful utterances when someone has actually looked at the moon. As Heisenberg wrote ‘we do not have a science of nature, we have a science of our description of nature’.27 Bohr thought the situation was more complicated than this, and his ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ interpreted the wave-particle duality paradox to mean that particles do not have simultaneously determinate position and momentum values. That is, wave and particle behaviors are complementary – exhibited in mutually exclusive circumstances. Bohr argues: …the fundamental difference with respect to the analysis of phenomena in classical and in quantum physics is that in the former the interaction between the objects and the measuring instruments may be neglected or compensated for, while in the latter this interaction forms an integral part of the phenomena. The essential wholeness of the proper quantum phenomenon finds indeed logical expression in the circumstance that any attempt at its well-defined subdivision would require a change in the experimental arrangement incompatible with the appearance of the phenomenon itself.28 We can either find out which path an individual electron goes through (in which case the resulting pattern will resemble that of particles) or we can not know which path the electron takes, and end up with a wave pattern. What Bohr is arguing, contra Heisenberg, is that this is not a measurement problem to be resolved with greater technologically precise instrumentation or more objective observation procedures.

10 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

As Hooker puts it, ‘Descriptively, there is a single situation, no part of which can be abstracted out without running into conflict with other such descriptions… The object cannot be ascribed an “independent reality in the ordinary physical sense”’.29 For Bohr, this is not an epistemological problem: it is an ontological one. Put another way, it is the difference between uncertainty and indeterminacy.30 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen’s 1935 article ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Descriptions of Physical Reality be Considered Complete’ distills Einstein’s concern that quantum theory points to the inseparability of objects (as though objects ‘communicate’ with each other instantaneously), thus violating the theory of special relativity. What Einstein is concerned about is, indeed, what counts as reality: I just want to explain what I mean when I say that we should try to hold onto physical reality… That which we conceive as existing (‘actual’) should somehow be localized in time and space. That is, the real in one part of space, A, should (in theory) somehow ‘exist’ independently of that which is thought of as real in another part of space, B… What is actually present in B should thus not depend upon the type of measurement carried out in the part of space, A; it should also be independent of whether or not, after all, a measurement is made in A… If one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I do not at all see what physics is supposed to describe. For what is thought to be a ‘system’ is, after all, just conventional, and I do not see how one is supposed to divide up the world objectively so that one can make statements about its parts.31 The crux of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen’s argument is this: ‘If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty (i.e., with probability equal to unity) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity’.32 If, in other words, we can control a system such that it is either not disturbed at all, or its total disturbance can be measured and accounted for, we can retain a notion of causality, and thus reality, as defined by classical physics. Put another way, quantum theory presents an epistemological issue that could, theoretically, be overcome by technological developments in measuring instruments. Bohr recognized Einstein’s disquiet and responded in ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics’ by first recognizing the apparent disjuncture between causality at the macro

After War 11

and micro levels of observation: ‘…causal description is upheld in relativity theory within any given frame of reference, but in quantum theory the uncontrollable interaction between the objects and the measuring instruments forces us to a renunciation even in such respect’.33 He then points out that the remark ‘without in any way disturbing a system’ contains ‘a criterion of reality … however cautious its formulation may appear – an essential ambiguity when it is applied to the actual problems with which we are here concerned’ (ibid). Bohr writes: But even at this stage there is essentially the question of an influence on the very conditions which define the possible types of predictions regarding the future behavior of the system. Since these conditions constitute an inherent element of the description of any phenomenon to which the term ‘physical reality’ can be properly attached, we see that the argumentation of the mentioned authors [Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen] does not justify their conclusions that quantum-mechanical description is essentially incomplete. On the contrary, this description, as appears from the preceding discussion, may be characterized as a rational utilization of all possibilities of unambiguous interpretation of measurements, compatible with the finite and uncontrollable interaction between the objects and the measuring instruments in the field of quantum theory. In fact, it is only the mutual exclusion of any two experimental procedures, permitting the unambiguous definition of complementary physical quantities, which provides room for new physical laws, the coexistence of which might at first sight appear irreconcilable with the basic principles of science. It is just this entirely new situation as regards the description of physical phenomena that the notion of complementarity aims at characterizing.34 To answer Einstein’s concern about ‘what physics describes’, Bohr argues that natural (and presumably social) scientists, study phenomena, defined as ‘the observations obtained under specified circumstances, including an account of the whole experimental arrangement’, what Barad refers to as ‘entangled material agencies’.35 In other words, reality is defined as things-in-phenomena rather than things-in-themselves.36 Objectivity becomes what Bohr defines as ‘permanent marks – such as a spot on a photographic plate, caused by the impact of an electron – left on bodies which define the experimental condition’.37 Objectivity, then, does not depend upon the separability of observer from observed (in classical accounts). Indeed, for Bohr, to evacuate the human from the universe would be to accord the human with a privileged position.

12 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

My reading of these discussions is aided by Karen Barad’s comprehensive account of the development of quantum mechanics in Meeting the Universe Halfway.38 Barad’s term ‘intra-action’ refers to the ontological inseparability (in the Bohrian sense) of all ‘words’ (culture) and all ‘things’ (nature), contrasted against the term ‘interaction’ predicated upon (ontologically) individuated entities that subsequently interact. By considering ‘words’ and ‘things’ as ontologically (as opposed to only epistemologically) entangled, Barad’s theory avoids the problem that representation seeks analogies and homologies between separate entities.39 As such, Barad defines realism as ‘not about representations of an independent reality but about the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within and as part of our world’.40 What I like about Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory, Barad’s adaptation, and Latour’s metaphysics, is that they highlight all matter and all interactions as entangled, beyond an epistemological approach that would retain a notion of individual entities (whether defined as material objects or cultural artifacts such as conversations, normative conventions and so on) whose interaction cannot be ultimately determined through measurement. At its heart, Bohr’s interpretation challenges the concept of individualism. For Bohr, ‘the incessant exchange of matter which is inseparably connected with life will even imply the impossibility of regarding an organism as a well-defined system of material particles like the systems considered in any account of the ordinary physical and chemical properties of matter’.41 This ‘incessant exchange’ takes place with or without observation and sentience; it is not created or sustained by a measuring process or observer. Moreover, observer and observed are not inherently static in time or space (to make them so is to exact an agential cut) – they are always already previously intra-acting physical systems. For Bohr, complementarity leads to a notion of volition as ‘entangled’, and he eschewed interpretations claiming that quantum theory supports a notion of free will: I…emphasize that it is just this impossibility of distinguishing, in introspection, sharply between subject and object which provides the necessary latitude for the manifestation of volition. To connect free will more directly with limitation of causality in atomic physics, as it is often suggested, is, however, entirely foreign to the tendency underlying the remarks here made about biological problems.42 In concert with Barad’s ‘agential realism’, a number of contemporary scholars endeavor to deflate the philosophical space between matter and

After War 13

culture, and have coined terms aimed at, if not completely rejecting then at the very least significantly narrowing, the matter-culture bifurcation, for instance: Latour’s ‘parliament of things’, ‘co-production’ and ‘infraphysics’; Callon’s ‘actor network’; Stenger’s ‘cosmopolitics’; Law’s ‘relational materialism’; Pickering’s ‘noncorrespondence realism’; Serres’s ‘quasi-object’; Kearnes’s ‘relational intersubjectivity’; Fuller’s ‘social epistemology’; Bergson’s ‘to vary with’ matter itself and ‘image’; Braidotti’s ‘new materialism’ and ‘transpositions’; Irwin’s ‘co-constructions’; Fox Keller’s ‘dynamic objectivity’; and Haraway’s ‘naturecultures’.43 In what follows, I conduct a preliminary sketch of the elements of several of these approaches and leave their further elaboration to subsequent chapters. The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’s (SSK) ‘strong program’s’ ‘symmetry postulate’ argues that all ideas (whether rational, irrational, true or false) are social ‘through and through’ as opposed to the Kantian idea that true (rational) beliefs are based on reality while false (irrational) beliefs are based on societal influences.44 For Kant, the true belief that the earth revolves around the sun is based on rational science (employing the scientific method) whereas the false belief that the stars and planets revolve around the earth was based on Christian church influences. SSK is able to hold both true and false beliefs (as in the example above) on equal footing because the ‘correspondence’ of beliefs to reality is itself based on subjective assertion, imputation or acceptance. Thompson provides a flavor of this perspective: It seems ironic that human experiences known by artists and saints and yogis in different cultures over the millennia, and repeated over and over again in quite different situations, are dismissed as superstition and illusion, but an elementary particle that only exists as a nanosecond impulse on a screen seen only by a handful of high priests at CERN at a cost greater than the construction bill for the Great Pyramids is considered to be ‘scientifically real’. Elementary particles are no more real than angels or garden dwarves; they are, in Varela’s words, ‘brought forth’. Elementary particles are brought forth by linear or ring accelerators, just as angels or bodhisattvas are brought forth by meditation. Physics … is a language.45 The strong program tackles the observer-observed problem by arguing that subject and object are not ontologically separate because society is part of nature, and knowledge itself is a natural phenomenon. For SSK: We can assume that observation will always enable us to uncover a reality, which is more complicated than we can assimilate into our

14 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

current conceptual schemes and theoretical systems. Experience and practical involvement with the world will endlessly generate anomaly. Nature will always have to be filtered, simplified, selectively sampled, and cleverly interpreted to bring it within our grasp. It is because complexity must be reduced to relative simplicity that different ways of representing nature are always possible. How we simplify it, how we cho[o]se to make approximations and selections, is not dictated by (non-social) nature itself. These processes, which are collective achievements, must ultimately be referred to properties of the knowing subject. This is where the sociologist comes into the picture (my emphasis).46 For the strong program, nature is more complex than observers’ attempts to explain it: we come to understand parts of nature through an endless refining process of observation and interpretation, and it is this continuous refining process sociologists of science analyze.47 Reality possesses causal agency, not least in its ability to stimulate the sense organs, and by extension, the sentient analytic process itself. In order to analyze these refining processes, sociologists must ascertain detailed knowledge about what scientists are responding to – their stimuli – whether neutrinos, genes or protoctists. In other words, nature centrally impacts on our beliefs about how nature is experienced, but it does not causally explain how it is then described (although in a strict sense and given Bloor’s assertion that the human mind is necessarily part of nature, the description itself must at least be, partially, causally explained by nature). As such, Bloor describes the strong program as relativist in the sense that it is concerned to evaluate theories and beliefs in terms of their credibility, which necessarily engages with the social aspects of science, consisting of the context in which any given theories or beliefs are found (including classification, rules, principles and so on). Interestingly, Bloor does not characterize the subject-object as a zero-sum game in which the more we know as fact, the less it is based on subjectivity (in the phenomenological sense), because for Bloor, ‘all knowledge always depends on society’ and is thus necessarily provisional.48 Adherents argue that SSK provides a ‘third method’ that solves the problem of relying upon scientific descriptions and explanations of nonhuman matter. However, my unease with the strong program is that, in practice, it aims to ‘explain shared beliefs about nature’ and nature seems to remain effectively silent.49 SSK depends upon a knowing human subject that, as Maturala and Varela put it, ‘brings forth a world’. Microbes, in SSK, do not bring forth a world. What Collins and Yearley identify as a strength of SSK, to ‘…show that the appar-

After War 15

ent individual power of the natural world is granted by human beings in social negotiation’, to my mind provides a partial account precisely because it requires a human-centered universe.50 Actor network theory (ANT) has garnered enthusiastic adherents and dogged criticisms, the latter coming not least from the strong program.51 At its heart, ANT seeks to place ‘things-in-themselves’ at the analytic center: Things-in-themselves? But they’re fine, thank you very much. And how are you? You complain about things that have not been honored by your vision? You feel that these things are lacking the illumination of your consciousness? But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry that you were not there, and in any case you would have tamed them, killed, photographed, or studied them. Things in themselves lack nothing, just as Africa did not lack whites before their arrival (my emphasis).52 My affinity with Latour’s work is greatly facilitated by Graham Harman’s close reading. Here, Latour’s metaphysics emerges as a truly novel response – that neither analytic nor continental philosophies offer – to Kant’s Faustian bargain to produce a ‘philosophy of access’ where a chasm is figured between human and cosmos.53 Latour charges that Western society is predicated on an artificial bifurcation between nature and culture in which knowledge about nature’s order of things is sui generis or self referential (that is, knowledge entirely contained within that defined as sociality): a bifurcation that never actually eventuated, leading Latour to conclude that We Have Never Been Modern. Latour’s main point is that the separation between culture and nature is an artificial, philosophical enterprise: ‘forces cannot be divided into the “human” and “nonhuman”… It is not a question of nature… Natures mingle with one another and with “us” so thoroughly we cannot hope to separate them and discover clear, unique origins to their powers’.54 Latour deploys the term ‘collective’ to describe humannonhuman associations and relegates ‘society’ to one particular part of the collective, ‘the divide invented by the social sciences’.55 This artificial divide – a divide that never succeeded – is itself a discursive repertoire. Part of ANT’s criticism of SSK is that the latter ‘depends on an antithesis to natural realism in favor of social realism’:56 … [T]here are two and only two known and fixed repertoires of agencies which are stocked at the two extremities – brute material

16 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

objects, on the one hand, and intentional social human subjects, on the other. Every other entity – gravitational waves, scallops, inscriptions, or door closers, to name a few – will be read as a combination or mixture of these two pure repertoires.57 According to ANT, the world is made up of actants, defined as anything that relates to other actants: ‘atoms and molecules are actants, as are children, raindrops, bullet trains, politicians, and numerals… An atom is no more real than [the] Deutsche Bank or the 1976 Winter Olympics, even if one is likely to endure much longer than the others’.58 Actants, then, are entirely concrete and in a specific place in the world, and with specific relations with other actants at any given moment. Actants are not powerful through some inner essence, but rather attain force through assembling allies. This process is temporal and always subject to disintegration: ‘it is never an actant in naked purity that possesses force, but only the actant involved in its ramshackle associations with others, all of which collapse if these associations are not lovingly or brutally maintained’, in what Latour refers to as a ‘tiered array of weaknesses’ in which the ‘winner has stronger alliances’.59 In short, realism is resistance:60 What makes the atom more real [than a ghost] is that it has more allies, and these allies stretch well beyond humans. Experiments testify to the atom’s existence; instruments stabilize it and make it indirectly visible; generations of children learn of it and pass the word along; Brownian motion shows that particles of water are moved by it. The ghost, by contrast, has only a paltry number of allies bearing witness to its reality. But the atom’s allies may one day desert it too.61 The problem with the strong program, for Latour, is that it underdetermines the ability of objects to effect our understandings (beliefs, theories) about them. Contrasting SSK’s advancement of symmetry with regard to valid and invalid science, Woolgar refers to ANT’s ‘radical symmetry with regard to agency’.62 Indeed ANT proponents reverse what they see as SSK’s desire to ‘strip science of its extravagant claim to authority’ by asserting that ‘nature settles controversies’.63 Put another way, ‘the belief system has to register the world without the world introducing any significant difference, apart from its mute presence and insistence’.64 For ANT, the ‘things themselves are actants, not signifieds, phenomena, or tools for human praxis’.65 Callon and Latour

After War 17

argue that ANT escapes the difficulties that natural realism and social realism present: Nonhumans are party to all our disputes, but instead of being those closed, frozen, and estranged things-in-themselves whose part has been either exaggerated or downplayed, they are actants – open or closed, active or passive, wild or domesticated, far away or near, depending on the result of the interactions. When they enter the scene they are endowed with all the nonhuman powers that rationalists like them to have, as well as the warmth and uncertainty that social realists recognize in humans.66 In other words, reality for Latour, is relations. Latour’s metaphysics rejects any realism that purports an ultimate independent substance, and delights in granting status to objects-in-themselves while criticizing the atomistic view of objects: ‘…a piece of rock may be a substance, but not a yellow taxi. A soldier may be a substance, but not an army. An emerald: yes; three emeralds glued together: no’ (4). For Latour, it is all about relations, with no relations more real than others: No actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others.67 Harman summarizes Latour’s distinct metaphysics thus: [ANT] has nothing to do with old-fashioned realism, since it places physical mass on the same level as puppet shows and courtroom hearings. It has nothing to do with social constructionism: after all, it is not limited to human society, which is pounded by the demands of nonhuman actants as if by waves of the ocean. It is not deconstruction, because even if we falsely sneer at ‘those who claim that Derrida reduces the world to a text’ it will still be admitted that there are not inanimate objects in Derrida. It is not phenomenology, because an electric drill or vein of silver are not appearances for human consciousness, but actants that undermine whatever humans encounter of them.68 What I find most promising in Latour’s metaphysics is that it explicitly acknowledges that actants and relations between actants need not

18 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

have anything to do with humans. That is, objects do not require human mediation in order to act: ‘What makes a hybrid a hybrid is not its combination of nature and human civilization, but more generally its fusion of substance and network.’69 I am especially drawn to formulations that proceed from an imagination in which humans are not always and indelibly directing the (only) flow of communication, interpretation and meaning. My attraction is, of course, augmented by Latour’s specific invocation of microbes: We do not know who are the agents who make up our world. We must begin with this uncertainty if we are to understand how, little by little, the agents defined one another, summoning other agents and attributing to them intentions and strategies… There are not only ‘social’ relations, relations between man [sic] and man. Society is not made up just of men, for everywhere microbes intervene and act… We cannot form society with the social alone. We have to add the action of microbes.70 My encounters with the microbial strongly suggest that bacteria are the biosphere’s most prevalent and prolific actants, and that, through colonies, they assemble an almost countless array of allies. Most of these assemblages have nothing to do with humans; humans are not even aware of the vast array of microbial assemblages on earth. Given that my primary goal in formulating a microontology is to somehow attend to this alliance-making in the absence of either human representation or mediaton, Latour’s work is obviously attractive. My frustration, and Harman’s much closer reading corroborates this concern, is two-fold. First, relations, as Harman puts it, ‘do not exhaust’ the things that relate.71 In other words, objects do not seem to have any status outside of the events in which they relate: alliances seem not only to articulate objects but to create them as well. Second, while ANT champions an approach that takes actants seriously in their own right, its empiricism resembles the kind familiar to the strong program and often science studies; that is, studies that focus much more on definably social actors (paradigms and politics for instance) than material objects.72 That is, in practice, when empirical studies emanating from the strong program and ANT are compared, they appear similar in their focus on sociologically familiar objects of study such as norms, paradigms and dissemination rituals. 73 Even laboratory devices are described and interpreted more in terms of their human invention and attribution of

After War 19

meaning than in their material composition and operation: scientists in action as it were. As Harman observes: … [Latour’s] examples are drawn from the human realm, not from general cosmology. And in this way, the more difficult cases are left in shadow. With a bit of work, it is not difficult to see why all objects that enter human awareness must be hybrids, why the ozone hole or dolphins or rivers cannot be viewed as pure pieces of nature aloof from any hybridizing networks. The harder cases involve those distant objects in which human awareness is currently not a factor at all. Where are the hybrids in distant galaxies? If they are not present, then the purifying discourse of nature wins the war, and the rule of hybrids can be viewed to some extent as a local effect of human perception. For this reason, Ian Hacking writes of ‘the death that follows laboratory life and the cumulative inaction that follows science in action’.74

A nonmodern microontology Adrian Mackenzie and Andrew Murphie argue that the social sciences approach science in one of three ways: critique, extraction or engagement.75 I hope this book participates in all three of these activities. Critiques of science, write Mackenzie and Murphie, include the critical theory analyses of scientific rationality (Adorno, Agamben, Popper, Kuhn and so on) as well as social constructionist analyses of the processes of scientific knowledge and objects. Extraction is interested in using scientific concepts within philosophy (Deleuze, Whitehead, DeLanda and so on). The direction of these moves is almost always from science to social science. Finally, engagement attempts dialogue, conversation and collaboration with science (Stengers, Haraway, Barad and so on): ‘it engages with science-in-the-making and it has had to formulate questions about how to live in or with science collectively.’76 This microontology engages in critiques of science: those epistemic cultures, gender relations, changing orders and so on that build and rebuild the fabric of the scientific and technological enterprises. Chapter 3 provides a critique of symbiogenesis theory within evolutionary theory. I also extract a number of concepts from science: self, other, symbiosis, Gaia and so on, in order to contribute to the social sciences’ long-standing theorization of these concepts within the fabric of social relations. However, my main objective is to engage with science. Microontologies requires

20 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

a world of actants building and destroying allies in messy relational processes. I proceed from the premise that phenomena are always already intra-acting and an inherent suspicion towards individualism. I try hard to resist the anthropomorphic tendency to ‘grant’ agency to objects, recognizing that this is simply beyond my (human) abilities. The nonhuman (whether biotic or not) has agency regardless of what I think (and nor does entanglement care that this reality might cause me disquiet). As such, I try to move toward a sort of nonhumanism, although my affliction (being human) may well foreclose anything more than a posthuman theory. Indeed, engagement has the feel of a perfect storm: wondrous but next to impossible.

2 Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria

Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm – a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.1 Any good biologist finds it intellectually distressing to devote his [sic] life to the study of a group that cannot be readily and satisfactorily defined in biological terms; and the abiding intellectual scandal of bacteriology has been the absence of a clear concept of a bacterium.2 If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?3

‘Big like us’ Numerous calls for conference papers, articles and book chapters concerned with various iterations of human-animal relations circulate the listserv highway. What invitations to consider human-animal relations do, in effect, is adopt what Margulis calls a ‘big like us’ approach; concentrating on creatures that easily bear human ocular scrutiny – creatures we can see unaided by the technology of microscopes, as though creatures ‘big like us’ resemble the majority of life. Perhaps we could imagine, as no doubt science fiction writers have already, our eyes to have microscopic vision, enabling us to focus immediately upon the microbial world unimpeded by what must then be unfathomably oversized species. Perhaps we might then overcome the myopia that defines our natureculture border to be with animals.4 21

22 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

To entertain this other-centrism at even the most superficial level (which is perhaps our limit) offers some interesting comparisons. Referring to the ‘unseen majority’, William Whitman, David Coleman, and William Wiebe estimate that there are about 5 × 1030 bacterial cells on earth: that’s 5000000000000000000000000000000 bacterial cells. Another estimated 1018 – 1000000000000000000 – bacteria circulate in the atmosphere attached to dust. Betsey Dexter Dyer argues that there must be something enduringly advantageous about being small: most organisms are minute bacteria, evince the greatest organismal diversity, and have dominated evolutionary history.5 Because of their size, bacteria enjoy a much more intimate relationship with the environment than their sluggish lumbering animal offspring: ‘a little moisture or dryness, slightly more concentrated salt, an elevated temperature or pH are all sensed directly by single cells.’6 In comparison with bacteria, then, human beings are scarce, decidedly big, and strangely multicellular (most organisms are unicellular). We suffer from a very limited metabolism (oxygen respiration) and it takes us months to reproduce: creating a new organism every twenty minutes or so, bacterial reproduction is much more efficient. R.A. Lafferty’s scifi short story ‘Slow Tuesday Night’ imagines a human world at microbial speed: fortunes of titanic proportion are made and lost within minutes, transportation and manufacturing are practically instantaneous, people meet, fall in love, marry, have children and divorce in a matter of hours.7 Stephen J. Gould once remarked ‘With respect to the old belief in steady progress nothing could be stranger than the early evolution of life – for nothing much happened for ever so long… The oldest fossils are some 3.5 billion years old… but multicellular animals appeared just before the Cambrian explosion some 570 million years ago’.8 Gould’s just-so story of time figures creatures ‘big like us’ prominently (see Figure 2.1). Yet, the extraordinary time-line of bacterial liveliness compared with that of animals, plants and fungi invites a different conception of time, a time in which Margulis argues ‘everything happened’ (see Figure 2.2). The ‘everything’ to which Margulis refers is all major forms of metabolism, multicellularity, nanotechnology, metallurgy, sensory and locomotive apparatuses (such as the wheel), reproductive strategies and community organization, light detection, alcohol, gas and mineral conversion, hypersex and death. Bacteria are vonHelmholtz’s ‘less glamorous backstage machinery that actually produces the show’.9 It is difficult to comprehend the prevalence and diversity of bacterial inventions: to do so circumscribes the domain of human purview. For

Periods

Epochs

Quanternary

Holocene

11,000

Pleistocene Neogene

Paleogene

Cenozoic

1.8

Tertiary

Pliocene

5

Miocene

23

Oligocene 38

Eocene 54

Lower (early) 146

208

Late middle Early

245

Late Middle Early

Jurasic

Triasic

Carboniferous

Paleozoic

Permian

Proterozoic

286

Pennsylvanian 325 mississippian

360

Devonian

410

Silurian

440

Ordovician

505

Cambrian

544

NeoProterozoic

900

Mesoproterozoic 1600

Palioproterozoic

2500

Late Archaean 2900

Archaean

PreCambrian Eon

65

Upper (late)

Cretaceous Mesozoic

Phanerozoic Eon

Paleocene

.544

Eras

2.5

Eons

Now Billions of years

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 23

Middle Archaean

3300

4.5

Hadean

3800

3.8

Early Ar chaean

Figure 2.1

‘Big Like Us’ Centered Time Scale. Image courtesy of Anthony Krivan

Epochs

Quanternary

Holocene Pleistocene Pliocene Miocene Oligocene Eocene Paleocene Upper (late) Lower (early) Late Middle Early Late Middle Early

146

Jurasic 208

Triasic 245 Carboniferous

Paleozoic

Permian Pennsylvanian mississippian

Devonian Silurian Ordovician Cambrian

11,000 1.8 5 23 38 54 65

286 325 360 410 440 505 544

NeoProterozoic

.544

Tertiary

Cretaceous Mesozoic

Phanerozoic Eon

Periods Paleogene Neogene

Eras

Cenozoic

Eons

Now Billions of years

24 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

Proterozoic

900

Mesoproterozoic

1600

2500

2900

Archaean

PreCambrian Eon

Late Archaean

2.5

Palioproterozoic

Middle Archaean

3300

4.5

Hadean

3800

3.8

Early Archaean

Figure 2.2

Prokaryote Centered Time Scale. Image courtesy of Anthony Krivan

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 25

instance, asserting that human sexual reproduction ‘is by now technologically assisted to a very large extent’ Rosi Braidotti writes: Cloning as a non-linear form of reproduction is a new technique, practiced on a regular basis since the mid-1990s, whereas sexual intercourse is an established practice, which has been around for 500 million years, but we are not to let this small time factor interfere with our desire to experiment. It is only a matter of time.10 Braidotti refers to ‘reproduction’, but must actually mean mixis rather than reproduction (this is an important distinction. See Chapter 5). All living organisms continually reproduce as a fundamental condition of living; only a minority of organisms practice mixis, and then typically only for very short periods of their lifespan. (And as far as replication goes, I cannot think of anything as linear as cloning). Moreover, if it is only a ‘matter of time’, then bacteria and other nonsexually reproducing organisms easily trump a mere 500 million years. Bacteria invented cloning some 3.8 billion years ago and continue to reproduce through binary fission and other means. As Arthur C. Clarke writes, ‘we never invent anything that nature hasn’t tried out millions of years earlier’.11 Much of the ‘brave new world’ of reproductive technologies is human mimicry of well-worn, millions of year old bacterial practices. Our tendency to distinguish ourselves as a species – and no more so than from the microbial – permeates even theories of the unconscious. ‘[O]ccupying a large share of Freud’s sparse references to animals, the single-celled organism both is and is not “human”; its difference from humanity is and is not a positive function’, writes Judith Roof, who argues that Freud deployed protist (single cell eukaryote) reproduction to reassure humanity of its evolutionary ascendancy.12 And yet, as Roof points out, protists ‘are both the common denominators of and the exception to evolution’s rule. In effect, protists are the remainder, those organisms that “have succeeded in remaining up to the present time at their lowly level”, which already, always, and seemingly eternally represent the very dynamic that higher organisms only arrive at later.’13 Because protists practice uniparental reproduction, they defy death in a way that troubled Freud’s pleasure principle and death drive. Freud only recovers humans/animals from this fall from evolutionary grace by latching on to one empirical finding suggesting that repeated fission weakens organisms.14 Despite our all too human self-assurances, Sagan is right to argue that ‘bacteria are biochemically and metabolically far more diverse

26 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

than all plants and animals put together’.15 And as Chapters 3 and 4 will detail, animals are, both ancestrally and currently, literally made up of bacteria. Thus my encounter with bacteria must somehow recognize that bacteria do precede my relating with them. It must also somehow recognize that ‘I’ am bacteria, that bacteria are us. It must also somehow take on board that bacteria are not easily separated – they are notoriously ungracious when scientists attempt to culture them (i.e. isolate them from their communities in petri dishes) – and that our symbiotic and symbiogenetic ancestry means, as Haraway recognizes, that it is symbionts all-the-way-down.16 The animal cell, typically understood as the smallest unit of structure and function, is already a symbiont. And, at the same time, I must recognize the rub that the vast majority of microbial intra-actions have nothing to do with humans. Humans do not even know about the vast majority of intra-actions that take place on earth. Putting this in larger evolutionary perspective, Carl Woese et al. remark, ‘if you wiped out all multicellur life forms off the face of the earth, microbial life might shift a tiny bit… If microbial life were to disappear, that would be it – instant death for the planet’.17 Notwithstanding recent advertisements about ‘good’ bacteria in yoghurt, I am schooled in recognizing my meetings with bacteria as military encounters – invasion and defense – between my (nonbacterial) individual self and disease (bacteria). That is, the pathogen matrix overwhelmingly defines the parameters of animal meetings-with bacteria. Thus my not-species meeting-with must begin by exploring bacteria excessive to pathogen characterization.

Domains Archaea and Bacteria18 Within the domains Bacteria and Archaea, multicellular assemblages and complex life cycles with several developmental stages are common. While knowledge accumulated so far suggests a staggering diversity within these domains, the majority of bacteria are yet to be discerned, suggesting much further diversity to come. And given that bacteria exchange genes so readily, thereby creating a new ‘mix’ each time, we might reasonably argue that there are as many kinds of bacteria as there are bacteria. The quick survey provided below falls far short of expressing the wide range of bacteria: I provide here merely a glimpse into this majority world. Scientists distinguish between organisms on the basis of several factors, such as metabolism, motility, and reproduction. Metabolism is

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 27

crucial. All organisms on earth rely upon only two sources of energy: light energy from the sun or energy derived from chemicals. One of the major differences between bacteria and animals is that many bacteria do not ‘eat’ in the sense that we mean it: they convert light and/or chemical energy. All animals and fungi by contrast are heterotrophs – ‘living off others’, relying upon the ingestion of other organisms and their products (more on this in Chapter 7). Photoautotrophs (such as plants, algae and cyanobacteria) use light, carbon dioxide and water to produce their own food: Light energy + CO2 + H2O ⇒ sugar + O2 (waste) Photoautrophic waste is what animals use to breathe. Plants use carbon dioxide, combine it with hydrogen (from water) to make carbonhydrogen compounds such as wood, starch, and sugar.19 Purple sulfur bacteria use carbon dioxide combined with the hydrogen from hydrogen sulfide to make carbon compounds. Purple nonsulfur bacteria use carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen gas or organic molecules like lactate. Together, photosynthetic organisms deplete the atmosphere of about 250 billion tons of carbon annually. Photosynthetic metabolism ‘really runs the entire biosphere’.20 Chemolithotrophy occurs in a few groups of bacteria. These organisms manufacture their own food (they are not consumers) by using chemicals (rather than light) as a source of energy, and specifically, minerals found in rocks, soils and dissolved in water. Methanogen metabolism looks like this: Chemical bond energy + CO2 + H2 ⇒ sugar + CH4 (waste) Another organizing feature of organisms is their motility. Many bacteria do not move of their own volition – although all expand their cells through morphogenetic (reproductive) movement – but rather are moved by air or water currents. Bacteria may also glide (by using a kind of slime substance) or swim using flagella. Flagella are whips or tails attached to the bacterial cell in which there is a rotating wheel that turns by internal electricity (a flow of hydrogen ions). The third and fourth organizing features are reproduction and sex (genetic recombination), and this is the subject of Chapter 5. Ancient hyperthermophiles and thermophilic green nonsulfurs Compared with today, in the first 500 million years of life the earth had shorter days, more violent storms, larger and more frequent tides, and more frequent bolide bombardments.21 The atmosphere was dense

28 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

with carbon dioxide and contained little oxygen. One hypothesis is that life originated with thermophiles (literally, ‘heat lovers’) that thrived at boiling or near boiling temperatures. Anaerobic hyperthermophiles (including the genera Thermatoga, Hydrogenobacter, Thermus and Aquifex, and hyperthermophilic archaea) exist today, thriving at temperatures of 80 degrees Celsius in such places as the United States’ Yellowstone National Park, New Zealand, Iceland and eastern Russia. (Humans define thermophiles as such because they thrive in temperatures that kill eukaryotes: rather than acknowledge our inability to exist in these temperatures, we tend to say these Bacteria and Archaea lack the ability to live in lower temperatures). A fork in the tangled web of life occurred with the evolution of green nonsulfurs, descendants of the first photosynthetic bacteria. Green nonsulfurs photosynthesize light energy through a version of the green pigment chlorophyll. However, and as their name suggests, these green nonsulfurs do not require sulfur compounds (such as H2S) or water as a source of hydrogen. Instead, green nonsulfurs use organic compounds. Green sulfur bacteria Green sulfur bacteria are so named because they photosynthesize using bacteriochlorophyll and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) as a source of hydrogen. Instead of using hydrogen from water, in other words, green sulfur bacteria use hydrogen from hydrogen sulfide: Green sulfur bacteria CO2 + H2S + light ⇒ C6H12O6 (sugar) + S0 (sulfur) Cyanobacteria and all plants and algae CO2 + H2O + light ⇒ C6H12O6 (sugar) + O2 (oxygen) Cyanobacteria, green plants and algae produce almost all of the biosphere’s oxygen, as a waste product of photosynthesis. The sulfur that green sulfur bacteria produce is not wasted: sulfate-reducing bacteria ‘breathe’ sulfate. Some green sulfur bacteria live in symbioses with sulfate-reducing bacteria, and this symbiosis is found, for example, in Chlorochromatium and Pelochromatium. Proteobacteria Sometimes called purple bacteria, these organisms are all gram-negative (meaning they do not become stained with Gram’s (crystal violet) stain). All proteobacteria are named by Greek letters based on their DNA

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 29

sequences. Alpha proteobacteria proliferate, and are probably best known through their association with what scientists calls the Oxygen Holocaust. About 3.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria evolved and began to release oxygen as a waste product. Billions of anaerobic bacteria died, others retreated to anoxic environments such as deep sediments, some adapted metabolic mechanisms to fix oxygen to one molecule thereby removing it from contact with its other molecules, while still others evolved oxygen respiration. Chemically, respiration looks like this: Food molecule (for instance sugar) + O2 ⇒ CO2 + H2O + ATP (energy-carrying molecule) Mitochondria were once free-living independent alpha proteobacteria. They provide animals like us with Adenosine-5'-triphosphate (ATP) – our energy source. Margulis hypothesizes that about 2.5 billion years ago, hyperthermophilic archaea and alpha proteobacteria joined symbiotically to form a new type of cell that was very good at acquiring energy and respiring with oxygen (more on this in Chapter 3). Because of our human cells’ symbioses with once free-living mitochondrial bacteria, we are able to survive the ravages of the poisonous gas oxygen (of course, mitochondria are also responsible for programmed cell death, so this particular symbiosis comes with an immutable and catastrophic caveat for animals). Many nitrogen-fixers are alpha proteobacteria, and they form symbiotic relationships with plants such as legumes. Plants require nitrogen to build proteins, RNA, DNA and other molecules (soil fertilizers contain nitrogen, which provides temporary nitrogen replenishment to the soil). The waste product from nitrogen fixation is ammonia. Beta proteobacteria such as the genera Leptothrix, Sphaerotilus and Gallionella are mainly known as iron and manganese oxidizers for their ability to corrode stone monuments and buildings with their acidic waste, their utility in maintaining fish aquaria, and, in the case of Neisseria as the cause of gonorrhea. Bacterial cell walls are negatively charged, and so they pick up positively charged ions, including metals in solutions. ‘Betas’ (as well as other kinds of bacteria) are able to alter their environmental conditions to put metals into solution or otherwise precipitate them.22 Humans use these bacteria to ‘leach’ copper sulfate from ore deposits to make metallic copper. Gold may well have bacterial origins as well: ‘Thiobacillus leaches the gold into solution from sulfide-rich rocks, and mats of cyanobacteria absorb it into their sheaths’, producing ancient (about 2.5 billion years ago) deposits like those found in Southern Africa.23

30 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

Gamma and delta proteobacteria in nonsulfur-rich environments are best known for their bioluminescent, snow, ice and tree-like structure formation abilities. ‘Gammas’ such as Photobacter and Vibrio produce a higher than average number of photons and are hypothesized to have persisted because they detoxify oxygen (and thus the ravages of oxygen damage to cells). Bioluminescence in fireflies, dinoflagellates and some marine animals provides a means of communication, and while individual bioluminous bacteria are too small for their light to signal to each other, when swarming together on, say, a dead fish, their combined luminescence might well attract other fish that, by eating the dead fish, will establish bioluminescent bacteria in the freely available nourishment provided in animal digestive tracts.24 Some bacteria form symbioses with marine animals whose organs glow and help with mate selection and finding food. Marine, river, lake and aerial (the kind we see in sunbeams) ‘snow’ consists of the bioluminescent fecal matter of animals such as fish. Erwinia and Pseudomonas, two ‘gamma’ genera, are able to form centers for ice crystals at just above freezing temperatures. Buchnera form symbiotic relationships with all aphids, supplementing the aphids’ diet while being passed from mother to daughter through uni-parental reproduction. Gammas also include Escherichia coli. These bacteria are comparatively easy to isolate and culture, thus making them the most studied of all bacteria. Myxobacteria are distinguished because during part of their developmental cycle they change from rod-like appearance to form a stalk-like structure with spores at the top. Gamma and delta proteobacteria in sulfur-rich environments are well-known for the symbiotic relationships they form with marine organisms such as bivalve mollusks as well as nematode worms, flatworms and other organisms. The famous ‘deep sea vents’ in which mollusks and worms have been found three miles below the ocean surface in dark icy water survive via symbioses with bacteria (and owe their ‘fame’ to their enormous ‘big like us’ size compared with their shallow-water counterparts).25 Bacteroides and gliders are rod-shaped gram-negative bacteria, but are distinguished from proteobacteria. Bacteroides are found in animal intestines – about 10 trillion in the colon and one order of magnitude away from the densest possible packing together of bacteria – fermenting foods like carbohydrates and producing various acidic waste products (about 20% of our feces weight is bacteroides). These and the grampositive bacteria prevent the reproduction of pathogens in our intestines. Bacteroides also frequent the tiny crevices between gums and

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 31

teeth, living with the abundant gram-positive mouth bacteria. Their acidic waste products promote tooth decay. These bacteria, combined with those of all the other bacteria that inhabit our bodies, means that the normal human is ‘composed of over 1014 cells, of which only about 10% are animal cells’.26 Gliders are distinguished because they do not have flagella, but rather ‘skate’ along surfaces (including each other) and specialize in breaking down large molecules. Humans and gliders form symbiotic relationships in the form of ‘retting’ whereby gliders enable humans to derive natural fibers such as linen and hemp from the tough fibrous material of plant stems. Gram-positive bacteria Gram-positive bacteria derive their name from the blue color they produce when dyed by Gram’s stain. They live in every possible environmental niche from fresh and salt water, soils and sediments, to the surfaces and insides of other organisms, and they take on a variety of shapes and sizes from rods and long filaments to helical shapes. Grampositive bacteria are divided into two groups: ‘high-GC’ that have proportionally more guanine and cytosine than ‘low-GC’. Gram-positive bacteria are responsible for the many diverse fermentations that change the odor, flavor and texture of food and drink. Fermentation is actually bacterial heterotrophic metabolism, and the flavors we love are the bacteria’s waste products, such as lactic acid, cheese, some forms of alcohol, monosodium glutamate, and the flavor enhancement processes used in making chocolate, vanilla, (black and oolong) tea and coffee. Indonesian luwak coffee is made from the beans fermented by the gram-positive bacteria Paradoxurus hermaphroditus in the intestines of civet cats who are fed the beans and then defecate them, to be harvested by humans as a drink. Soil itself is, essentially, a microbial product: there are over a million or more bacteria per gram of soil. Many gram-positive bacteria form symbiotic relationships with fungi and animals. For instance, Streptomyces form pale crusty patches on Attine ants and secrete antibiotics and antifungals to discourage the growth of unwanted microbes in the gardens of fungi that these some 200 species of ants cultivate. The blue color distilled from the blue-producing plants indigo and woad comes from a process of fermentation using bacteria. Tobacco is also produced by ‘sweating’ the leaves, which employs bacterial fermentation. Human bodies are the habitat of indigenous microbes, and most are gram-positive bacteria. As Dexter Dyer points out, from a microbial

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perspective this habitat is hazardous for these bacteria: huge rafts of dead cells flake off and those bacteria not carried away must scramble to reestablish themselves: ‘it is like living in a zone of constant earthquakes and avalanches.’27 To make matters worse, we wash ourselves with soaps, which disintegrate bacterial cell membranes. Fortunately for our bacterial companions, washing of the nonsurgery preparation kind that we most often practice accomplishes more of a bacterial rearrangement than genocide. Bacteria produce the characteristic smells that humans effuse (Propionibacterium is associated with human acne and also with the holes in swiss cheese). Cellulose digesting animals (giraffes, moose, cows and so on) are also dependent on grampositive bacteria. (This symbiosis is the subject of the final chapter of this book.) Cyanobacteria Cyanobacteria invented oxygeneic photosynthesis, which has come to dominate metabolism for producing fixed carbon from carbon dioxide. Cyanobacteria use hydrogen and electrons from water (before this photosynthetic organisms used hydrogen sulfide) for converting carbon dioxide into sugar, and produce oxygen as a waste product (that animals breathe to sustain life): Light energy + CO2 + H2O ⇒ sugars (food) + O2 (waste) Cyanobacteria profoundly altered the earth’s atmosphere by filling it with their waste: oxygen. Some cyanobacteria are able to fix atmospheric nitrogen as well, making them perhaps the best-adapted organisms on earth. They were the first to resettle on the volcanic ash and tuff created by the Krakatao volcanic eruption and first to resettle on the Bikini coral island after the nuclear tests conducted there by the United States.28 Cyanobacteria are also prevalent in microbial mats and are responsible for the massive banded iron formations found in the fossil record. Stromatolites are the lithified remains of layered cyanobacterial communities. Humans use cyanobacteria to clean up fossil fuel spills. Cyanobacteria form a number of diverse symbioses with protists, plants, fungi and animals. One of the most well-known of these symbioses, about 2.5 billion years ago, led to the symbiogenetic merger of cyanobacteria in the form of chloroplasts in algae and plants. Lichens are a symbiotic association between fungi and either green algae or (less commonly) cyanobacteria. Bryophytes such as mosses, liverworts and hornworts can form symbiotic relationships with

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 33

nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria, the latter enabling life in boggy or swampy soils as well as arid, nutrient-poor soils such as sand dunes where nitrogen is less abundant. Flamingos get their distinctive pink color directly from carotenoids, a pigment derived from cyanobacteria and algae (or indirectly from the crustaceans they consume that are themselves cyanobacteria-eating). Nostoc is a cyanobacterium consumed by humans in several Asian, Central and South American cuisines. The health drink Spirulina is also cyanobacterial. The cyanobacteria Trichophilus and Cyanoderma grow on three-toed sloth fur, providing a yellow and dull green color, which camouflages these sedentary animals. Cyanobacteria also proliferate in marine sponges, ascidians (marine invertebrate animals), byozoans (moss animals), eshiuran worms, lobsters and crabs.

Spirochetes Spirochetes have distinctive elongated cells with which they burrow – in corkscrew motion – into dense substances such as mud, intestinal contents, and animal and plant tissue. Humans are most familiar with spirochetes as syphilis and Lyme disease. Spirochetes thrive in anoxic, cellulose-rich environments as well as places like human teeth plaque. Treponema pallidum (we know this bacterium as the cause of syphilis) flagella are inside the cell: they have two cell membranes separated by a space inside which the flagella rotate. The most famous T. pallidum may well have been those that inhabited the brain of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Deborah Hayden’s account of Nietzsche’s attempt to save a flogged horse from further beating, his subsequent frenzied post-card writing, urine drinking and incoherent rambling is a lesson in spirochete abilities.29 Doctors were familiar with syphilis, and Nietzsche progressed through the well-documented primary stage immediately after infection; the pain of secondary syphilis; and finally the intellectual impairment, personality disturbances, reflex hyperactivity, sensory changes, slurred speech and affect changes of tertiary syphilis.30 Research demonstrates that T. pallidum is able to rest dormant in animal tissue for many years: scientists often mistook this as evidence that antibiotics such as penicillin cured syphilis. As Margulis notes, while spirochetes do not suddenly activate from brain-inhabiting slumber but rather work over many years, Nietzsche’s record of writing might well indicate that his spirochetes did indeed ‘awake’ on the 3rd of January 1889, quickly proliferating in his brain. In a less common reversal of the typical direction of infection from colonizer to

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colonized, it appears that T. pallidum was a gift of the American indigenous peoples to Europeans: Christopher Columbus and his compatriots returned to Spain with a new set of symptoms that quickly spread across Europe, largely via soldiers and the sex workers they infected, eventually infecting between 5–20 percent of the entire European population. Spirochetes, according to Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis, also merged with eukaryotic cells, providing the great advantage of cell motility. (I review the evidence for this in Chapter 3.)

Archaea: methanogens, hyperthermophiles and halophiles As already noted, having diverged from eubacteria over three billion years ago, Archaea now comprise their own domain. Methanogens get their name because they produce the green house gas methane as a metabolic product.31 Some methanogens are autotrophs, which means they metabolize without the need of complex food molecules. While most autotrophs are photoautotrophs (they use light as an energy source), autotrophic methanogens are chemoautotrophs, using carbon dioxide and hydrogen (gases considered waste products by most organisms). This is an example of what Tyler Volk calls the ‘waste world’ of the biosphere; organisms using each other’s waste products in their metabolism (see Chapter 6).32 The methane produced by bacteria is crucial to the biosphere in that it removes carbon from the ground and oxygen from the air that would otherwise accumulate in huge quantities produced by cyanobacteria, algae and plants, and create a highly flammable atmosphere. Looking a little more closely at the bacteria in human guts, we find that methanogens are unevenly distributed within the human population. In so-called developed countries, 30–50 percent of people have colon-dwelling methanogens, whereas in developing countries, it is much higher. Hyperthermophilic archaea thrive in temperatures greater than 80 degrees Celsius and pH less than 3 (very acidic compared with human ambient alkalinity). Finally, Halophiles (salt lovers) thrive in extreme (only for animals) concentrations of salt; for instance ten times salt water salinity. Archaeal halophilic metabolism is remarkable. It combines heterotrophy and photosynthesis. Instead of using chlorophyll, archaeal halophiles use bacteriorhodopsin (a pink-red carotenoid pigment) that when light-stimulated, the pigments ‘pump’ hydrogen ions across the membrane to be stored as an auxiliary energy source to supplement their usual respiratory metabolism (heterotrophy).

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Forms of life We lack an exact accounting of what we already know.33 ‘We are now nine billion because of Pasteur’, writes Bruno Latour.34 What transforms, for Latour, ‘useless matter’ (bacteria) into ‘full-blown substance’ are taxonomy and phylogeny (122). In other words, what made the bacteria with which Pasteur worked into actants, according to Latour, was the series of laboratory trials that Pasteur devised to study – to meet with – bacteria. As such, ‘Pasteur transformed our relationship with microbes’, defining these relationships as either pathogenic or domesticated.35 I like Latour’s description of the intra-action between Pasteur and the microbes he worked with: ‘Pasteur and the ferment mutually exchange and enhance their properties, Pasteur helping the ferment show its mettle, the ferment “helping” Pasteur win one of his many medals.’36 In other words, actants (Alfred North Whitehead’s propositions – Pasteur, lactic acid ferment, laboratory, microscope and so on – ‘occasions given to different entities to enter into contact’) gain and modify their definitions through the event of the experiment.37 Of course, these relations with humans will have been preceded by countless relations between and amongst bacteria and other things, making ‘Pasteur’s useless matter’ already fully-fledged actants. Astrid Schrader’s excellent work on scientific interest in Pfiesteria piscicida (a dinoflagellate protist thought to kill billions of fish in U.S. mid-atlantic estuaries) is a wonderful example of the kind of actant relations of which Latour writes.38 As Schrader puts it, ‘how you get to know a species experimentally cannot be separated from the ontological question of what they are’. Distinguishing between what is ‘naturally’ P. piscicida and what is environmentally induced during their life cycle is no easy task (defining the life cycle itself requires either classificatory exclusions or nearly limitless environmental interaction, not least of which is with symbiotic bacteria), and separating P. piscicida from their various metabolic and reproductive transformations (i.e. through culturing) produces nontoxic P. piscicida. In effect, in classifying the organism, scientists create an organism that is not the object of their study. It is not that P. piscicida’s indeterminacy cannot be resolved. Rather, the condition of resolvability is predicated on ‘a complete specification of the material-discursive practices that enact [Karen Barad’s] “agential cut”. Different “cuts” between “object” and “measurement agencies” establish different phenomena.’39

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Throughout the vicissitudes of taxonomy, bacteria have always occupied abject status – mainly as pathogens – and more generally in their classification as dissimilar to cells from organisms ‘big like us’, a point I return to in Chapter 7. The prokaryote-eukaryote distinction which preoccupied microbiology until Carl Woese et al.’s ribosomal work, is predicated on bacteria’s absence of nuclei, absence of sexual reproduction, and absence of plastids (ironic, given that plastids were once free-living bacteria). The shifting classification of bacteria, as well as arguments that bacteria cannot be classified as species, is an interesting foray into disciplinary epistemic cultures. While animal and plant classification was based on comparative anatomy and embryology, bacteria’s physiological diversity led the editorial board of the first edition of Bergey’s Manual of Determinative Bacteriology to agree to a classification based on utility rather than phylogeny (whether physiological or morphological).40 Roger Stanier and C.B. van Niel’s much-cited 1962 article ‘The Concept of a Bacterium’ vacillated between accepting and eschewing bacterial phylogenetics. Stanier, Doudoroff and Adelberg’s first edition of The Microbial World (1957) reiterated the impossibility of bacterial phylogeny at the same time that they asserted bacteria’s monophylogeny within Prokaryota. Aristotelian classification bifurcated all organisms as Plantae or Animalia, and the trend since then has been to increase the number of classificatory categories. Since Carl von Linné’s Systema Naturae (1735), successive disciplines – naturalists to biologists to microbiologists to molecular phylogenists – have attempted to classify all organisms according to species, genera, families, orders, classes and kingdoms. Curtis, Sloan and Scannell and Woese and Fox favor three kingdoms (Protista, Plantae and Animalia); Woese, Kandler and Wheelis then argued for Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya; Copeland suggests four kingdoms (Monera, Protoctista, Plantae and Animalia; Whittaker and then Whittaker and Margulis argue for five kingdoms (Monera, Protoctists, Fungi, Plantae and Animalia); Edwards asserts there are eight kingdoms (Cyanochlorobionta, Erythrobionta, Chlorobionta, Myxobionta, Fungi 1, Fungi 2, Chromobionta and Animalia); and Leedale stretches this to 13 kingdoms (Monera, Red Algae, Plantae, Euglenoids, Myxomycetes, Fungi, Heterokonts, Eustigmatophyta, Haptophyta, Cryptomonads, Dinoflagellates, Mesozoans and Animalia).41 Woese et al.’s classification scheme has had the largest impact, and is widely accepted today. Actants always exceed their meditated understanding, and phylogenetics is no less implicated in defining meetings-with bacteria than naturalist or any other scientific enterprise. In other words, phylo-

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 37

genetic classification is understood through particular intra-actions of organisms and science: cuts that establish meetings-with. Scientists make these cuts through the kinds of things we are familiar with (epistemic cultures, phylogeny and so on), as do technologies (eyes, microscopes, gel electrophoresis and so on) and microbes. Based on bacterial phylogenetics, Woese and his colleagues studied ribosomal RNA because rRNA is ‘of ancient origin, universally distributed, and functionally equivalent in all cells, making it the ideal organelle for following the course of evolution’.42 The 16S is a specific genomic sequence of bases (adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine) that can be used to compare organisms). It provides a veritable explosion of classificatory possibilities: 16,000 base pairs x four possible combinations = 416,000 possible kinds of bacteria.43 16S rRNA sequencing’s main justification is that it provides a much more exact classification. To wit, a research team in Berlin found that only about 1 percent of the bacteria in the human drinking water they sampled can be cultured. Ninety-nine percent of the bacteria are VBNC: ‘viable but not culturable’.44 Woese et al.’s results suggest that, at the molecular level, there are significant genealogical (monophyletic) differences between bacteria that had been classified together based on morphological similarities. As such, and according to Woese and his colleagues, there is no prokaryote in the sense that no single phylogenetic line led from bacteria to eukaryotes. Woese et al.’s research suggests that there are fundamental differences between Bacteria and Archaea. At first, Archaea were thought to be rare and confined to extreme (from an animal perspective) environments such as hot springs. Now they are known to be both abundant and distributed throughout the planet. I am drawn to Woese et al.’s classification scheme, not so much because it adheres to a kind of gene-centric classification logic, but rather because it groups animals (humans) together with ciliates, green plants, fungi, flagellates and microsporidia within a single kingdom. As such it is one of the few schemas that does not reserve a separate classificatory place for animals. In other words, I like it precisely because it puts us in our place: idiosyncratic late-comers to a diverse and sophisticated cacophony of living organisms that compose the bulk of biota. Woese et al.’s schema is not without critics. Margulis argues that molecular phylogeny is reductive because it is based on only one marker (rRNA) rather than important differences in physiology, morphology, metabolism and so on.45 Margulis argues from a position reminiscent of a Darwinian naturalist approach to organisms: ‘no substitute exists

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for knowing the live organism in question, its life history and habitat.46 Natural history, life cycle details, morphology including ultrastructure, the history of environmental change as documented in the rock record, and good sense are all crucial elements in reconstructing the ancient lineages on Earth’.47 There may be 416,000 possibilities, but do these differences tell us anything practical about the bacteria under study? Further, and as Jan Sapp notes, the question of difference has surfaced within molecular characterization, which is based on a few ‘representative’ bacteria such as E. coli, that simultaneously (and ironically) argues that prokaryotes are not monophyletic.48 With some exceptions, the majority of schemas accept Bacteria as both base and trunk of the Tree of Life (TOL).49 Which leads to the question of trees. Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life provides a history and critique of the arboreal metaphor within evolutionary theory, from the pre-arboreal Great Chain of Being, Charles Darwin’s ‘great Tree of Life’, Ernest Haeckel’s blooming tree, Willi Hennig’s singlebranch emphasis, and computational method developments, to molecular sequencing – and I need not rehearse the details here. Assembling this TOL, as Joel Cracraft and Michael Donoghue note, has been massively facilitated (and complicated) by molecular data and increasing computational power, producing phylogenetic studies at the rate of nearly 15 per day.50 What bacteria essentially do is complicate the metaphor (a metaphor based on replication and vertical inheritance), morphing the tree into more of a tangled web, or a ring of life as some have suggested.51 W. Ford Doolittle’s depiction of the differences between organismal, genome, and gene phylogenies helps to illustrate this complication (see Figure 2.3). The complication stems from the finding that different genes yield different family trees because genes are transmitted horizontally as well as vertically, known as Lateral Gene Transfer (LGT).52 Essentially, this means that the base of the Bacterial tree is a polytomy.53 Marla Rivera and James Lake, for instance, argue that two prokaryotes fused their genomes, closed the ring of life, and created the first eukaryote. Put another way, ‘eliminating a fusion organism, which necessarily contacts two nodes of a ring, will delete the leaf, open the ring and convert it to a tree’.54 It also means that some eukaryote genes will be related to Bacteria while others will be related to Archaea. As I noted, the general consensus is that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is bacterial. One corollary is that Eukaryotes and Archaea shared a common ancestry separated from bacterial descendants. This said, attempts to reveal a stable Archaean or Bacterial core

Figure 2.3

Gram positives

Euryarchaeota

Entamoebae

Methanosarcina Halophiles Methanobacterium MethanThermoproteus ococcus T. celer Pyrodicticum

Crenarchaeota

Green non-sulfur bacteria

Archaea

Three Kingdom Tree of Life. Image courtesy of Carl Woese

Thermotogales

Cyanobacteria Flavobacteria

Purple bacteria

Bacteria Slime molds

Microsporidia Diplomonads

Trichomonads

Flagellates

Plants Ciliates

Fungi

Animals

Eucarya

39

40 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

reveal a lot of phylogenetic sequencing noise.55 For instance, Hervé Philippe and his colleagues, recognizing that the individual trees of 45 bacterial species constructed for 57 translational proteins mostly disagree, tried stringing all the gene sequences together. This manipulation produced a statistically robust tree with 44 of the 57 genes.56 Still, 44 is only a few percent of a typical bacterial genome. And Brown and collaborators derived a stable core of only 14 genes when they included members of the Archaean.57 ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ as Doolittle points out, and given that the scientific enterprise is based upon the supposition that life on earth began from microbial beginnings (derived from molecular beginnings, derived from chemical beginnings), the search for phylogeny has only really just gotten started.58 Nonetheless, even at this early date, the tree of life has morphed into a reticulated tangled web, complicating the neoDarwinian premise that adaptation results from selection among mutations and that speciation occurs as a result of diverging adaptations that become fixed in different populations, a point I discuss in further detail in Chapter 3. As we saw, LGT makes tangled webs of trees. So do artifacts. Philippe studies phylogenetic artifacts, which are signals, remainders really, of mutations that have been fixed in an ancestral species.59 If only one substitution occurred in a phylogenetic tree, this would provide a pretty unambiguous signal; a clear artifact. In actual sequences however, single substitutions are extremely rare. For example, a base position that has undergone 25 substitutions across a tree connecting 50 species will produce a lot of noise and not a very good signal: it will be ‘saturated’ in phylogeneticist language. Complicating this, any given position will be fast- or slow-evolving, and this evolution is heterotachic: the evolutionary rate of movement of any given position changes over time (i.e. slow in one part of the tree and fast in another part).60 Phylogeny is based primarily on these fast- and slow-evolving changes: fast-evolving sites are major contributors to change, but produce more noise whereas slow-evolving sites contribute fewer changes, but produce more reliable signals. Complicate this still further by long-branch attraction (LBA) artifacts in which two fast-evolving species will be grouped together (appear together on the phylogentic TOL) as a result of the increased noise created by two slow-evolving species because they share many ancestral characters.61 The result of all this is that ‘early-emerging lineages are often fast-evolving ones misplaced by the LBA artifact’.62 On the universal tree based on rRNA [such as Woese et al.’s], all the basal branches are thus potentially

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 41

erroneous. This is no small thing: it means that the original root, the first two (of the eight) major branches of the bacterial line (Aquificales and Thermotogales) as well as the first six (of the ten) branches of Eukaryotes (Diplomonads, Microsporidia, Trichomonads, Flagellates, Entamoebae and Slime molds) might well be wrong.63

Thinking (with) microbes I am interested in various efforts to meet-with bacteria that circumvent typical bacterial characterizations – as passive, pathogenic and the like – as well as think through current formulations of sociality that are defined as human (and, if we are generous, a few other animals) faculties. Schrödinger’s What is Life? may well have indirectly foreshadowed the kind of generous openness to bacterial self-organization, cognition and communication described in works such as Sonea and Mathieu’s Prokaryotology: A Coherent View and Dixon’s Power Unseen: How Microbes Rule the World.64 A number of empirical studies, such as those of BenJacob and his colleagues, meet-with bacteria who are organized, complex, adaptable, communicative, socially intelligent and conscious. These studies evince Latour’s prescient observation that ‘microbiology laboratories are one of the few places where the very composition of the social context has been metamorphosed’.65 I am especially inspired by the ways in which Ben-Jacob meets with bacterial actants. He and his colleagues have developed a number of experiments in which various kinds of bacteria engage with changing environmental conditions.66 Perception Setting the stage for empirical studies concerned with bacterial perception, Antonio Lazcano, Arturo Becerra and Luis Delaye’s research suggests that the bacterial ancestors of eukaryote cells had fully developed sensitivity-response systems, called alarmones.67 Far from passive microbes that cannot perceive their surroundings, bacteria monitor and respond to internal and external stimuli. Stress, defined by environmental insults such as lack of food, temperature change, excess salt and so on, are detected by alarmones, which are small signal metabolities that rapidly synthesize in times of stress.68 Alarmones seem to have evolved in RNA and protein cells before the evolution of DNA genomes. The researchers posit that LUCA had alarmones, and therefore had an already elaborate complex sensory system.69

42 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

Communication and self-engineering From elaborated sensory systems, bacteria developed complex communication including individual bacterial interpretation of information provided by other bacteria (micro-level), leading to complex patterns of (macro-level) behavior. Bacteria form communities of millions and sometimes billions of bacteria that are capable of complex communication strategies in which differing environments are perceived, analyzed and described to members of the community in order to formulate the best adaptive response.70 While any single bacterium can sense only a small portion of its environment, a colony forms a kind of superorganism that can sense much more of its environment through communication.71 For instance, Paenibacillus dendritiformis can, under conditions of environmental stress, select their identity from two distinct branching or chiral morphotype cell types. Through communication, the bacteria collectively decide when to move between C and B patterns (see Figure 2.5). Up close, these different morphologies look like this (see Figures 2.6a and b). Bacteria take advantage of inheritable memory in the form of cell differentiation and inherited gene expression. They also make ‘colonialaided self-executed genetic changes, especially in the noncoding part of the DNA’, for additional long-term memory. Bacterial communities, then, ‘perform collective sensing, distributed information processing, and gene-regulation of individual bacteria by the group’.72 Ben-Jacob refers to two types of communication: ‘inductive communication whereby a chemical signal from a bacterium is absorbed by another bacterium and triggers a specific predetermined pathway within the receiving cell’; and ‘informative communication’ whereby a signal ‘initiates an intracellular response that involves internal restructuring – reorganization of the intracellular media, the gene-network or even parts of the genome itself.’73 In other words, bacteria make use of a collective epigenetic memory that can, for instance, track previous encounters with antibiotics: ‘they collectively glean information from the environment, “talk” with each other, distribute tasks, and convert their colonies into a massive “brain” that processes information, learns from past experience, and, we suspect, creates new genes to better cope with novel challenges’ (forthcoming). In other words, by forming colonies, bacteria provide themselves with more time to experiment with genetic variation to resist antibiotics. Recent research suggests that bacteria modify their colony structure in the presence of antibiotics.74 Bacteria can also stimulate the

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 43

Figure 2.4 Communication amongst P. dendritiformis to transform themselves into different cell types. They become chiral (a) by elongating themselves through cell division suppression (b) and then the bacteria collectively alter their movement from ‘run-and-tumble’ to a coordinated forward-backward movement, which creates the branch twists with specified handedness (c). Image (d) is a computer simulated model. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society. See Eshel Ben-Jacob and H. Levine, ‘Self-engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ Journal of the Royal Society Interface (Published online, 2005): 1–18, 6.

44 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

Figure 2.5 C-B Morphotype Transitions. (a) is a B to C transition; (b) a stressinduced morphotype transition caused by an encounter with fungi (the bright spot); (c) a B-C dialogue. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society. See Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine, ‘Self-engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ Journal of the Royal Society Interface (Published online, 2005): 1–18, 7.

expression of genes in other cells of the same type.75 As such, bacterial learning within communities is Lamarckian: the bacteria that form these superorganisms generate new traits and behaviors not explicitly stored in any given individual’s genes (forthcoming). Some bacteria communicate in a process known as quorum sensing, a kind of long-range chemical signaling, which takes place only when bacteria reach high densities.76 Quorum sensing regulates bioluminescence, virulence factor expression, biofilm formation, sporulation and mating.77 Significantly, this communication not only takes place between the same kinds of bacteria, but also between different kinds of bacteria, and even between bacteria and animals. For instance, in the

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 45

(a)

(b) Figures 2.6a and b The first image is of the ‘bushy’ branching morphology. The second image shows the dendritic growth. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob and the Royal Society. See Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Bacterial Self-organization: Co-enhancement of Complexification and Adaptability in a Dynamic Environment,’ Philosophical Transactions – Royal Society. Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 361, no. 1807 (2003): 1287.

46 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

case of bioluminescence, bacteria within fish communicate with the light organ in which they live, spurring growth to maturation. Hatchling squid raised in sterile seawater, for instance, fail to enlarge their pouches without the presence of bacteria. With the presence of bacteria, these pouches develop into organs.78 Human gut bacteria communicate with our guts by sensing human hormones and adjusting themselves accordingly.79 Bacteria have further developed complex engineering capabilities as an adaptation to conflicting environmental constraints. For instance, when faced with the need for high bacterial density for movement and the lack of food needed to support that high bacterial density, P. dendritiformis excrete specialized chemicals that form a layer of lubricant within which the bacteria can move, allowing the colony to expand.80 P. dendritiformis must first extract the fluid from the substrate and then regulate the surface tension and lubrication’s viscosity. As the bacteria move forward, they push the lubrication forward with them, ‘paving their own way’ (2) (see Figure 2.7).

Communities Bacterial communities contain 109 to 1012 organisms and behave in multicellular fashion: they differentiate, divide their labor, and even in some cases ‘reproductive organs’ in which some differentiated groups of cells reproduce themselves within the community. Bacteria also emit pheromone-like peptides to signal their willingness to have sex (transfer DNA) with other bacteria. The peptides, indeed, modify the partner’s membrane such that the signaling bacteria can penetrate it. We have seen already that bacteria form spores under environmental stress (starvation). Sporulation occurs only after a consultative process during which: A collective assessment of colonial stress as a whole is determined by cooperative perception. Starved cells emit chemical messages that convey stress. The other colony members use the information for contextual interpretation of the state of the colony relative to its own individual situation. Accordingly, each bacterium ‘votes’ – it sends a message for or against sporulation. Once each member has sent its preferences and read the other messages, sporulation is initiated if the ‘majority vote’ is in favor (forthcoming). This is, indeed, a parliament of things. For myxobacteria (motile, rodshaped bacteria that live in cultivated soils), a majority vote in favor

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 47

Figure 2.7 Bacterial Self-Engineering. Branching colonial pattern: (a) typical branched colonial pattern formed by P. dendritiformis when grown on hard and food-depleted substrate; (b) a closer look at the branches through a microscope to show the lubricant layer produced collectively by the bacteria; (c) snap-shot of a video clip showing bacteria swimming. The video reveals bacteria alternately swimming and directed tumbling; (d) scanning electron microscope picture noting the phenotypic diversity of the bacteria, a feature that is collectively regulated. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society. See Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine, ‘Self-engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ Journal of the Royal Society Interface (Published online, 2005): 1–18, p. 3.

results in the usually individual cells congregating together – many hundreds of them – to pile on top of each other in order to form what are described as ‘fruiting bodies’ (see Figure 2.8).81 Ben-Jacob and his colleagues propose that this bacterial signaling constitutes linguistic communication as the meaning-exchange function of language in which context-dependent meaning is assigned to words, sentences and paragraphs.82 Thus, any given (bacterial) reader has the

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Figure 2.8 ‘Fruiting Body’ Morphogenesis in Submerged Cultures of Myxococcus xanthus. Image courtesy of Dale Kaiser and the American Society of Microbiology. See J.M. Kuner and D. Kaiser, ‘Fruiting Body Morphogenesis in Submerged Cultures of Myxococcus xanthus,’ Journal of Bacteriology 151, no. 2 (1982): 4459.

cognitive flexibility to assign meaning to the text, to alter this meaning upon re-readings and so on. Dialogues based on shared meanings can also be created between (bacterial) conversers. Informative communication entails bacterial freedom to select a non pre-determined response. Thus, bacteria respond within a preferred, not strictly defined, range of possible responses. Bacterial colonies, in other words, enable multicellular coordination beyond the purview of any given bacterium, and this is why bacteria are typically found in films, chains, mats and colonies.83 E. coli colonies,

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 49

for instance, consist of nonclonal populations of differentiated bacteria that undergo complex morphogenesis.84 The colony itself regulates bacterial physiology such as DNA rearrangement systems. Yet bacteria do not, in scifi Borg tradition, forego their own autonomy. Each bacterium constitutes ‘a biotic autonomous system with its own internal cellular gel that possesses informatic capabilities (storage, processing and interpretation of information)’.85 Rather, they cooperate. That is, bacteria have learned to cope with varying environmental conditions by practicing large-scale cooperative systems: millions of bacteria cooperate, within and between bacterial communities. This kind of bacterial organization is inherently malleable because each ‘unit’ or building block is itself a living organism ‘each with internal degrees of freedom, internally stored information and internal assessment of external chemical messages’.86 Commenting on the usual juxtaposition of cooperation against individual freedom (and the related altruism and free-rider ‘problems’ within evolutionary theory), Ben-Jacob’s research suggests that: The ‘smart’ bacteria have ‘realized’ (over evolution) that increasing informative communication between individuals results in increased freedom and cooperation of the individuals. As the individuals increase their adaptability to the group, the colony elevates its adaptability and endurability by increasing its complexity. The essential new lesson that has been learned from bacteria is that colonial higher complexity provides the degree of plasticity and flexibility required for better adaptability and endurability of the colony, as a whole, to a dynamic environment.87 Myxobacteria, for instance, employ various strategies when faced with ‘cheaters’ – those individuals who try to take advantage of the colony’s cooperative effort. Myxobacteria can isolate defectors by collectively altering their identity through a new gene expression state. This creates a new ‘dialect’ that the defector finds difficult to imitate, and it helps the cooperating myxobacteria to ‘improve their social skills for better cooperation.’88 Bacteria also cooperate between colonies of different kinds of bacteria. For example, sub-gingival plaque bacterial colonies (the ones found inhabiting our mouths) divide their labor to develop specialized tasks (one such specialized task is storing valuable information that is both costly and hazardous to store and maintain). This is no small accomplishment. Each of the 20 genera of sub-gingival plaque bacteria is a colony of about 1010 bacteria: together a single human

50 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

Figure 2.9 Hierarchical colonial organization. Each vortex (condensed group of bacteria) is composed of a number of cells that swarm around their common center. The vortexes contain from ten to millions of bacteria. The vortexes rotate clockwise and anticlockwise in non-random patterns. The vortex cells reproduce, expanding the vortex and moving outward in a unit, leaving behind a branch-like structure. Pictures (e) and (f) are video stills showing the formation of a new vortex. Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society. See Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine, ‘Self-engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ Journal of the Royal Society Interface (Published Online 2005): 1–18, 8.

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mouth contains about a thousand times the number of bacteria as the human population on earth. All of these bacteria must communicate with each other by developing shared languages, and then must work out ways of cooperating. Figures 2.9 and 2.10 are examples of hierarchical colonial organization. The pictures show a whole colony adapting to different environmental conditions. The bacterial populations of these colonies are larger than the total number of people on earth. Each vortex rotates either clockwise or anticlockwise as the bacterial cells within reproduce. Figure 2.10 shows images of vortexes displaying inheritable self-

Figure 2.10 Vortices’ inheritable self-identity. Images courtesy of Eshel BenJacob, Herbert Levine and the Royal Society. See Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine, ‘Self-engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ Journal of the Royal Society Interface (Published Online 2005): 1–18, 13.

52 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

identity. The ‘mother colony’ in picture (a) was used as the source of bacteria for plates (b) and (d). They have distinctive patterns compared to those of (c), which were taken from large vortices at the front of the mother colony.

Social intelligence Taken together, this research suggests that bacteria ‘develop collective memory, use and generate common knowledge, develop group identity, recognize the identity of other colonies, learn from experience to improve themselves, and engage in group decision-making, an additional surprising social conduct that amounts to what should most appropriately be dubbed as social intelligence’.89 Until recently, this kind of characterization has been the stuff of science fiction, for instance Greg Bear’s Blood Music.90 Ben-Jacob and his colleagues posit that bacteria have developed a kind of genome cybernetics, whereby the genome is able to perform information processing and alter itself.91 Established research has shown that other organisms use both transposable elements and (revealingly defined) ‘junk DNA’ to reconstruct a new coding nucleus. In yeast and ciliates, for instance, transposable elements effectively re-program genome activity between replications.92 Rather than rely upon random mutations, cells actively engender genetic variation through transposons and other means (for instance, bacteriophages and plasmids). Research on bacteria suggests they perform these same abilities through their extensive, complex communication skills. For instance, bacteria employ plasmids that transfer mutations from cell to cell.93 This ‘acquisition of genomic learning’ is non neoDarwinian, and for Ben-Jacob, it means that the genome is self-aware.94 Most of the genome changes described here constitute horizontal changes, but genomic networks such as those found in sporulating bacteria such as Myxobacteria, make vertical genomic leaps as well.95 Again, this complicates the traditional emphasis that neoDarwinism places on vertical inheritance produced through random variation, and is discussed further in Chapter 3.

Meeting with bacteria What might we do with these images of complex bacterial communication and organization? Of myriad issues, three themes are especially implicated in human meetings-with bacteria. These themes offer promising ways to set different, more generous, parameters for meetings-with.

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 53

A difference which makes a difference96 Reading through scientific reports of bacterial communication, it is clear microbiologists struggle between a strong eschewal of anthropomorphizing bacterial processes and a commitment to acknowledging the sophistication of bacterial organization. Developed from Charles Sanders Peirce’s original theory of semiotics, biosemiotics might prove useful here, not least in its attempt to collapse the Cartesian dualism separating body and mind.97 Constituting a theoretical approach or frame, biosemiotics ‘is concerned with the sign aspects of the processes of life itself’ gleaned through the relationships between sign, object and interpretant.98 According to biosemiotics, what organisms sense also has a meaning (food, predator, escape, sexual mate and so on). All organisms are born into a system of signs – a semiosphere – consisting of the totality of movements, odors, colors, chemical signals, touch and so on.99 Organisms co-produce semiotic niches which refer to the set of signs that an organism must master in order to survive. ‘Each living organism builds its own world, its own reality’.100 Bacteria are a great evolutionary success story, literally building their own (and our) world: they constantly co-produce hospitable niches in the face of antibiotic cat and mouse games, and more generally through the development of photosynthesis and so on. Jesper Hoffmeyer distinguishes between endosemiotics – sign processes that take place inside organisms – and exosemiotics – sign processes between organisms. Compared with exosemiotics, our knowledge of endosemiotics is impoverished, as is our understanding of bacterial biosemiotics generally. Alexei Sharov’s passing remark ‘bacteria are not able to build mental models of objects but they can build material models of themselves i.e. their offspring’ certainly deserves more careful consideration. Like Karen Barad’s brittlestar, whose blindness is rethought as ‘all-eyes’, perhaps we might come to understand bacteria as allcognition rather than automata making unreflexive responses to stimuli.101 The research of Ben-Jacob and other bacteriologists is particularly helpful here, as it provides a picture of the sophistication of bacterial sign systems, both within any given bacterium, and within bacterial communities. Studying how information is stored and processed among bacteria will also help us to better understand what Hoffmeyer calls vertical semiotics, concerned with the temporal, genealogical or hereditary aspects of biosemiotics.102 Again, horizontal and vertical (including epigenetic) bacterial memory provides important insights into ‘semiotic survival.’103 If, as Sebeok prophesized ‘a full understand-

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ing of the dynamics of semiosis may in the last analysis turn out to be no less than the definition of life’, then bacterial biosemiotics provides a treasure trove of clues to both the origins of the life of signs, as well as their diversity and sophistication: bacteria are capable of biosemiotic processes that remain elusive to humans.104 Natural, cultural, social It seems to me that one of the key challenges of meeting-with bacteria, or at least meeting microbes halfway as Karen Barad might say, consists in the opening up of nature, culture and sociality. In the 1930s, Robert Park wrote two articles on ‘human ecology’ in which he refers specifically to the microbial world to argue that social scientists must take into account the interconnectedness of living (organisms) and nonliving (environment) biota.105 For Park, ‘competitive cooperation’ is a sociological insight that Darwin used in his early forays into the mechanics of evolution: ‘He [Darwin] projected on organic life a sociological idea’ and ‘thus vindicated the relevancy and utility of a sociological idea within the biological realm.’106 Park recognizes ‘symbiotic societies’ are organized in complex interdependent assemblages, but quickly distinguishes ‘society’ as that which has surpassed biotic interdependence. ‘Man’ is distinguished from animal as less environmentally dependent: humans make and remake their world rather than simply respond to it, and this remaking involves institutional structures, customs and traditions. He writes, ‘The fact seems to be, then, that human society, as distinguished from plant and animal society, is organized on two levels, the biotic and the cultural. There is a symbiotic society based on competition and a cultural society based on communication and consensus.’107 In the end, culture and sociality remain resolutely human productions. Much more recently, Garry Runciman’s thoughtful talk on the natural, cultural and social selection at the 2008 British Sociological Association annual conference revisited these issues. Runciman’s main argument is that natural, cultural and social selections are three different, sequential and mutually interacting processes.108 Runciman provided the following examples of these semiautonomous fields (see Table 2.1). Various flying creatures are subject to natural selection pressures. A process of cultural selection determines the human classification of some of these creatures as ‘game birds’, suitable for human hunting and consumption according to particular culturally derived rituals. This cultural selection then leads eventually to a social selection process in which poaching laws are created, instituted, enforced and broken by

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 55 Table 2.1

Nature-Culture-Social Schema. Table courtesy of Garry Runciman Nature

Culture

Social

Animal

Flying creatures

‘game’ birds

Poaching laws

Vegetable

Edible grains

‘dietary’ habits

Arable estates

Mineral

Gold, silver

Precious jewelry

Minted coins

humans. Social selection pressures then act back on natural selection. If a particular species of bird killed by sanctioned and unsanctioned gaming reaches a particular level, this species may become extinct and its environmental niche will alter. What strikes me about this formulation is that nonhuman matter seems only to occupy a place in natural selection. The birds, grains and metals do not define themselves as game birds, diets or jewelry, and they certainly do not seem to define themselves in terms of laws, property and commerce. As well, the actors in all of these selections seem to be distinctly human. Everything besides the humans seem to wait passively to be interpolated into this schema. For me, Latour’s parliament of things is one of proportional representation: microbes, fungi, flora and nonhuman animals occupy the bulk of the biospheric parliament. As Harman puts it ‘all reality is political, but not all politics is human.’109 Might we think of these selective pressures as not only more involved with each other, more enmeshed, but as involving the intra-action of humans and nonhumans? The previous section exposes bacteria as organized, complex, communicative and communal. As such, perhaps we might think more in terms of ‘webs of domestication in which we humans have entangled ourselves’.110 Anna Tsing points out that we typically understand domestication as human control over other species, mostly unaware of how such relations entangle humans in domestication as well as in relations of interdependence: ‘we live in symbiosis with rice, wheat and corn fields, with berry thickets and vegetable patches, and also with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil that their rootlets enter into symbiosis with, in order to grow and feed the stalk, leaves, and seeds or fruit’.111 We know that seedless grapes, oranges, bananas and corn have lost their sexuality but reproduce in abundance through their symbiotic relationship with humans (farmers). We think that we select the plants, but who is to say that the plants are not selecting themselves?112 Who is to say, indeed, that bacteria are not selecting modes of human cultural and social selection that enhance

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bacterial thriving? Given the dependence of all life on bacteria, perhaps bacterial activities (bacterial doing) differentially sustains the greater survival of some organisms over others – perhaps termites that create and sustain particular colonies, and humans who create and sustain particular farming practices – as a means of increasing their own capabilities. As animals, our position as heterotrophic omnivores (we can only sustain our own lives through already-made organic compounds) makes us particularly vulnerable to plant and animal life, which is in turn completely dependent upon microbes: this is the exact opposite understanding to Park’s modern formulation in which humans stand outside of, or at least control, the web of life. A microontology would understand humans to be enmeshed in a complex web of co-domestications, as Tsing describes, such that natural, social and cultural selection may not be so definitively distinguished. Taking research on bacterial self-organization, communication, complexity, division of labor, and communities seriously suggests that bacteria are not only social in and of themselves, but also – through symbioses – weave all organisms into cultural and social co-constructions and co-evolutions. Shifting our focus to a bacterial perspective, we can think about how much European colonization of the Americas, the Antipodes and Africa was precipitated through bacterial organization, communication and general liveliness: that bacteria colonized at least as much as humans ever did. As we know, at least in the case of syphilis, bacterial trafficking crossed the oceans in the opposite direction, colonizing already so-called developed nations, and inciting Europeans to engage in already-enmeshed cultural and social selections when they encountered T. pallidum and other microbes: isolating patients, killing sex workers, developing medical treatments such as silver nitrate eye drops and so on. What I am getting at here is a kind of ongoing mixed natural-cultural-social history with bacteria. This history extends back to LUCA and enmeshes natural, cultural and social domains. Bacteria are, as Lingis so wonderfully wrote, ‘spreadings of duration’.113 Joost Van Loon’s ‘parasite politics’ steers toward the kind of natureculture-social enmeshment that characterizes this kind of meetingswith bacteria. Van Loon argues for an understanding of community formation from a symbiotic perspective that emphasizes ‘differencewithin’ identity politics, as opposed to the familiar emphasis on ‘difference-without’ (sameness) in community formation.114 Following the path of some symbiotic relationships that begin as microbial parasites and go on to form lasting, mutually beneficial long-term relationships, Van Loon argues ‘communities are formed on the basis of endemic parasitism.’115 Through the concept of ‘epidemic space’ – consisting of

Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria 57

vector (mode of passing on), index (first identified case) and vortex (the coming together of seemingly unconnected events that ‘leads to a more or less volatile intensification of speed or flows’) forces – Van Loon argues that viruses and epidemics such as Ebola and HIV/AIDS require a re-consideration of the traditional separation between ‘the subject, the social and the public sphere’.116 For instance, Van Loon argues ‘the more aggressive and virulent a virus, the more it will rely on cultural vectors for its survival.’117 This resembles the kind of Latourian actant relations I am interested in. Eschewing as tautological and reductionist the argument that self-replication is the viruses’ primary motivator, Van Loon argues instead that viruses are primed for symbiosis because they can never exist in isolation. As vectors of symbiosis, viruses are not dysfunctional, but rather an integral part of the synthesizing process of life.118 Van Loon argues that parasite politics figures a particular ethical relation to otherness, which is the subject of the final chapter of this book.

3 Evolutionary Theory and Its Discontents

Unarguable is another key word. Of course, biologists have never been at a loss for theories about how one type of living thing might be evolutionarily related to another, and what features might be important for deciding this.1 It might have happened thus; but we shall surely never know with certainty. Evolutionary speculation constitutes a kind of metascience, which has the same intellectual fascination for some biologists that metaphysical speculation possessed for some medieval scholastics. It can be considered a relatively harmless habit, like eating peanuts, unless it assumes the form of an obsession; then it becomes a vice.2 Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.3

Introduction This chapter concerns symbiogenesis theory, and its speculative role in evolution. Symbiosis refers to the living together of two or more differently named organisms for most of the life of at least one of the partners.4 The association may be optional or obligate for one or both of the organisms. Symbiogenesis refers to the appearance of a new phenotype, trait, tissue, organelle, organ, or organism formed through a symbiotic relationship. Symbiosis and symbiogenesis have long been recognized within biology (particularly microbiology) and ecology, and I will detail different forms that symbiosis takes, and its implications for expanding 58

Evolutionary Theory and Its Discontents 59

our understanding of life processes such as coevolution. Lynn Margulis, symbiogenesis theory’s most well-known and ardent contemporary supporter, has dedicated her career to arguing that symbiogenesis is the primary creative force in evolution.5 This assertion is controversial, and evolutionary theorists tend to either ignore symbiogenesis theory or assimilate it into neoDarwinism.6 This chapter considers symbiogenesis within the context of other biological phenomena such as epigenetics and lateral gene transfer, that, when taken together, challenge our understandings of evolution itself. Symbiogenesis theory’s ambivalent status within evolutionary theory offers insights into themes familiar to social scientists such as the genesis and development of scientific facts, and scientific epistemic cultures.7 Throughout this chapter, I will argue that a number of agential cuts have occurred through scientific (including measurement, technology and objects), political, social and cultural processes, to define living and nonliving organisms, and more generally, evolutionary theory itself.8 My aim is not to pronounce the validity or invalidity of symbiogenesis theory per se (evolution is, after all, truly Latourian science in action, and thus forever open to revision in light of new findings), but rather to contemplate questions about how science processes theory and data, as well as some of the more germane implications of symbiogenesis theory for the social sciences. Most social scientists do not contend with theories of evolution or the origins of life, yet do contend with the persistent societal belief that competition, selfishness, altruism, fitness, selection, ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ organisms, parental investment and the like are indigenous to nature. Indeed, from Spencer to E.O. Wilson to Dawkins, evolutionary theory has maintained that evolution works as much at the cultural level as at the biological. For this reason, social scientists need to be curious about competing claims within evolutionary theory, as they point toward potentially alternate accounts of the origins of sociable life.

Symbiogenesis theory I will turn to research detailing the diversity of symbioses later in the chapter. For now, here are two examples often used to illustrate this phenomenon. Lichen is a symbiosis of algae or cyanobacteria and fungi. The cyanobacteria or algae provide the photosynthetic metabolism while the fungus can reorganize its membranes to sustain the lichen in extreme weather changes such as frozen tundra and desert rocks.9 Another oft-cited example is Mixotricha paradoxa:

60 The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

Figure 3.1a

Mixotricha paradoxa. Image courtesy of Lynn Margulis

Figure 3.1b

Mixotricha paradoxa. Image courtesy of Lynn Margulis

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Hundreds of these microscopic protists live in the hindguts of the Australian termite Mastotermes darwiniensis, digesting the wood that the termite eats. Not only do these protists live in symbiotic relationship with the termites; other microorganisms – small and large spirochetes – cover their surfaces enabling motility and attach to the protists via specific attachment sites.10 Moreover, M. paradoxa with its symbionts have five genomes, and their DNA is transferred horizontally when protists are transferred between termites.11 Symbiogenesis was originally identified by Russian botanist K.S. Mereschkowski in 1909 within the context of a growing disciplinary split between botany and zoology. Botanists studying the abundant lichens on the Siberian tundra and marine biologists studying micro and macro organisms in fresh and sea water, were developing a critical attitude toward natural selection ‘which translated into the struggle for existence as the primary force of evolution’.12 They observed different forces in nature such as co-evolution, and cooperation. Zoologists studying animals were, not surprisingly, more accepting of the principle of vertical inheritance, individuated organisms and random mutation. Fellow Russian botanist B.M. Kozo-Polyansky concurred with Mereschkowski as to the abundance and evolutionary importance of symbiogenesis, and attempted to integrate symbiogenesis into Darwinism through the proposition that symbiotic associations were selected for in the struggle for survival. So within the former Soviet Union, emerging disciplinary silos, their attendant epistemic cultures (including emerging and shifting organism classification schemes with a preference for ‘big like us’ organisms) and the technologies developed within particular disciplines (the electron microscope and genomic imaging for instance) go some way to explain how symbiogenesis theory emerged as an anomaly derived from plant and microorganism observation in nature and how it remained, if not unknown, then marginalized as evolutionary theory increasingly focused on animals (first in nature and then in laboratory settings).13 Moreover, translation issues (English Darwinian texts translated into Russian for instance) may have had an impact on the Russian reception of Darwinian ideas. The very recent translation of Russian work on symbiogenesis into English, the developing iron curtain and the cold war certainly account for the historical and contemporary absence of Mereschkowski and Kozo-Polyansky’s theories and numerous Russian empirical studies of symbiosis from North American and European accounts of evolution. But the Russians were not alone. In Germany, Andreas Schimper (1885), Richard Altmann (1890) and Anton De Bary (1887) all proposed

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versions of symbiogenesis theory, as did Paul Portier (1918) in France. American anatomist Ivan E. Wallin independently developed the term ‘symbionticism’ to account for both speciation and cell organelle origin, and we might speculate about the more positive reception his work may have received had his Russian, German and French contemporaries’ research been more widely known.14 It is clear, then, that symbiogenesis theory emerged soon after Darwinism in a number of countries from scientists working in a diversity of disciplines. Nonetheless, these ideas did not permeate Western mainstream zoocentric science.15 Lynn Margulis is contemporary biology’s best known and ardent supporter of symbiogenesis theory.16 She compiled evidence demonstrating the bacterial origins of eukaryotic cell parts.17 Against the prevailing scientific consensus up until the 1960s, Margulis argued that mitochondria and chloroplasts in eukaryotic cells (cells with membrane-bounded nuclei) are the product of a symbiotic merger of oxygen-breathing and photosynthesizing bacterial ancestors (mergers two and three in the figure below).18 Amassing a diverse collection of both historical and contemporary empirical research from a range of scientific sub-disciplines, Margulis is currently attempting – against the current consensus of scientific data – to argue that eukaryotic cells also resulted from a bacterial merger of wall-less archaebacteria and eubacteria to produce a cell that contains a karyomastigont (an intracellular organelle system – merger one in the figure below), whose ‘whip tails’ were once free-living spirochetes.

Symbiogenesis theory and neoDarwinism Ernst Mayr, the twentieth century’s Darwin, summarizes Darwin’s five major theories of evolution as: (1) The nonconstancy of species (the basic theory of evolution); (2) The descent of all organisms from common ancestors (branching evolution); (3) The gradualness of evolution (no saltations, no discontinuities); (4) The multiplication of species (the origin of diversity); and (5) Natural selection.19 The modern synthesis, or neoDarwinism as it is sometimes called, is predicated on the following propositions: 1. Heredity is through the transmission of germ-line genes, which are discrete units located on chromosomes in the nucleus. Genes carry information about characters; 2. Variation is the consequence of the many random combinations of alleles that are generated by the sexual processes, with each allele

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Figure 3.2 Origin of Species through Symbiogenesis. Drawing by Kathryn Delisle. Image courtesy of Lynn Margulis

usually having a small phenotypic effect. New variations in genes – mutations – are the result of accidental changes; genes are not affected by the developmental history of the individual; 3. Selection occurs among individuals. Gradually, through the selection of individuals with phenotypes that make them more adapted to their environment than others, some alleles become more numerous in the population.20

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In sum, neoDarwinism pivots on the proposition that genes produce small variations through random mutation over long periods of time. What distinguishes Margulis’s theory is that it argues against the prevailing consensus within evolutionary theory that random mutation is natural selection’s primary engine of change. Margulis contends that symbiogenesis constitutes the major mode of evolutionary innovation on which random mutation then makes slow, minor changes. In other words, Margulis argues that the accumulation of random mutations played a minor, modulating-only role in evolution. As Sapp puts it, symbiotic associations ‘brought together genetic material from very distantly related organisms, and thus the changes arising from them are far greater in magnitude than those which result from the gradual accumulation of differences within species such as gene mutation, combination and so on’.21 A number of corollaries follow from Margulis’s theory, including the implication that organisms acquire characteristics through horizontal – Lamarckian – inheritance of the kind found in symbiotic mergers, an issue I discuss later in the chapter.22 For natural selection to be the major creative force in generating or modifying evolutionary forms, it must, according to Stephen J. Gould, meet two conditions: ‘(1) if nothing about the provision of the raw materials – that is, the sources of variation – imparts direction to evolutionary change; and (2) if change occurs by a long and insensible series of intermediary steps, each superintended by natural selection – so that “creativity” or “direction” can arise by the summation of the increments’. Gould continues: Variation must exist in sufficient amount, for natural selection can make nothing, and must rely upon the bounty thus provided (by natural variation)…. Variation in short must be copious, small in extent, and undirected… If the variations that yielded evolutionary change were large – producing new major features, or even new taxa in a single step then natural selection… would perish…. This is why saltational and macromutational theories have always been viewed within the evolutionary community as anti-Darwinian.23 In other words, ‘natural selection can only be the major creative agency in evolution if all or most of the adaptive complexity manifest in living organisms is built up over many generations by the cumulative selection of naturally occurring small, random mutations or variants, i.e., additive, incremental steps over an extended period of time’.24 Again, Margulis posits that symbiogenesis, not natural selection, is the

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major creative force in evolution, producing relatively large changes in organisms over short periods of time with the adaptive advantage of generating complexity relatively quickly. Evolutionary theorists term ‘non-Darwinian’ (or anti-Darwinian in Gould’s quote above) any complexity derived from sources other than ‘by brute, mechanical…climbing from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing’.25 Complexity achieved through symbiogenesis, what Dawkins calls ‘single-step selection’ ‘denies the very heart of [Darwin’s] evolution theory’.26 Indeed, for Dawkins, ‘generating adaptive complexity [by symbiogenesis] is climbing mount improbable in one saltational step’.27 A second departure concerns the evolutionary ‘unit of selection’. NeoDarwinism defines the gene or individual organism as the unit of natural selection and contemporary research is largely informed by a vertical, nonreticulated conception of phylogeny, isolating mechanisms through which cells differentiate and (through the genome) struggle for survival.28 Symbiosis, as the ‘the formation of associations, that is, the breakdown of genetic, physiological and spatial isolation between organisms’, invites a reconsideration of genes (organisms and species) as the fundamental unit of selection.29 Margulis writes: … of all the organisms on Earth today, only prokaryotes (bacteria) are individuals. All other live beings (‘organisms’ – such as animals, plants and fungi) are metabolically complex communities of a multitude of tightly organized beings. That is, what we generally accept as an individual animal, such as a cow, is recognizable as a collection of various numbers and kinds of autopoietic entities that, functioning together, form an emergent entity – the cow. ‘Individuals’ are all diversities of co-evolving associates. Said succinctly, all organisms larger than bacteria are intrinsically communities… Individual animals and plants are not selected by natural selection because there are no literal ‘individual’ animals or plants; ‘natural selection’ just refers to the fact that biotic potential is not reached; the ability of populations of cells and organisms to maximally grow is always limited by the growth of different cells and organisms and their associated surroundings.30 Consider the life cycle of Dictyostelium discoideum. It not only points to the co-evolutionary history of any organism, but also questions the phylogenic division between organisms.31 This ‘social amoeba’ consisting of a hundred or so species belonging to the

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Amoebozoa, emerges from spores that release amoebas who feed on bacteria.32 When the food supply is exhausted, the amoebas spontaneously aggregate to form a multicellular organism that in turn releases the next generation of spores. Margulis and Schwartz remark that D. discoideum ‘…have features that are animal (they move, they ingest whole food by phagocytosis, and they metamorphose), plant (they form spores on upright reproductive bodies), and fungal (their spores have tough cell walls and they germinate into colorless cells having absorptive nutrition – they live on dung and decaying plant material)’.33 Zoologists classify D. discoideum as an animal; to mycologists it is a fungus and to a botanist, a plant. Again, what counts as an individual? – are lichens parasitic fungi; is D. discoideum a plant-animal on its way to becoming a fungi?34 Disagreement over the unit of selection reveals significant details about the development of scientific facts and epistemic cultures. At the heart of the conflict between evolutionary and symbiogenesis theories is the epistemic privileging of animals. Zoology (and evolutionary theory generally) privileges animals ‘big like us’.35 Proponents of symbiogenesis theory argue that a differential focus on animals has limited most research to the Phanerozoic, leaving the 3,000 million years of living organism activity in the Proterozoic and Archean underresearched. This effects a double privileging of organisms as autonomous individuals and of sexual reproduction. Concomitant to the epistemic ‘big like us’ approach is the classification of bacteria as parasites. ‘To a hammer everything is a nail’ (to a biologist, every bacterium is a pathogen) might best describe the historical development of bacteriology. For instance, technological advances in microscopy mainly served to improve the prevention and treatment of bacteria considered parasitic to humans.36 Oyama argues that the popularity of parasitism over symbiosis as the characterization of evolution (and life itself) lends itself ‘with grisly effectiveness to Dawkins’s manipulative gene language’.37 As a consequence, Keith Ansell Pearson argues that ‘in biology…symbiosis has had a curiously awkward history which reveals much about the anthropocentric determination of the subject and about hominid fears of contamination. It has played, and continues to play, a subversive role in biology since it challenges the boundaries of the organism’.38 Part of the containment of bacteria as pathogens, according to symbiogenesis theory, has to do with the continued anthropomorphic preference for vertical genetic filiations through sexual reproduction. This preference obscures the degree to which DNA (as well as RNA and cyto-

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plasmic material, bacteria and viruses) is shared horizontally between organisms, by ‘contamination rather than linear filiation’.39 As Parisi argues ‘…the classical evolutionary understanding of the development of life, based on differences of degree (increasing complexity) and types (species) and on random mutation (Darwin’s theory of natural selection), dismisses the symbiotic processes of inheritance that explain the continual modifications of cellular and genetic transmission. [Symbiogenesis] challenges the “zoocentrism” of the theories of evolution (based on linear evolution from the simple to the complex)’.40 Put another way, when ‘heredity is defined as the sexual transmission of genes from one generation to the next…anything else, transmitted sexually or not, is by definition foreign, disease, retrogressive’.41 The counter-epistemic privileging of bacteria found in symbiogenesis theory leads to a preferencing of DNA and RNA exchanges without reproduction, the collapse of the autonomous individual organism in favor of organisms as assemblages, and an understanding of evolutionary novelty produced primarily through a series of single-step monumental symbiogenetic mergers. Symbiogenesis theory suggests the symbiotic system – the interactions – is what generates both species diversity and evolutionary adaptation.42 Thus, for symbiogenesis theory, the ‘unit of selection’ is the symbiont.43 Put another way, it shifts the focus of natural selection to ‘reciprocal actions between organisms and the environment, rather than competition among individuals’.44 At the same time, we need to exercise caution in characterizing symbiogenesis theory as advocating a cooperative or ‘mutualistic’ relationship between symbionts found in a number of social analyses such as Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, published in 1902. In their recent article in Nature, Goldenfeld and Woese take up the conception of bacteria as cooperative because bacteria form communities that appear to act collectively to ‘invade biochemical niches and interact in biogeochemical cycles’.45 Commenting on the symbiogenic merger of mitochondria and chloroplasts into the eukaryotic cell, Lewis Thomas similarly writes: There is something intrinsically good natured about all symbiotic relations, necessarily, but this one [mitochondria and the eukaryotic cell] which is probably the most ancient and most firmly established of all, seems especially equable. There is nothing resembling predation, and no pretense of an adversary stance on either side. If you were looking for something like natural law to take the place of the ‘social Darwinism’ of a century ago, you would have a hard time

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drawing lessons from the sense of life alluded to by chloroplasts and mitochondria, but there it is.46 By contrast, Margulis argues that ‘symbiosis has nothing to do with cost or benefit. The benefit/cost people have perverted the science with invidious economic analogies’.47 Symbiosis and the creation of new species through symbiogenesis, may be anything but cooperative: we might just as easily characterize these phenomona as violent. A fungus attacking an alga for nutrients, after say 25,000 times, led to the symbiotic emergence of lichen. Moreover, certain associations may be defined as both parasitic and mutualistic under different environmental conditions and/or during different stages.48 The contemporary reception to symbiogenesis theory is mixed, constituting by some accounts Latourian science in action, and by other accounts an anomalous curiosity. On one hand, there are certainly indications that more scientists are interested in researching symbiosis, and that the implications of symbiogenesis theory are being seriously considered.49 Lead articles in Science and Nature go so far as to foretell a paradigm shift in evolution and the natural sciences generally precipitated by symbiogenesis theory.50 For instance, Goldenfeld and Woese foresee the gene-dominated molecular reductionism of the twentieth century supplanted by ‘an interdisciplinary approach that embraces collective phenomena’.51 Referring to the ability of microorganisms to reconstruct their genomes in response to environmental stress, the authors ask ‘how valid is the very concept of an organism in isolation?’ (369). Citing dynamical systems theory, the authors write: ‘This is an extraordinary time for biology, because the perspective we have indicated places biology within a context that must necessarily engage with other disciplines more strongly aware of the importance of collective phenomena’ (369). Symbiosis (the journal of the International Symbiosis Society) is dedicated to research on symbiosis and other journals such as Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Environmental Microbiology and International Microbiology regularly publish research on symbiosis. An increasing amount of research is dedicated to better understanding symbiosis within Homo sapiens as well as exploring the potential to harness bacteria for producing biofuels and agricultural innovations.52 Moreover, other phenomena that challenge natural selection such as biological self-organization are gaining scientific interest. This said, most scientists maintain that symbiogenesis is an anomaly, that it rarely occurs in evolution and does not account for evolutionary

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novelty on the scale argued by its proponents, and thus does not constitute anywhere near a revolution in evolutionary theory.53 Other scientists have attempted to assimilate symbiogenesis into evolutionary theory. For instance, in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins acknowledges the recognition of the bacterial origins of mitochondria in eukaryotic cells was ‘one of those revolutionary ideas…whose time had come’.54 He then redefines symbiosis as associations between members of the same species in order to incorporate symbiosis as a strategy through which individuals might maximize the preservation of their ‘selfish genes’ over time. Axelrod and Hamilton attempt to assimilate symbiosis into neoDarwinism by reasoning that while tit-for-tat game strategies rely upon individuals’ ability to recognize each other, microorganisms (who were thought to lack this ability) would maintain continuous contact with one ‘player’. Some responses also seem to be normative in character; that is, they involve the sanction and censure of scientists themselves.55 Thomas Cavalier-Smith’s review of Margulis and Sagan’s Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species distills the major criticism that symbiogenesis plays a minor role in evolution. His review does more than this however; it employs rhetorical devices to minimize, contain and otherwise dismiss Margulis’s research. Cavalier-Smith argues that: (1) Margulis was not the first person to generate symbiogenesis theory; (2) Margulis has never fully appreciated his own work on symbiogenesis; (3) Margulis’s former supervisor Hans Ris actually revived Mereschkowski’s symbiogenesis theory; and (4) that Margulis’s books directed at a public audience are ‘chattily written in the fashionable mode of pop-science journalism’.56 Cavalier-Smith’s attempt to displace the credit for symbiogenesis research on to other – male – scientists (Mereschkowski, Ris and himself) and the derogation of that portion of Margulis’s research written for public consumption might certainly occupy feminist science studies scholars interested in women’s continued struggle within science as well as science studies scholars concerned with continued ‘top-down’ scientific approaches to public understandings of science.57 Cavalier-Smith notwithstanding, Margulis’s recognition within the scientific academy through honors such as the National Medal of Science make most scientists wary of direct attacks. The majority of scientists acknowledge the validity of Margulis’s compilation of evidence concerning the symbiogenic mergers of mitochondria and chloroplasts while at the same time denying its greater implications (and perhaps hedging their bets in case future research tips the scales in favor of more widespread

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acceptance of symbiogenesis theory). Referring to symbiogenesis theory and the Gaia hypothesis, Ernst Mayr states: ‘The evolution of the eukaryotic cell was the single most important event in the history of the organic world and Margulis’s contribution to our understanding the symbiotic factors was of enormous importance. But what she is saying now…it’s startling to find a reputable scientist arguing such fantasies’.58 Referring to Margulis, W. Ford Doolittle states ‘There’s a role in science for iconoclasts. It would be a great mistake to jump on her with both feet. They raise questions even when they’re wrong. And, of course, they’re occasionally right, as she was’.59 John Maynard Smith similarly states: ‘I think she’s often wrong, but most of the people I know think it’s important to have her around, because she’s wrong in such fruitful ways. I’m sure she’s mistaken about Gaia too. But I must say, she was crashingly right once, and many of us thought she was wrong then too’.60 These responses from leading figures in evolutionary theory provide a flavor of the normative character of science when faced with competing theories and evidence.61

A tangled web, or ‘On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection and All Sorts of Other Things’62 Kuhn’s characterization of normal science occasionally subjected to catastrophic challenges that devastate the current paradigm has given way to interest in the myriad complex ways in which the cacophony of new findings in science and new developments in technology circulate in the production of knowledge in largely distinct disciplines. Several analyses have detailed, for instance, the steady movement within genetics and molecular biology away from the central dogma that at one time defined new sub-disciplines and determined research agendas.63 A recent article in The New York Times quotes Sonja Prohaska, a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig critiquing the central dogma: ‘It cannot work that way’ says Prohaska, ‘there are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes’.64 Similarly, there is no short supply of critiques of neoDarwinism.65 Given that hypothesis testing, new ideas and critique are built into the very fabric of science, I see symbiogenesis theory as one of several biological phenomena pushing our insights concerning evolution.66 Space constraints precluded an exhaustive review of this literature: what I will do here is gesture toward recent developments in evolution and development research that move us further from the sole emphasis on random mutation, the individual organism as the unit of selection, and ‘slow’

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evolution, and toward research that explores co-evolution, epigenetics, lateral gene transfer and other biological phenomena. Bacteria participate in different agential cuts when disciplines and sub-disciplines draw from each other to produce interdisciplinary research agendas. Margaret McFall-Ngai traces the impact of recognizing bacterial-animal symbioses within evolutionary and development theory: Several decades ago, ecologists realized that bacteria have in the geological past, as well as in the present day, dominated material and energy flow in the world’s ecosystems. Subsequently, with the advent of molecular phylogenetic analyses, evolutionary biologists have come to recognize that bacteria are the most diverse of all organisms. In recent years an integration of bacterial genetics and physiology into host cell biology has produced a remarkable insight into the biochemical mechanisms that sustain the eukaryotic cell… Now is the time for the fields of microbiology and developmental biology to embrace a similar integration of thinking (11). Animal development, writes McFall-Ngai, proceeded from an ‘implicit assumption…that only “self” cells (i.e. those containing the host genome) communicate to induce developmental pathways’ (1). However, growing evidence suggests that co-evolution between bacteria and animals is ubiquitous and that these symbiotic associations are maintained across generations.67 Recognizing that the ongoing evolutionary presence of bacterial genomes means that animal (including human) genomes are actually genomic communities, Relman and Falkow call for a ‘second human genome project’ to characterize these microbial partners.68 McFall-Ngai details two methods for maintaining bacteria-animal symbioses across generations: environmental and transovarian transmission. In the former, only the sperm cells do not have symbionts: bacterial partners are transmitted either through or on the female gametes. Bacteria are also passed from parent to offspring during birth. During embryogenesis, tissues that develop specifically interact with co-evolved microbial species. In the case of environmental transmission, the larvae or juvenile organism acquires bacterial symbionts from its environment.69 (4). This is the case for symbionts in the termite hindgut for instance. In some cases, such as in tube worms, intracellular symbioses also exhibit environmental transmission; that is, some associations use both transovarian and environmental transmission. Further,

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some bacterial transmissions are obligate for the animal. For instance Asobara tabida wasps have an obligate relationship with Wolbachia bacteria: without Wolbachia, the wasp cannot reproduce offspring. Researchers have also found that co-evolved bacteria induce genes associated with mucosal immunity, intestine maturation and nutrient processing.70 Moreover, many environmentally transmitted symbioses remain open to the environment throughout the life of the nonbacterial symbiont.71 This can, for instance, help the animal to differentiate between indigenous microbiota (that is, bacteria transmitted environmentally and transovarianally) and ‘tourist’ bacteria, which in turn aids in immunity.72 Conrad Waddington differentiates between ‘normative’ natural selection (based on competition) and ‘epigenetic’ natural selection based on complementary cell-cell interactions during development.73 Studies of the ubiquity of developmental symbioses suggest a need to acknowledge epigenetic selection as systemic functioning between organisms.74 Epigenetics is gaining increasing attention within evolutionary and development (‘evo-devo’) theory.75 Epigenetics refers to the vertical transmission of information through non-DNA means. While there is no change in the underlying DNA sequences (from this process alone; changes occur through other means), nongenetic factors determine gene expression. Epigenetics challenges the central dogma of genetics, which maintains the centrality of DNA in both genetic inheritance and organismal development. The central dogma, simplified, looks like this: 1. In the nucleus, two strands of DNA pull apart; 2. Through a process known as transcription, an RNA polymerase enzyme copies one of the DNA strands into a strand of mRNA; 3. the mRNA strand is transported out of the nucleus and into the cytoplasm; 4. Through a process known as translation, transfer RNA (tRNA) binds to the mRNA; 5. The tRNA adds an amino acid monomer to the polymer chain; 6. The protein chain then moves into the cell to direct activity there.76 Numerous findings now complicate this equation. Increasing evidence suggests the importance of proteins, the cytoplasm and the environment in determining which genes are activated, transported, copied, spliced and so on (indeed, these developments are leading geneticists to coin a new central dogma, ‘one protein – many functions’). As Jablonka and Lamb write, ‘the gene cannot be seen as an autonomous unit…a “gene” has meaning only within the system as a whole’.77

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Alternative splicing involving introns (formerly known as ‘junk DNA’ – only about 1.5 percent of DNA codes for proteins) and exons; crossing over (gene recombination through the exchange of DNA segments during meiosis – it can produce nearly limitless variation in the gametes because it can occur at different sites and in different germ cells); posttranscriptional editing of mRNA; repair mechanisms that sacrifice fidelity (i.e. nonerror) for the continuation of replication; enzyme-mediated modification of protein composition; chromatin diminution (when large pieces of chromosome are eliminated from cell lineages that go on to form body cells); polyploidy; polyteny (with or without underreplication); amplification; rearrangement; homeotic genes (that turn on and off transcription factors); lateral gene transfer; enzyme reverse transcriptase; and other phenomena observed during mitosis and meiosis complicate the gene-centric view of evolution.78 Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb analyze the impact of epigenetics on evolutionary theory.79 Researchers have known for some time that identical genes can lead to very different phenotypes, and that disabling genes known to influence particular developmental pathways can make no difference to the final phenotype. Now we know that most specialized cells are epigenetic, and acquire information that they pass to their daughter cells through epigenetic inheritance systems (EISs). Epigenetics considers the genome as an organized system (rather than the autonomous gene of the central dogma scenario), suggesting that genetic variation is not entirely random. In other words, epigenetics suggests that ‘soft inheritance’ from the environment is also at play in natural selection.80 Jablonka and Lamb detail the influence that August Weismann’s theory of vertical inheritance through sexual reproduction had on the rejection of Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime.81 Weismann, however, did not completely expunge Lamarckism from evolutionary theories. Nor did the idea of gradual evolution of small variations meet without opposition: a number of evolutionary theorists (for instance, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, and much later Stephen J. Gould) propagated the idea of saltatory jumps in evolution – an idea that resonates with symbiogenesis theory.82 Moreover, Margulis’s research, and those of others working on the cytoplasm and embryogenesis, showed that genes are not exclusive to the nucleus: they are also found in mitochondria and chloroplasts. Bacteriology also confirms that bacteria do not have membrane-bounded nuclei: so for the majority of organisms on earth, Mendel’s laws do not apply.83 Research shows that bacteria produce mutations in response to environmental conditions. Mutations, therefore, are not generated through an

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entirely random process: they are ‘directed’.84 Moreover, mutation rates in bacteria increase during stressful environmental conditions. These mutations can be global such that mutations increase throughout the genome; local such that mutations increase only in certain regions of the genome; induced local mutations that occur in direct response to changing environmental conditions; or induced regional increased mutations which are nonrandom increases in the rates of mutation in a specific set of genes.85 As James Shapiro writes, ‘These molecular insights lead to new concepts of how genomes are organized and reorganized, opening a range of possibilities for thinking about evolution. Rather than being restricted to contemplating a slow process depending on random (i.e. blind) genetic variation and gradual phenotypic change, we are now free to think of realistic molecular ways about rapid genome restructuring guided by biological feedback networks’.86

Conclusions While researchers are actively pursuing research on symbiosis, they tend to agree that future research is unlikely to reveal a symbiogenetic origin of other components of the eukaryotic cell.87 It is one thing for microbiologists and prokaryotologists to study horizontal genome acquisition in bacteria. However, the implications of ‘such horizontal gene transfer between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and between eukaryotes of different species’ – the interdependence of species for genetic novelty, for evolution itself – remain marginal to neoDarwinism.88 Certainly the acceptance of symbiogenesis theory pivots to a degree on the weight of empirical evidence that can be harnessed in its support. But it also depends upon other factors, which science studies has elucidated through analyses of epistemic cultures and their inherent normative sanctions. Those scientists who, for instance, judge symbiogenesis to be an anomaly to be dismissed may have a lower threshold ‘with respect to what counts as a revolution’ while those scientists who attempt to assimilate symbiogenesis may have a higher threshold for defining when a theory reaches a crisis point.89 Certainly, as it stands, each side of this debate employs its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense: The resulting circularity does not, of course, make the arguments wrong or even ineffectual. The man (sic) who premises a paradigm when arguing in its defense can nonetheless provide a clear exhibit of what scientific practice will be like for those who adopt the new view

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of nature. That exhibit can be immensely persuasive, often compellingly so. Yet, whatever its force, the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle.90 Science in action indeed.91 Evolutionary theory is responding to developing research and ideas that complicate Darwin’s original theories. Referring to the traditional division between evolution and development, and ‘evo-devo’s commitment to research both in tandem, Jablonka and Lamb write: As we see it, the dichotomy between physiology/development and evolution, and between proximate and ultimate causes, is not as absolute as we have been led to believe. They grade into one another. At one extreme there are purely selective processes, acting on chance variation, while at the other there are purely instructive processes, which are totally physiological or developmental and do not involve any selection. Between these extremes we find the majority of processes in the real world, which are to varying degrees both instructive and selective…. In other words, Darwinian evolution can include Lamarckian processes, because the heritable variation on which selection acts is not entirely blind to function; some of it is induced or ‘acquired’ in response to the conditions of life.92 Richard Dawkins talks of ‘misfirings’ and writes of ‘outlaws’, ‘modifiers’, ‘a motley riff-raff of DNA and RNA fragments…: plasmids, episomes, insertion sequences, plasmons, virions, transposons, replicons, viruses’, ‘mutation[s] [that] include more radical changes in the genetic system, minor ones such as inversions, and major ones such as changes in chromosome number or ploidy, and changes from sexuality to asexuality and vice versa’, emphasizes that ‘mutations are just as likely to initiate genetic change during growth-mitosis as during reproduction-meiosis’ and an ‘interactive view of gene action’ in which ‘a phenotypic effect of a gene is the joint product of itself and its environment, an environment which includes the rest of the genome’.93 Interestingly, Daniel Dennett, whose Afterword appears at the end of The Extended Phenotype, seems to open the door for analyses that recognize symbiosis and symbiogenesis: Each of us walks around each day carrying the DNA of several thousand lineages (our parasites, our intestinal flora) in addition to our nuclear (and mitochondrial) DNA, and all these genomes get along

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pretty well under most circumstances. They are all in the same boat after all. A herd of antelope, a termite colony, a mating pair of birds and their clutch of eggs, a human society – these groupish entities are no more groupish, in the end, than an individual human being, with its trillion-plus cells, each a descendant of the ma-cell and pa-cell union that started the group’s voyage. ‘At any level, if a vehicle is destroyed, all the replicators inside it will be destroyed. Natural selection will therefore, at least to some extent, favour replicators that cause their vehicles to resist being destroyed. In principle this could apply to groups of organisms as well as to single organisms, for if a group is destroyed all the genes inside it are destroyed too’ ([Dawkins] p. 114). So are genes all that matter? Not at all. To be sure, Dennetts’ commentary does not undermine the selfish gene theory of selection, but it does beg unit of selection, and identity questions more generally. Darwin’s legacy for shaping social science will surely continue as we work out ways to make sense of symbiosis and symbiogenesis theory from a social perspective. Grosz argues that Darwin’s refusal to restrict the structure and processes of evolution to biological activities may prove to be its strength and value for social theory.94 Focusing on evolutionary theory is important because it speaks directly to the foundations of social theory. We need to learn more about how the social sciences developed in tandem with the concept of the individual organism as the unit of selection and evolution as the struggle for survival, and look in turn at how these primary assumptions underwrite understandings of social, group and societal collective action, political affinities and other macro processes such as risk, consumerism, neoliberalism, surveillance and globalization. Some feminist science studies scholars have already engaged symbiogenesis theory to argue for a different understanding of what it means to have co-evolved with nonhumans as well as critique assumptions about the ontology of sexual difference.95 The remainder of this book attempts to imagine identity, gender difference, the environment and ethics from a microbial perspective.

4 Microontologies of Self

Introduction Marcel Mauss’s influential work on gifting outlines a system of exchange, of giving and taking, which depends upon a strong notion of human selfhood.1 Mauss’s gifting is concerned both with what traffics between people (human and nonhuman animals, objects, souls and identities) and the structure of this trafficking (its largely implicit social norms). Mauss argues that gifting is a way of forming and maintaining community identity, and through this process, individual identity. The system of gifting, and the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘nonself’, is understood as a closed economy in which gifts are given and received – calculated in a complex system of exchange predicated on a paradox: gifting requires that ‘exchangers’ be individuated selves capable of giving ‘freely’; at the same time, individual autonomy is necessarily compromised through the obligatory structure of giving. It is this excess of the gift – a compromising of the self – that interests me. Drawing upon Rosalyn Diprose’s notion of ‘corporeal generosity’, I argue that there is much in gifting that circumvents descriptions of the ‘self’/‘nonself’ dichotomy in terms of a closed economy in which resources are exchanged without excess or remainder.2 Diprose’s ‘notion of an embodied generosity is intended to draw attention to the unavoidable yet generally overlooked debt that any body owes to other bodies’.3 At the same time, this embodied gifting is both unpredictable and intrusive – there is as much possibility of threatening the integrity of bodies as there is of opening up new possibilities. It is this complexity of the ‘self’/‘nonself’ relation that is contemplated in recent analyses of the biological literature on immunity. This literature is interested in the complex ways in which organisms, through the immune sub-system, 77

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distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘nonself’ for the purpose of maintaining immunological integrity. While immunology initially favored a closed economy approach, it now increasingly recognizes the permeable borders of the ‘self’ and ‘nonself’ as well as the sense of unpredictability and openness to change over time. My interest is to bring together these two literatures, the former concerned with the philosophical and the latter with the biological. This bringing together attempts an analogy between the biological and the economical self. To do this, I will suggest that the models of self produced by each discipline have developed in directions that suggest an appreciation of the self’s excess produced through intra-action. I argue this excess (especially in terms of its unpredictability and unintended consequences) may be usefully illustrated by the bioevolutionary phenomenon of symbiogenesis. To some degree, the task of linking these ‘selves’ together has been accomplished with respect to human-animal relationships.4 However, these relationships concern, for the most part, ‘self’/‘nonself’ debates at the macro-level.5 Like Feynman, I want to think small – I am interested in the human-bacterial relationship, which I argue provides perhaps the most forceful arguments for Diprose’s challenge to ‘self’/‘nonself’ models.6 In so doing, I hope to contribute to Maureen O’Malley and John Dupré’s recent call for a ‘more inclusive philosophy of biology’ that pays attention to the micro-level of life.7 O’Malley and Dupré presciently argue that attention to microbes ‘will transform some of the philosophy of biology’s standard ideas on ontology, evolution, taxonomy and biodiversity.’8 To this end, I will argue that microbes render the human ‘self’/ ‘nonself’ distinction partial at best, suggesting the efficacy of drawing upon biological theories and evidence to further consider philosophical debates about selfhood. I will conclude with some thoughts on how a theory of corporeal generosity might contribute to ongoing efforts to theorize the social, for instance in Levinas and Derrida’s encounters with the Other as an ‘ethical moment par excellence’, a conversation I revisit in Chapter 7.9

Corporeal gifting, or the economic self The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, provides the outline for contemporary debates concerned with the constitution and limits of gifting as a fundamental cross-cultural practice.10 Mauss begins by outlining the explicit features of gifting as the free, voluntary giving of resources without any expectation of return. However, Mauss

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centrally argues that this fundamentally misconstrues the life of the gift: gifts are given only upon the requirement of obligatory return. As Mary Douglas writes ‘there are no free gifts; gift cycles engage persons in permanent commitments that articulate the dominant institutions’.11 Mauss argues that the purpose of gifting is to build ongoing connections of obligation and reciprocity between individuals and communities. Drawing upon several anthropological studies, Mauss identifies gifting as a universal feature of organized societies, between all members of society, and entailing a wide range of property, wealth, movable and immovable goods and services, and individuals. And yet these material gifts to a certain extent mask the central commodity of exchange, which consists of an individual or community’s soul (selfhood, autonomy): ‘in this system of ideas one clearly and logically realizes that one must give back to another person what is really part and parcel of his [sic] nature and substance, because to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul.’12 In short, gifting defines a two-fold obligation: the obligation to give, and the obligation to receive in a continuous process the function of which is to secure the cohesion of the social. This cyclical, continuous process suggests a particular relation of ownership between any individual and gifted objects. Specifically, because a gift received must be continually returned, ownership can only be partial and temporary: it is ‘a pledge and something hired out…and at the same time deposited, mandated, and bequeathed in order to be passed on to another. For it is only given to you on condition that you make use of it for another or pass it on to a third person, the “distant partner.”’13 Moreover, since we do not return to the giver the gift that s/he gives, we must estimate the value of the gift (the soul of the giver) in both passing on this gift, and returning another. Finally, the process of gifting is its own purpose, insofar as it is the process itself that is important, rather than the outcomes (which themselves only occur as corollaries of the process). And as long as the obligations to give and receive are met (and the obligation to do so is sufficiently strong as to obviate nonparticipation), there is a sense in which, beyond the obligation to reciprocate, gifting entails the potential for unanticipated consequences, outcomes that are produced from the process itself. The Gift has incited the critical imagination of a number of scholars who variously critique or extend Mauss’s characterization. For instance, Morna Joy points out that Mauss’s interpretation bears little relation to the anthropological ethnographies he cites, which are already distortions

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based on Western cultural and colonial perspectives.14 Nigel Clark notes that Western interpretations tend to emphasize gifting as a closed economic system in which objects are resources that circulate without excess; in which, in Alphonso Lingis’s terms ‘what goes around comes around’ and ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’.15 As such, Clark notes that setting the terms of gifting within an economic paradigm effects a mobilization of emphasis on the negative, destructive aspects of gifting, which creates what Diprose refers to as ‘a parsimonious relation to the world’.16 Lingis, Diprose and Clark challenge this economy-driven focus on gifting as a closed system in which calculable commodities are exchanged in an effort to maximize power. Lingis argues ‘a gift is truly a gift only to the extent that… there is an element of impetuousness, reckless-ness in it’.17 For this reason, Jacques Derrida argues that giving is impossible since a gift is recognized as such and becomes a commodity, thus bestowing a debt on the recipient.18 As such, a gift is only possible if it goes unrecognized and if the giver and receiver both forget the gift.19 Diprose’s concept of ‘corporeal generosity’ takes up the notion of the gift as debt. She wants to draw attention to the debt that a body owes to other bodies, reminding us that every life is dependent upon a whole range of openings to other lives. For Diprose the corporeal gift is generous in as much as it is the ‘nonvolitional, intercorporeal production of identity and difference that precedes and exceeds both contractual relations between individuals and the practices of self-transformation’.20 Corporeal gifting, between bodies (human or otherwise) and within bodies, thus engages an open, undetermined play of forces, a ‘network of unknowable and immeasurable outcomes’.21 This adaptation of gifting theory retains a number of key ideas from Mauss’s original theory, such as the conviction that gifting involves the obligatory giving of our selves, that the processes take precedent over outcomes,22 and that the outcomes themselves can neither be anticipated nor calculated. As such, Diprose, Clark and Derrida refer to gifting as a violent act insofar as it involves a radical opening up to unknowable events and outcomes. That is, generosity carries with it the potential threat of harm through unanticipated possibilities.23 A number of scholars have extended the gifting literature beyond human-human interactions, to argue for the sort of corporeal generosity of which Diprose writes. In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway makes a deep kinship claim between animals (dogs) and humans predicated on ‘multidirectional flows of bodies and values’.24 Kara Kendall provides a close reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s human-dog/Other relation that, she

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argues, complicates Levinas’s traditionally read humanism.25 Describing relations between humans and other animals, Clark argues that ‘to enter into a close relationship with another species is not to enter a circle of calculable effects of equivalent exchanges, but to open a network of unknowable and immeasurable outcomes’.26 These relationships are at once foreign and familiar: on one hand ‘our very identities as individuated or discernibly different beings arises out of exchanges with those who differ from us’ (7); on the other hand, corporeal generosity ensures that there is something definitively familiar in the relationship, in the ‘letting go of customary precautions and boundary maintenance on the part of each participating being’ (8). And further, this corporeal generosity effects bodily transformations that are neither anticipated nor intended. With Robert Wilson’s observation that ‘our paradigm for an individual is a human being’, I want to both extend and bring closer to home these readings of corporeal generosity by focusing on bacteria and their symbiotic relations within human bodies.27 Residing inside the body (but not contained by it), bacteria-human relations do not enjoy the attention of animal-human companions, but are nonetheless crucial to the survival of humans. As such, O’Malley and Dupré argue that the major focus on macroorganisms such as animals actually ‘distorts our philosophical view of the biological world’.28 In order to make this argument, I first turn to the human immunology literature which specifically addresses the ‘self’/‘nonself’ relation at the biological level.

The biological self The self model has enjoyed a long history in evolutionary theory. ‘Individuality’ notes Scott Gilbert, ‘was assumed by evolutionary biology, and it was not a problem to be solved’.29 Distinguishing between germ and soma lines, Weismann’s theory of ‘genetic individuality’ defined the organism at three different levels: genetic (the assumption that each individual has one genotype), embryonic (how parts become a single whole) and organism as a whole (individual entities that compete).30 Frank Burnet’s definition of immunity – ‘any element which is foreign (nonself) to an organism will trigger an immune reaction if introduced to it, whereas endogenous elements (self) do not, in normal circumstances, induce an immune reaction’ – characterized immunological individualism.31 That is, Burnet’s self/nonself model offered a way of understanding biological relations between organisms while

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simultaneously maintaining the organism sui generis. The immune self that emerged in the biological literature ‘expressed… the… image of competitive struggle between organisms and infectious agents (such as bacteria and viruses); and intentional acts of identification – particularly of “recognition” of the foreign – underlie the division and relation between self and nonself’, effecting what Diprose describes as a ‘parsimonious relation’ with respect to bacteria and the human body.32 For instance, referring to this approach, Tauber notes that ‘antibodies were first described in the context of repelling pathogenic invaders or neutralizing their toxins’.33 This agential cut – bacteria as distinctly separate and constantly threatening to devastate the integrity of the (human) self – has animated the logic of immunology for decades. It is not the only possible agential cut, however, and I am interested in emerging formulations that suggest symbiotic and co-evolutionary understandings of self. Indeed, with regard to microbiota, the immunological literature suggests selfhood in more-than predation terms; in other words, the interface between an organism’s exogenous and endogenous boundaries constitutes the (unpredictable) excess of selfhood. Taking ingestion as an example, Crist and Tauber argue that: the nutritive act enables the continued existence of the living entity; yet it also places the organism in jeopardy, for to engulf a foreign entity is potentially a dangerous, even lethal, action. The typical outcome of the amoeba-bacterium encounter is the disintegration of the bacterium by digestion.34 The rub, that an activity necessary to life (ingestion) may also lead to such a catastrophic ending (death of the self) is the one most often assumed to characterize relations between humans and microorganisms – predation.35 Yet, Crist and Tauber note ‘another possible twist to the story’ which anticipates my argument, that the bacterium (although it would more accurately be an already entangled community of bacteria with complex genomic lineage) may develop the ability to resist being digested, and indeed, may further develop the ability to live within the organism, thus developing a sort of ‘truce rather than war’.36 Again resembling the philosophical literature’s discussion of gifting relationships between people and their excess, the authors characterize microbiotic and animal relationships as ‘a tense proximity between self and nonself’; a characterization that fits well with symbiosis and symbiogenesis.37

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To start, Pradeu and Carosella identify a number of circumstances in which the traditional immunity model does not hold, such as the body’s tolerance of bacteria, parasites, skin grafts (from identical twins), foetomaternal tolerance and chimerism.38 These phenomena, events if you will, are social – they depend upon complex ongoing intra-actions – and invoke different senses of self, since skin grafting between identical twins is tolerated and immunity is acquired rather than innate.39 On this latter point, it turns out that immunity is co-extensive with microbes that are inherited both vertically and horizontally. In a comprehensive review of the development of microbiological research on interspecies epigenesis, Scott Gilbert notes that ‘microbes direct the development’ of immune responses by the lymphocytes in our lymph nodes.40 Bacteria also activate genes that produce generalized defensive substances. For example, the expression of the enzyme matrilysin used to digest proteins and kill harmful bacteria is induced by the bacteria themselves.41 Co-evolved microbiota also induce genes associated with mucosal immunity. Here the body responds ‘to overtures made by the specific co-evolved community’ which includes the differentiation between resident microbiota and ‘tourist’ bacteria passing through the body.42 Accumulating evidence also suggests that allergies, asthma and inflammatory bowel disease may be due in part by the lack of normal development between indigenous microbiota and body tissues.43 In short, and as Chapter 3 noted, organismal development is predicated upon symbioses: ‘all development is co-development’ as McFall-Ngai concludes.44 Whereas evolutionary theory has traditionally focused on ‘isolating mechanisms’ through which cells differentiate into individuals, symbiosis entails ‘the formation of associations, that is, the breakdown of genetic, physiological and spatial isolation between organisms’.45 Species mergence rather than differentiation best characterizes evolution produced through symbiogenesis.46 Thus, human immunology embodies a history of bacterial origins. All eukaryotic cells are heterogenomic (their genomes have more than a single type of ancestor). That is, eukaryotic cells are communities rather than individual entities. Of all the cells in a human body, 10 percent are eukaryotic (derived from bacteria) and 90 percent are bacteria.47 As Sagan notes ‘the human body…is an architectonic compilation of millions of agencies of chimerical cells’.48 For Lewis Thomas, any definition of Homo sapiens must take into account the ‘provisional configuration of elements… [A] good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts’.49

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Symbionts all the way down means that we are, ancestrally, made up of bacteria. It also means that any given human body is also a symbiont: 600 species of bacteria in our mouths and 400 species of bacteria in our guts, and the countless more bacteria that inhabit our eyes, anuses, and skin. Indeed, the number of bacteria in our mouths is comparable to the total number of human beings that have ever lived on earth.50 The number of microbes in our bodies exceeds the number of cells in our bodies by 100 fold. The human distal gut contains more than 100 times as many genes as our human genome (which has 2.85 billion base pairs). That is: ‘… human animals live in symbiosis with thousands of species of anaerobic bacteria, six hundred species in our mouths, which neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies, four hundred species in our intestines, without which we could not digest and absorb the food we ingest’. The number of microbes that colonize our bodies exceeds the number of cells in our bodies by up to a hundredfold.51 Every living thing that exists now, or has ever lived, is a bacterium.52 Asking what bacteria have to do with humans is, in Gould’s terms, asking the wrong question, or as Cary Wolfe puts it referring to humanism, ‘the “human” that we know now, is not now, and never was, itself’.53 The incalculable interactions between bacteria and human guts, mouths, anuses, eyelids and so on certainly exceed traditional closedeconomy, pathogen characterization. Indeed, Kitano and Oda point out that the myriad symbiotic relationships within the human intestines actually function to optimize robustness against pathogen attacks.54 Tauber reminds us that it is the bacteria in our colons that produce vitamin K, an essential co-factor in producing clotting proteins.55 A recent genomic study found that intestinal bacterial flora can manipulate ‘host’ gene expression.56 The study found that the symbiotic relationship works both ways: the ‘host’s’ genotype and immunology reciprocally affect the bacterial flora life. The concentration on competitive individuality, most recently articulated through the genome, has been fruitfully critiqued.57 At cellular and multicellular levels, the continued image of the go-it-alone gene/ organism/human makes little sense. To paraphrase Gilbert, the formation of an ‘individual is actually the formation and continuity of a collegial assemblage of organisms’ (my emphasis). Schneider and Sagan refer to

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selfhood as the ‘stumbling block’ of modern biology insofar as the gene (or perhaps more recently the cell, and at most the organism), is researched as an autonomous entity: ‘Organisms (let alone genes) are not isolated Platonic abstractions, but centres of flux messily interacting in evolving populations. Selfhood, over time, is not stable’.58 Indeed, O’Malley and Dupré argue that prokaryotes cannot be meaningfully studied in isolation, that is, as individual selves. The authors argue that an individual microbe is not the fundamental ontological unit in microbiology – rather the community is the smallest ‘self’.59 Taking on board our growing knowledge of human-bacterial relations, and cognizant of the gifting and immunology literatures, our understanding of humankind as composed of autonomous individuals is partial at best. As symbionts, we are gifted into heterogeneous assemblages unrestricted by sexual reproduction: assemblages proliferated by ‘contamination rather than linear filiation’.60 Assemblages conceive variation in evolution not in terms of the natural selection of individual autonomous organisms struggling through scarcity and propelled by gratification, but as the ever-transitioning networks of relations within already filiated populations.61 Tauber captures the implication: The lesson to be gleaned is not that our body has learned in the course of evolutionary history what is beneficial to it and what is not, but rather that the boundaries of self and nonself become individually tailored and may be blurred. What is becoming increasingly evident is that the immune system ignores much of what it sees. It allows the organism to engage its environment…: the self/nonself border is ever-changing (590). Molecular biology, notes Scott Gilbert, shows that animal-bacterial co-evolution is the rule not exception.62 And Doolittle argues that within-species genomic variation cannot be explained by intense hostparasite conflict, but rather as evidence of the hitherto unimagined diversity of microbial life, a point I will return to later.63 Following the path of some symbiotic relationships that begin as microbial parasites and go on to form long-term relationships, Van Loon argues ‘communities are formed on the basis of endemic parasitism’64: as we have already seen Van Loon argues ‘the more aggressive and virulent a virus, the more it will rely on cultural vectors for its survival.’65 This resembles the kind of actant relations I am interested in. As vectors of symbiosis, viruses are not dysfunctional, but rather an

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integral part of the synthesizing process of life.66 Van Loon argues that parasite politics figures a particular ethical relation to otherness. Van Loon characterizes viruses as (poisonous) gifts insofar as infection consists of the ‘flow of pathogen information between hosts’.67 ‘The “gift” of infection’ writes Van Loon ‘is an event whose consequences are ambivalent, contingent and open and hence socially and sociologically significant…immunity of populations [is] an inherently social phenomenon.’68 Phenomena such as parasitism, infection and tolerance suggest the interface between an organism’s outside (exogenous) and inside (endogenous) boundaries constitutes the (unpredictable) excess of selfhood. Julie Theriot’s research, and advances in immunology generally, bespeak of this corporeal generosity: ‘disease… is becoming intimate with the cells of our body’, or as Haraway writes, ‘disease is a relationship’.69 Indeed, cells actively work with bacteria. As such, ‘disease usually results from inconclusive negotiations for symbiosis, an overstepping of the line by one side or the other, a biological misinterpretation of borders’.70 To summarize, then, we might say that there is contagion, pathogenicity, and parasitism at work in the organism, but that it is a rather more complicated relationship than we tend to assume. Contagion is co-implicated: it signifies as much debility and death as it does the possibility of flourishing. As such, bacterial gifting, especially in symbiotic form, is certainly excessive to traditional economic paradigms that require autonomous uncorrupted invidualism. Furthermore, failed digestion – symbiogenesis – defines not only an epistemology (symbionts all the way down) but an ontology of primordial entanglement. While an extended discussion of a symbiogenetic approach to environments occupies Chapter 6, it is worth noting here Margulis’s adoption of Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis.71 Autopoiesis refers to the ‘autonomous organization of dynamic processes occurring within a closed operational whole’.72 Initially deployed in tandem with James Lovelock’s term ‘geophysiology’ to describe Gaia’s biospheric selfregulation, Margulis adapted autopoiesis – self-making – to describe life as other-than replication. That is, Margulis argues that autopoiesis, not vertical inheritance, defines life. In two main texts, Autopoiesis and Cognition and The Tree of Knowledge, Maturana and Varela developed autopoiesis in response to the epistemological problem of representation.73 For Maturana and Varela, ‘everything said is said by an observer’.74 There may be a reality ‘out there’, but it exists ‘only through interactive processes determined solely by the organism’s own organization’.75 In other

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words, the organism’s own autopoietic organization ‘brings forth a world’: ‘the living organization is a circular organization which secures the production or maintenance of the components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their functioning is the very same organization that produces them’.76 Organisms interact with their environments through ‘structural couplings’ that take place in the present: ‘past, future and time exist only for the observer’ (x, 18). What clearly appeals to Margulis in her formulation of symbiogenesis theory is the absence of replication as life’s defining teleology. ‘A living system’ write Maturana and Varela ‘is not a goal-directed system: It is, like the nervous system, a stable state-determined and strictly deterministic system closed on itself and modulated by interactions not specified by its conduct’ (50).77 Gaia, for Margulis, is autopoietic insofar as it is a system that produces the components that produce its own organization. Maturana and Varela developed the term ‘allopoietic’ to recognize the way that systems work within systems such that the smaller system (such as a cell) contained within the larger system (such as an organism) functions are subordinated to the goals of the larger system.78 As Chapter 7 will detail, one of the objections that evolutionary theorists make to Gaia theory is that it characterizes the biosphere as a kind of evolved superorganism, which, evolutionary theorists argue, is impossible since evolution would require the planet to have evolved within an environment shared by at least one other living planet. My own concern with autopoiesis is that although I chorus Margulis’s extraction of life from the teleology of replication (life simply has, in Dawkins’s terms, too many ‘misfirings’), autopoiesis paradoxically undermines symbiosis and symbiogenesis, both of which pivot on a contagic rather than autonomous self: to wit, the bacterial symbionts in what we term the human body. As we have seen, each human body is a product of symbiogenetic mergers (countless bacterial and viral mergers) and symbioses with diverse kinds and uncalculable numbers of bacteria in our mouths, anuses, guts and so on. Without the bacteria in our guts, our digestion is severely compromised, inviting questions about the autonomy of the human body. We might say that the bacteria are allopoietic within the autopoietic human body, but this seems distinctly ‘big like us’. ‘Autopoietic machines’, write Maturana and Varela, ‘have individuality; that is, by keeping their organization as an invariant through its continuous production they actively maintain an identity which is independent of their interactions with an observer’.79 As Hayles points out, for autopoiesis theory, a system’s boundary disintegration is

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equivalent to death: put another way, ‘closure and recursivity…play a foundational role in autopoietic theory’.80 By contrast, boundary disintegration is integral to symbiogenesis. It is what accounts for dramatic symbiogenetic transformation. Hayles’s insightful critique reveals another dilemma concerning the conservation of autopoiesis/organization on the one hand, and transformation on the other. Considering the comparison of an amoeba and a human, Hayles writes: ‘either an amoeba and a human have the same organization, which would make them members of the same class, in which case evolutionary lineages disappear because all living systems have the same organization; or, else an amoeba and a human have different organizations, in which case organization – and hence autopoiesis – must not have been conserved somewhere (or in many places) along the line’.81

Symbiotic generosity Is it possible to understand gifting outside of the zero-sum game of economic theory? Through the analogy of the ‘biological self’ and the ‘economic self’, I have argued in this chapter that the human body, far from exemplifying individuality, is an excellent illustration of the corporeal generosity of gifting. Gifting involves the literal and metaphoric giving of our selves. We are more materially immersed in the lived (and unlived in the case of DNA, bacteria, viruses, dust and so on) bodies of others’ identities than we typically think, and we are certainly more immersed than contemporary economic exchange theory allows.82 What we give we never entirely own; possession is only ever partial and temporary. The value of any gift is always estimated, and depends entirely upon whether or not, and on what terms, gifts are acknowledged. Indeed, from a material perspective, it is virtually impossible to calculate the debts our bodies owe – we circulate nucleic and mitochondrial DNA, blood, nutrients, flesh, antibodies, pathogens, microbes, bacteria and viruses in a process that is constitutive of life (as replication and process) itself. Corporeal generosity escapes neoliberal notions of a closed economy, and reminds us that, whatever cultural notions of autonomy and free will to which we might aspire, we are all corporeally inter-dependent. The necessary symbiotic relationships and their constant gifting invites fundamental questions about the individual autonomy of all people specifically, and living and nonliving matter more generally. That is, we are not autonomous individuals who subsequently interact: we intra-act, gifting things calculable and incalculable, and this ongoing

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process creates something that we call individuality, to be re-created with every encounter. Tauber draws attention to the paucity of our (human) language to grasp the self concept at the microbial level: ‘the self is neither subject nor object, but is actualized in action; the self becomes in this view, a subjectless verb’.83 Insofar as Western societies are dependent upon a notion of freedom prior to constraint, and in as much as the human body is ‘assumed as clearly and cleanly demarcated from others’, then human biology will continue to uncover uncomfortable anomalies to human subjectivity.84 In a critique of Nikolas Rose’s analysis of ‘life itself’, Bruce Braun argues that biopolitics is recoding molecular life as inherently unpredictable and wayward.85 In chorus with the traditional pathogenic approach to bacteria, new ‘emerging infectious disease’ discourses characterize the human body as ‘radically open to the world, thrown into the flux of an inherently mutable molecular life where reassortment is not what we control, but what we fear.’86 By bringing together gifting theory and critiques of selfhood emerging from biology, I have tried to provide some balance to this familiar yet heightened rendition of humanity’s relationship with its world by an exploration of bacterial symbiogenesis. By focusing on socio-cultural aspects alone, we risk not recognizing just how corporeal our gifting (and the gifting of others), and thus the transformative process, actually is. Indeed, I argue this very corporeal gifting materially enables the transformative process in the first place. While Diprose focuses her discussion on relationships between people, gifting also takes place within and between bodies (between microorganisms, bacteria, viruses and so on). Recognition of this corporeal gifting enables further exploration of this distinctly corporeally generous notion of self. There are a number of spaces within which corporeal gifting might be explored. For instance, a material notion of becoming as corporeal gifting may usefully connect the concept of selfhood to the ethical projects outlined in Levinas, Derrida, Caputo and Esposito’s philosophical works on friendship and community.87 From the root munus meaning obligation, office and gift, Esposito notes that immunitas refers to someone who is or becomes autonomous.88 Esposito argues for a nonimmunized life, insofar as civil and political rights are attempts to attain immunity from society. Timothy Campbell’s introduction to Esposito’s work notes the importance of symbiosis for thinking about community: some forms of immunity do not necessarily close off access to an authentically political form of life. Indeed, reading the immunitary

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system as only self-destructive fails to see other interpretive perspectives in which immunity doesn’t protect by attacking an authentic bios grounded in a common munus, but rather augments its members’ capacity to interact with their environment, so that community can actually be fortified by immunity.89 This in itself does not dictate the political intent of any given community. Nazi Germany, notes Esposito, likened Jews to microbes.90 Resonating with the arguments made throughout this paper, JeanLuc Nancy argues that ‘Being cannot be anything but being-with-oneanother, circulating in the with as the with of this singularly plural coexistence’.91 Nick Bingham distinguishes Nancy’s ‘being with’ on two points: first ‘it is concerned with what is always a multitude of others rather than a singular other…and second…it is radically nonathropocentric’.92 Levinas and Derrida contemplate this ‘being with’ relation between humans and nonhumans in terms of an ‘other friendship’. John Caputo describes Derrida’s question thus: ‘Is there a gift of friendship outside or beyond the economy of equality and reciprocity that we have always demanded of friendship?… To what extent is the main Western canon on friendship itself already disturbed and interrupted from within by an understanding, or at least an intimation, of this other friendship’?93 For Bingham, this ‘other friendship’ is not characterized by what is linked together (humans and bacteria for instance) but rather by ‘a certain quality of being open to and with others’ – a violent openness as Derrida and Diprose remind us.94 In other words, we push our concept of ethics to the limit when we extend our unconditional hospitality to the radical nonhuman Other – the ‘other friend’. I return to these questions in the final chapter.

5 Microontologies of Sex

Not that it really matters whether or not he [sic] ever knows about the vast populations of inorganic life, the ‘thousand tiny sexes’ which are coursing through his veins with a promiscuity of which he cannot conceive. He’s the one who misses out. Fails to adapt. Can’t see the point of his sexuality. Those who believe in their own organic integrity are all too human for the future [to come].1

Barnacle sex In The Origin of Species, Darwin urged scientists to ‘study the oddities of nature’. Perhaps Darwin had in mind Anelasma ibla or any other of the sub-class of cirripeds he studied in his exhaustive attempt to understand the structures and processes of nature. Darwin’s ‘barnacle work’ took years to accomplish, involved international correspondence with scientists and naturalists, and the dissection of hundreds of specimens. I am instructed by Elizabeth Wilson’s fine analysis of Darwin’s research on barnacles.2 Through dissection, Darwin discovered that most species of barnacles are what we would now term intersex: each barnacle has both female and male organs. Other barnacles first appeared to be sex dimorphic, but closer inspection led to an interesting discovery. What Darwin initially discarded as tiny barnacle-infesting parasites actually turned out to be male barnacles. Completely different in bodily shape and microscopically small, the male barnacles live, embedded, inside the body of the female. This is not ‘simply’ the case of one sex living inside the other; multiple (sometimes thousands) of males live inside single females. So barnacles can be intersex but they can also be something else – something we do not yet have a common term for. 91

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Wilson points out that ‘these females and hermaphrodites with many husbands are not simply the intermediary stages in the evolution of barnacle form; they are also evidence of the somatic diversity that nature produces’ (284). From a human perspective, barnacle sex and reproduction seem peculiar indeed. A perusal of the social scientific literature suggests that gender, sex, reproduction, replication, sexual difference and mixis are defined from an entirely ‘big like us’ vantage point. What might we learn from thinking about sex, reproduction, sexuality and sexual difference as the majority of the earth’s biota practice these processes? Sharon Kinsman presciently asks: Because most of us are not familiar with the species, and with the diverse patterns of DNA mixing and reproduction they embody, our struggles to understand humans (and especially human dilemmas about ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘sexual orientation’) are impoverished… Shouldn’t a fish whose gonads can be first male, then female, help us to determine what constitutes ‘male’ and ‘female’? Should an aphid fundatrix (‘stem mother’) inform our ideas about ‘mother’? There on the rose bush, she neatly copies herself, depositing minuscule, sapsiphoning, genetically identical daughters. Aphids might lead us to ask not ‘why do they clone?’ but ‘why don’t we?’ Shouldn’t the longterm female homosexual pair bonding in certain species of gulls help define our views of successful parenting, and help [us] reflect on the intersection of social norms and biology?3 The variety of animal, plant, fungal and protoctist sex and reproduction that Kinsman refers to is diverse indeed: slime molds can produce more than 500 different kinds of sex cells; the average male blanket octopus is 2.5 centimeters long compared with his 1.8 meter and 40,000 times heavier female mate; green spoon worm larva become female in the absence of other female spoon worms; male angler fish attach to female bodies where they degenerate until their death; male seahorses fertilize eggs inside their bodies where they are gestated until birth; gray whale mating rituals involve two males and one female; mangrove fish have ovo-testes and fertilize themselves; male slipper limpets become female as they mature; star-shaped sea squirts meet on the ocean floor and send cells (including DNA) to each other through the blood supply they come to share; some kinds of whiptail lizards are all female, hatching unfertilized eggs that produce more females; female bronze-winged jacanas mate with up to four males and the males

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build nests, incubate the eggs and feed the chicks when they hatch; male sticklebacks also care for their fertilized eggs and offspring until they are independent; male Darwin frogs keep their tadpoles inside their vocal sacs until they develop into froglets; naked mole rat daughters help their queen mother stay infertile by smearing her with their urine; a hatchling turtle’s sex depends on its temperature while it was in the egg; and leopard slugs are intergender (female and male) but fertilize each other’s eggs.4 With Kinsman, I want to attend to the diversity of sex, gender, reproduction, sexuality and sexual difference within the kingdoms Animalia, Plantae, Fungi and Protoctista. But I also want to appreciate these issues from the perspective of Monera, a vast assemblage of organisms rarely included in discussions of the evolution and current practices of sex. We know especially little about bacterial sex and reproduction: yet within Monera, diversity meets its biological and human imaginative limits.

Post-mature discoveries and evolutionary theory’s problem The kind of generation of offspring with which humans are most familiar, mixis, has been studied since the end of the nineteenth century, by botanists studying plant fertilization and zoologists studying the fertilization of eggs with sperm. For Zuckerman and Lederberg, humans’ discovery of bacterial sex was ‘post-mature’. Scientists were surprised that it was not discovered earlier since: (1) the techniques used were available; (2) it was understandable at the time; and (3) its implications must have been capable of having been appreciated.5 That discoveries can be postmature necessarily speaks of the context of assumptions, beliefs and values in which the questions answered by the discovery are not viewed as important or relevant. ‘Why’, ask Zuckerman and Lederberg, ‘was recombination in bacteria not perceived as a problem before 1946?’6 Part of the answer lies in the fact that bacteria were first assumed to be tiny primitive plants: Ferdinand Cohen called them Schizomycetes or ‘fission fungi’. Humans also find bacteria to be difficult experimental subjects: we might say, after Haraway, that the laboratory is not a setting within which we ‘meet well’ with bacteria. Observations of bacteria require humans to adopt the prosthetic aid of a microscope, and bacteria act differently in laboratory conditions than elsewhere: they are different actants in relation to the microscope, as Latour might say. Additionally, humans have traditionally conceived of bacteria as pathogens, of little interest and importance otherwise. Thus, it was not until March 1946 that Tatum and Lederberg observed sex in E. coli.

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These first inauspicious meetings have had unexpected yet significant material and rhetorical effects. First and foremost, our attention has been focused on sexually reproducing species, and further, on identifying gender differences within species. For instance, Carl von Linné, the ‘father of taxonomy’, based his classification scheme on what he understood at the time to be gender differences between plants (of course, he did not use this term). The famous Linnean Systema Naturae was widely adopted and provided the blueprint for further animal and plant taxonomies, well into the twentieth century.7 Social scientists, and feminist scholars in particular, are well aware that gender difference comprises one of the major axes (along with race, ethnicity, social class, age and disability) that humans use to make intra-differentiations amongst humans. Indeed, in public discourse, (some) women’s ability to produce offspring through sexual reproduction has long counted as one of the most obvious signifiers of gender difference. Whatever social, political and economic changes might take place to alter women’s position in society, sexual reproduction is seen as both immutable ‘fact’ and cause of structural differences between women and men. Of the almost countless references to female ‘materiality’ as sexual reproduction, my training as a sociologist secures Emile Durkheim’s rendition as a particularly sharp thorn in my side. He writes, ‘…society is less necessary to her because she is less impregnated with sociability…Man is actively involved in it whilst woman does little more than look on from a distance’.8 Not only does Durkheim remind his readers that it is female bodies that can be (passively) impregnated, but this impregnation is limited to fleshy materiality (babies). If male bodies are (actively) impregnated, it is with decidedly nonmaterial sociality.9 It is within this social, political and historical context that the recognition that uniparentally reproducing organisms have an evolutionary advantage over sexually reproducing organisms became what is known as the defining problem of evolutionary theory. John Maynard Smith referred to sexual selection as one of the ‘greatest challenges in evolutionary theory’, Darwin wrote The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex concerned with sexual selection, Ernst Mayr deliberated on the relative evolutionary merits of uniparental versus sexual reproduction and so on.10 After an extensive search of the biological literature on sex, Mackay concluded: The most intriguing aspect of my research was why we have sex at all. After all, sexual reproduction in animals started only 300 million years ago. Life on earth got on pretty well for 3000 million years

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before that with uniparental reproduction… [Sexual reproduction] takes more time, it uses more energy, and mates may be scarce or uncooperative.11 Sexual reproduction is a problem for the modern synthesis because its starting point is the production of offspring – those selfish genes determined to replicate themselves – characterized as a cost-benefit relation in the context of individual competition.12 According to evolutionary theory, sexual reproduction requires greater energy and time investment and is risky because it may cause injury and/or death, and it may not be successful. Maynard Smith describes a ‘two-fold cost’ of sex whereby uniparental individuals avoid producing costly males and overproduce females. Organisms that produce uniparentally are viewed, from this perspective, as having greater survival potential because they produce more offspring (typically in less time, using less energy, and with greater success defined as producing more live offspring). This affects an apparent disjuncture between the ‘better’ adaptation of uniparentally reproducing organisms and the classification of sexually reproducing species as ‘more complex’, ‘higher’ and so on. NeoDarwinism explains this disjuncture by proposing a number of benefits to sexual reproduction, including greater genetic novelty through the recombination of two heritable genomes, greater ability to evade parasites, eliminate deleterious mutations, and promote adaptations to new environments.13 These factors all increase organisms’ ‘per locus heterozygosity’, which means that the greater genetic variation of any given allele the better its chances of withstanding environmental change. Sexual reproduction, in other words, is an out-crossing mechanism that increases hybrid vigor. Sexual reproduction, according to this theory, functions to increase heritable variance, thereby accelerating evolution. However, we would actually expect increased additive genetic variance to slow down evolution: ‘if the immense genetic variation of natural populations is maintained by selection, then sex must represent an advantage because it slows down evolution’.14 So, implicitly, organisms that reproduce sexually (significantly including animals) turn out to be superior after all. Margulis and Sagan are more acerbic, calling this rhetorical maneuver ‘bio-economic “just so” stories that rationalize the existence of present-day life forms and their adaptations by thinly veiled comparisons with the profit motive’.15 Symbiogenesis theory presents an entirely different theory about contemporary forms of sex and reproduction. Its central argument is that sex arrived late on the evolutionary scene, as an effect of various

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symbiogenetic mergers and niche constructions. From this perspective, the kind of sex practiced by some animals (including humans) is a result of the failure of organisms to exchange DNA through other means. As such, sexual reproduction is an outcome of contingent circumstances rather than evidence of greater ‘complexity’ or hybrid vigor. In order to examine the details of this argument, we first need a nonzoocentric – moneric if you will – glossary of terms.

An/Other glossary Sex is ‘any process that recombines genes (DNA) in an individual cell or organism from more than a single source…sex may occur at the nucleic acid, nuclear, cytoplasmic, and other levels’.16 Many processes besides sex alter the structure of DNA or add DNA to produce variation, such as cosmic irradiation, virus and symbiont acquisition and exposure to ambient chemicals.17 ‘Big Like Us’ creatures find this definition challenging: while sex produces genetically new individuals, sex does not need to (nor does it typically for most organisms) produce an increase in the total number of individuals. Sex recombines DNA. There are countless examples of organisms that give and/or share DNA without producing a new individual. For instance, here is a picture of the

Figure 5.1 Trichonympha. A hypermastigote engaged in sex. Image produced by Dorion Sagan. Image is a still from L.R. Cleveland’s 1963 film, ‘Sexuality and other Features of the Flagellates of Cryptocersus’.

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hypermastigote Trichonympha (a uninucleate multiflagellate organism that lives symbiotically in termite and wood-eating cockroach guts) engaging in sex. Reproduction is ‘the process that augments the number of cells or organisms’.18 In other words, reproduction, not sex, increases the number of cells or organisms. As Margulis puts it ‘molecules, cells, organisms, even communities…reproduce’.19 We find in nature many examples of sex without reproduction, and reproduction without sex. Moreover, reproduction occurs both horizontally and vertically. As Margulis and Sagan observe: Our own biologically parochial existence as sexually reproducing beings does not mean…that there is only copulatory, genital-based sex or that sex has anything necessarily to do with reproduction ….Sex is not equivalent to reproduction. On the one hand, any organism can receive new genes – can indulge in sex – without reproducing itself. On the other hand, plants bud, bacteria divide and cells with nuclei reproduce all without any requirement for sex.20 Human bodies are constantly engaged in the reproduction of cells as a condition of living. For instance, we reproduce our own livers every two months, our stomach linings every five days, new skin every six weeks, and 98 percent of our atoms every year (ibid). Oyama refers to this ‘mobile exchange’ of genetic, intra- and extra-cellular and environmental influences as a ‘choreography of ontogeny’.21 As an illustration of the difference between sex and reproduction, recall the Acrasia cellular slime mold discussed in Chapter 4:

Figure 5.2 Drawing of an Acrasia Cellular Slime Mold. Image courtesy of Anthony Krivan

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When starved of nutrients, hundreds of individual cells living independently, react to a chemical signal (a gender difference) and fuse. These cells unite to form ‘slugs’ that can be seen by the (nonmicroscopeaided) eye. Acrasia do not reproduce because there is no increase in the number of live individuals (indeed, there is a decrease). Nevertheless, the ‘slug’ is a product of a sexual event among multiple parents.22 As Nick Lane puts it, slime molds ‘have more than two sexes, while maintaining uniparental inheritance’.23 Thus, we can think in terms of various levels of sexual union: Table 5.1 Margulis

Levels of Sexual (and Para-Sexual) Unions. Table courtesy of Lynn

Levels of Sexual (and Para-Sexual) Unions What Level?

What Units?

Example

Genophoric (bacteria)

DNA recombines: small and large replicons: integration into partner’s DNA

bacteriophage (bacterial virus) enters an E. coli

Chromosomal

Crossing over

female drosophila DNA (eukaryotes) crossovers

Nuclear

Fusion of nuclei: Karyogamy

Paramecia or Formaniferi nuclei

Cellular

Cytoplasm fusion: syngamy, fertilization

Animal sperm fertilizes egg

Histological (para-sexual) fusion

Transplantation of isolated tissues, organs or blood

Skin grafts, scion plant grafts, organ transplants

Organismal

Fusion of entire organisms, mating, conjugation, gamontogamy

Geosciphon pyriforme, larval hybridizat

In evolutionary time, symbiogenesis is a form of reproduction in which new organisms are created without meiotic sex. In the case of the symbiogenetic merger of mitochondria and chloroplastids with nucleated cells, 1 (mitochrondria) + 1 (chroloplast) + 1 (nucleated cell) = 1 (new kind of organism). For Mixotricha paradoxa, 1 (insect) + 1000s (protists) + 1000s (bacteria) = 1 Mastotermes darwiniensis. Mitosis is ‘cell division…consisting of a doubling of chromosomes followed by their segregation and deployment to offspring cells’ as illustrated in this image of the green algae Actinoastrum.24

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Figure 5.3 Actinoastrum engaged in Reproduction (mitosis). Image courtesy of Lynn Margulis

Mitosis preserves diploid cells (cells with two sets of chromosomes). It is responsible for the creation of all protists (unicellular eukaryotes). Prokaryotes reproduce by binary fission, and plants, fungi and animals grow through mitosis.25 In other words, plants, fungi and animals develop via mitosis. Even the creation of a new human infant is primarily the result of almost countless mitotic cell divisions (resulting in growth). Meiosis is cellular activity whereby diploid cells reduce to haploid (one set of chromosomes, as in eggs and sperm) cells.26 The creation of a new human being requires meiosis followed by fertilization (in which the nucleus of a haploid cell fuses with the nucleus of another haploid cell). Animals, plants, fungi and gendered protoctists today all cycle between the doubled (diploid) state of body cells and the single (haploid) state of gender cells. Meiosis is not exclusive to animals and plants. Protists, for instance, undergo more varieties of meiotic sex than any other kind of organism.27 Mixis refers to the ‘production of a single individual from two parents by way of fertilization occurring at the level of fused cells or individuals’ and can be thought of as a very particular form of reproduction.28 In humans, mixis occurs through meiosis and mitosis. Many organisms practice meiosis without mixis – dandelions for instance.

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Thus, compared with the minimal amount of mixis that some human beings engage in for a very short period of time, each of us engages in recombination (cutting and patching of DNA strands as well as the coming together of cytoplasm, entire cells, parts of organisms and entire organisms), merging (fertilization of cells), meiosis and mitosis. Our human bodies live in a permanently fertilized state, with only our egg and sperm cells qualifying as haploid: the vast majority of our cells are diploid. And 44 of our 46 chromosomes are completely unrelated to what we tend to think of as sexual difference. The only thing that does not exist is a pure (Y or YY) male.29 Donna Haraway highlights a key irony that in biological terms sex precludes reproduction: There is never any reproduction of the individual in sexually reproducing species. Short of cloning…neither parent is continued in the child, who is a randomly reassembled genetic package projected into the next generation. To reproduce does not defeat death any more than killing or other memorable deeds of words. Maternity might be more certain than paternity, but neither secures the self into the future. In short, where there is sex, literal reproduction is a contradiction in terms…Sexual difference founded on compulsory heterosexuality is itself the key technology for the production and perpetuation of western Man and the assurance of this project as a fantastic lie.30 When bacteria incorporate genes from other bacteria and then reproduce, their genes are passed on to their offspring without mixis. In other words, bacteria, not humans, ‘breed true’.31 And lest we remain sanguine about sexual forms of reproduction, we do well to remember, with Haraway, that sexual reproduction brings death to the individual. Since sex refers to the mixing of DNA, we need a term to describe features that bring organisms together to share DNA and/or reproduce: a term that describes mating types. The term I adopt here is gender. Our human tendency to conflate sex and reproduction coupled with our desire to accentuate difference encourages us to concentrate on markers used to designate female and male in humans such as genitals, chromosomes and gonads.32 For nonhumans, gender may well refer to other markers that have nothing to do with genitals, female-to-male attraction, or male-to-female attraction: gender is much more commonly things like H2, slime or hormones. The mushroom Schizophyllum commune has 27,000 genders,

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encoded by ‘incompatibility genes’ that come in many versions (alleles) on different chromosomes. Any given organism inherits one out of over 300 possible alleles on one chromosome, and over 90 on the other chromosome, giving a total of 27,000 possible combinations (300 × 90). Two cells sharing the same allele on either chromosome cannot mate, a way to encourage out-breeding according to evolutionary theory. Even with this biological prohibition, Schizophyllum commune are still able to mate with more than 99 percent of the population. Stentor polymorphous has 58,000 genders. Moreover, many species are composed of more than female and male. Many organisms are able to produce offspring that are both genders, multiple genders or no genders at all, including intersex in animals, monoecism in plants and heterothallism in fungi. For instance, a single fungal spore of a Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeast) may produce its own offspring, which then mate with each other without sexual fusion. Gender can change with the time of day, with temperature and, in the case of Ophryotrocha, organism length. For these reasons, Margulis and Sagan define gender as an epiphenomenon. In sum, living organisms display sex, reproductive and gender diversity. People with intersex conditions display a wide range of genomic gamete configurations: XXY, XXXY, XXXXY, XXYY, XXXYY to name a few. There is also great diversity in nonhuman animal chromosome structures: male birds are homogametic with two Z chromosomes and females are heterogametic with one Z and one W chromosome – thus female birds determine the chromosome configuration of their offspring.33 Some reptile and amphibian species have no sex chromosomes, and the chromosome configuration of offspring is determined by the temperature of egg incubation. The platypus has five X chromosomes and five Y chromosomes. Many species also transgender. David Policansky documents some of the widely distributed geographically and taxonomically genderchanging species.34 Given the selective and reproductive advantages of changing gender, Policansky questions why more species do not change gender, rather than attempting to explain why some species do have this ability. In other words, in some families of fish, transgender is so much the norm that biologists have created a term for those ‘unusual’ fish that do not change gender – gonochoristic. The coral goby, for instance, shifts between female and male depending on environmental circumstances. As further examples, earthworms and marine snails are male when young and female when they grow older. Chaetopod annelids show a similar development, but in certain environmental circumstances will change back into males. For instance, when two females are confined together,

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one female may kill the other female by biting her in half or eating all the available food. When this female has had sex with a male, the male might then turn into a female and bite her in two.35 Researchers have also found transvestism to be widespread amongst nonhuman animals. Sometimes transvestism takes a physical form, when animals physically resemble another gender of their species.36 Transvestism might also be behavioral, when an animal behaves in ways associated with another mating type of their species. Some entomologists, for instance, describe transvestism in various insect species. For instance, the female Papilio phorcas (a type of butterfly) takes on ‘male pattern’ wings of other male butterflies that fly faster and are better able to avoid prey.37 Organismal meetings focused on gender often seem to obscure other meetings-with our environments. For instance, more than 50 synthetic chemicals flow into our bodies daily (including tinned vegetables, cigarettes, chemical detergents, makeup, DDT) and alter our endocrine systems.38 Endocrine-disrupting compounds have been found to be responsible for a recently reported doubling in incidence of hypospadias in the United States and Europe.39 Children are at risk of exposure to over 15,000 high-production-volume synthetic chemicals; most of them developed in the last 50 years. More than half have not yet been tested for toxicity.40 The effects of DDT and DDE have been studied on a diverse range of animals from Tiger Salamanders to Cricket Frogs.41 A number of researchers are interested in the possible causal relationship between exposure in utero to environmental chemicals and effects on human sexual reproduction including gender ratio, disruption of androgen signaling, decreased sperm number and quality, androgen insensitivity, testicular and breast cancer, decreased prostate weight, endometriosis, decreased fertility, increased hypospadias and undescended testes, as well as adverse effects on immune and thyroid function.42 Again, each of these exchanges with the environment may effect variations in gender and fertility without any recourse to sex or mixis. Amongst bacteria, fertilization does not occur and so bacteria have not developed differences associated with gender. One might, indeed, stretch this to say that bacteria defy gender altogether. Yet, it is testament to the pervasiveness of the current paradigm of evolutionary theory that bacteria, practicing sex without reproduction, have not escaped gendering through human classification. Schiebinger shows how the history of the study of bacteria was infused with a priori notions of sex and gender from the outset.43 As we saw earlier, until the 1940s, bacteria were

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assumed to be uniparental. After that time, the ‘sex life’ of bacteria was described in heteronormative terms. Specifically, bacteria were defined as female or male based on the absence or presence (respectively) of a ‘fertility’ or F-factor (females designated F-; males designated F+): To transfer genetic material, the ‘donor’ or ‘male’ extends its sex pili to the ‘recipient’ or ‘female’. Unlike the case in higher organisms, the chromosomal transfer is unidirectional from male to female and the male, not the female, produces offspring. Further when the F+ cell transfers a copy of its F– factor to an F– partner, the recipient becomes male or F+. Because the donor cell replicates its F– factor during conjugation, it too remains F+. Thus all cells in mixed cultures rapidly become male (F+) donor cells: the females change into males, the males remain males, and everyone is happy. A recombinant F– (female) cell results only from a ‘disrupted’ or failed transfer of DNA…. (149–150). Except that gender change within bacterial sex is rampant. All it takes is for the F– factor to be transferred through viral infection, and a bacterium changes from F– to F+ and vice versa. Heat also changes gender in bacteria. Yet, the infusion of heteronomative ideology into analyses of bacteria persisted until the 1990s, decelerating the recognition of bacterial sex without reproduction and reproduction without sex.

Sexual diversity44 Because sex, reproduction and sexuality are so firmly associated in our understanding of the evolutionary basis of behavior, it is worth extending the discussion to sexuality. The diversity of sexual behavior amongst (known) species typically exceeds human normative expectations. This diversity confronts cultural ideas about the family, monogamy, fidelity, parental care, heterosexuality, and perhaps most fundamentally, gender difference. Edward Wilson notes that ‘monogamy, and especially monogamy outside the breeding season, is the rare exception. Parentoffspring bonds usually last only to the weaning period and are then often terminated by a period of conflict’.45 Single parenting, or indeed no parental investment at all, is the norm in the nonhuman living world (only five percent of mammals form life-time heterosexual pair bonds). Nonhuman organisms organize the care of young in diverse ways – what we might recognize as day-care, fostering and adoption. Parents also eat, and have sexual intercourse with their offspring.

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Many animals do not engage in sexual behavior solely or primarily in order to produce offspring. There is a general lack of acknowledgement of pleasure as an organizing force in relations between nonhuman animals. Male house flies remain copulating with female house flies for a full hour after all of its sperm are transferred, despite the fact that this prolonged copulation decreases its ability to sexually reproduce with other flies (and thus produce more offspring).46 Indeed, some insects have sex for an entire day. Animals also derive pleasure through masturbation. For instance, one ethologist recounts the following observation of stags: He may masturbate several times during the day. I have seen a stag do this three times in the morning at approximately hourly intervals, even when he has had a harem of hinds. This act is accomplished by lowering the head and gently drawing the tips of the antlers to and fro through the herbage. Erection and extrusion of the penis…follow in five to seven seconds…Ejaculation follows about five seconds later.47 Female animals engage in sexual intercourse when they are already pregnant. Birth control is not restricted to humans; many animals practice forms of birth control through vaginal plugs, defecation, abortion through the ingestion of certain plants, ejection of sperm and, in the case of chimpanzees, nipple stimulation. Embryos are also known to kill other embryos. Perhaps the single most popular debate about sexual diversity, however, is whether or not homosexual behavior is natural or unnatural. Homosexual behavior is part of our evolutionary heritage: it can be traced back at least 24–37 million years.48 Homosexual behavior occurs in over 450 different species of animals, is found in every geographic region of the world, in every major animal group, in all age groups, and with equal frequency amongst females and males.49 Homosexual behavior in animals is enormously diverse, and in some species is more diverse than heterosexual behavior.50 Like heterosexual pair-bonding, life-time homosexual pair-bonding is not prevalent in mammal species. More than half of mammal and bird species engage in bisexual activities. Nonhuman animal homosexual behavior varies in frequency within and between species from nonexistence (that is, it has not been reported by ethologists) to levels that meet or surpass heterosexual behavior. Whether homosexual behavior is still considered a deviation from the heterosexual norm, there is a list of other sexual behaviors class-

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ified as abnormal that few people question. Sex between different species is one of them. Yet findings are beginning to emerge suggesting that sexual behavior amongst nonhumans is again much more plastic and diverse than human culture recognizes. Sexual behavior between flowers and various insects is so commonplace that it is rarely recognized as transspecies sexual activity. And other examples have been found. For instance, Krizek documented a sexual interaction between two different orders of insects, a butterfly and a rove beetle. The rove beetle was perched on a leaf with its abdomen elevated. The butterfly approached and for several seconds explored the beetle’s anogenital organs with its proboscis. Krizek notes that other such interactions, between different orders of human and nonhuman animals, have been observed. Dieter Mollenhaur and his team in Germany have amazing footage of a Nostoc (cyanobacterium) mating with a zygomycete fungus to produce Geosiphon pyriforme, a holobiont. This mating between members of two different kingdoms is, indeed, ‘forbidden fertilization’. In short ‘natural systems are driven as much by abundance and excess as they are by limitation and practicality’ and are reflective of strong ecosystems.51

Original frustrations, frozen accidents I return now to the problem in evolutionary theory outlined at the outset of this chapter: how to account for sexual reproduction when it slows down evolution. From a Moneric perspective, mixis appears as a curious artifact, an oddity and curiosity of evolution.52 Sex is ‘an almost awkward adjunct to reproduction’.53 Addressing the commonly proposed function of sexual reproduction as genetic variation, Margulis argues that organisms that sexually reproduce do not evolve faster: they sexually reproduce because the viscidities of evolution have linked reproduction and tissue differentiation with sexuality. Put another way, sexual reproduction persisted in evolution because those organisms reproduced. Reproduction is obligatory; sexual reproduction is optional: There are many other ways of generating genetic variability and performing whatever other duties mixis itself performs. Mixis was never selected for directly. An inordinate amount of data has been collected in attempts to prove the selective advantage of mixis, especially in animals living in unstable environments (Bell 1982). No such conclusion is available from the evidence: neither in constant nor in varying environments can mixis be shown to confer selective advantage over

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amictic (nonsexual) life cycles. Animals and plants that show no mixis, which is to say organisms that have lost the capacity to form offspring from different parents in sexual unions (such as apomictic or self-fertilizing plants), nevertheless retain meiosis. We suggest they do this to maintain differentiation. Outcrossing has never been shown to confer a definitive advantage on organisms.54 Margulis’s symbiogenesis theory posits that sex evolved through three contingent circumstances of environment-organism response. The first was DNA repair. Before the ozone shield, around three billion years ago, bacteria faced a problem: they needed to absorb energy from the sun but were damaged and often killed by high levels of ultraviolet light. Research shows that those mutations that lead to the loss of the ability to survive ultraviolet light also lead to the total destruction of the genetic recombination system. This suggests an association between the ability to survive ultraviolet light and to genetically recombine. As Margulis and Sagan put it, ‘ultraviolet repair pre-adapted bacteria to sexuality’ (49, original emphasis). Margulis and Sagan speculate that, at first, genetic information was backed-up via extra copies of DNA within the cell. DNA derived from multiple sources became possible when bacteria exchanged their DNA. Thus, ‘in evolutionary terms, the appearance of excision-enzyme mechanisms to repair damaged DNA is a pre-adaptation to bacterial sex in which an entirely different DNA molecule is used for the source of the information to repair the damage’ (58). As such, cell reproduction may have been an early form of error correction.55 The second and third factors – multicellularity and differentiation – are the outcomes of symbiogenetic mergings in response to environmental pressures. To understand the symbiogenetic evolution of multicellularity, we need to review the process of mitosis, keeping in mind that mitosis preceded meiosis. Eukaryotic cells operate on a 24 hour cycle (prokaryotes operate on about a 20 minute cell cycle). Mitosis takes place in approximately the first hour of the cycle. Mitosis consists of four phases: (1) in the prophase, chromosomes condense and become visible; (2) in the metaphase the chromosomes align on the spindle at what’s called the cell’s equator; (3) in the anaphase the centromeres divide and the chromosomes segregate into offspring cells; (4) and in the telophase, offspring nuclei form and chromosomes relax into the nucleoplasm. Towards the end of the cell cycle, cytokinesis takes place in which the cytoplasm of a single cell divides into two daughter cells.

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Mitosis involves two distinct structures: the mitotic apparatus (mitotic spindle and often asters, centrioles and other microtubular structures) and chromosomal DNA. Margulis’s symbiogenesis theory explains this duality as the result of a double ancestry (spirochete derived microtubule-motile complex and DNA from the nucleochromatin complex).56 In other words, mitosis is derived from symbiogenetic processes. Chapter 3 outlined the theory that protists originally ate other protists but did not digest them. This failed digestion would have mixed up their genetic material: a process known as hypersex. Margulis speculates that this doubled form would have been advantageous because its smaller surface area per volume may have better tolerated desiccation and/or starvation. Thus, the duplication of chromatin before mitosis was originally a symbiotic merger that eventually produced a new type of organism through symbiogenesis. It would have also doubled the number of chromosomes without fertilization. So it was not advantageous to have sex; rather it was advantageous to be smaller and to be able to move around because of the decreased need for water: a ‘frozen accident’ as it were.57 Eventually, failed digestion would have converted to fertilization: selection pressures to reduce diploidy vied with environmental pressures (desiccation and starvation) that encouraged diploidy. As Gorelick summarizes, ‘What started as a meal, wound up being the origin of sex’.58 Retaining and exchanging the motile systems of their symbionts came at a price for animals: they could no longer divide by mitosis (the undulipodia of animal cells differentiate but do not further divide). In order to retain both undulipodiated motility and genetic recombination, these symbionts had to reproduce by meiosis. Meiosis is an evolved variation on mitosis. Put another way, sexual reproduction was the price these symbionts paid for multicellularity and differentiation.59 Margulis and Sagan describe this as the ‘trap of differentition’.60 Referring to the meiotic sex in eukaryotes, Margulis and Sagan write: We believe it emerged from failure of cytokinesis [cytoplasm divides to produce two daughter cells] after karyokinesis [process of nucleus division during cell division] or from resistance to digestion in adult protists after cannibalistic attack by fellow members of their populations. Two adult nuclei, each with one set of chromosomes, fuse in the karyogamic process, each offering identical amounts of chromatin. In those lineages embellished by crossing over, DNA splicing and recombining enzymes are put to use. Note, however, that DNA recombination is not intrinsic to the meiotic sexual process. In meiotic

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sex, recombination is on the level of cell and nuclear fusion. Fertilizations bring chromosomes of different parental nuclei into a common nucleus, and the DNA of chromosomes does not necessarily recombine.61 Since most symbioses did not involve differentiation and meiosis (obligate sexuality), sexual reproduction appears as a peculiar evolutionary development. During most of our evolutionary heritage, our ancestors reproduced without sex. We are, indeed, ‘the offspring of particular bombardments and interactions, of pre-sex mergings…’.62 Bacteria stumbled upon gene donation. In this symbiogenetic account, sexual reproduction evolved by accident as a necessary by-product of the evolution of multicellularity and cellular differentiation. In multicellular organisms, cells begin to specialize and carry out different functions: ‘mixis… becomes a consequence of the need to preserve differentiation… mixis itself is dispensable and… was never selected for directly’. Put another way, ‘multicellularity provided evolutionary advantages and sex came along for the ride’.63 The creation of genders is the outcome of a very long process of hypersex that formed our nucleated ancestors the protoctists, followed by meiotic and fertilization sex involving cell fusion. Genders and sexually maintained species only began evolving about a billion years ago.64 Mammalian sex is a very late variation on a general theme. As Margulis points out, we need to distinguish between the origins of sex, and how sex is maintained (that is, what keeps animals and plants from having sex and reproducing ‘uniparentally’ or by nonmixis means). Humans do not sexually reproduce because this is ‘better’ than the myriad other forms of sex and reproduction available. Sexual recombination was only one of the methods adapted. As Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths write, ‘obligatory sexual reproduction and invariable uniparental reproduction are two ends of a continuum, not discrete alternatives into which all organisms can be unambiguously sorted.’65 For instance, some organisms developed spores that enabled the organism to practice a form of ‘hibernation’ during hard environmental conditions. When paramecia are faced with ageing and death without a mate, they divide meiotically and then self-fertilize in a process known as autogamy. Autogamy, according to neoDarwinism, should lead to debilitation because it ‘unmasks’ genes (reverse epistasis). But for paramecia, it is a means of survival. Autogamy illustrates that sexual reproduction is not superior because it generates genetic variation. Many successful and ancient organisms have remained uniparental. For example, Glomales, mycorrhizal fungi whose symbioses with plants

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are helpful in securing mineral nutrients’ ecosystemic services, have remained uniparental ever since they colonized the continents some 400 million years ago.66 And several parasitic protozoa have clonal population structures with independently evolving lineages. Species of animals, plants, fungi and protists, as well as all bacteria, can reproduce without mixis.67 These species show no loss of evolutionary success or of variation. And this is to say nothing of viral sex. Humans sexually reproduce because of a series of evolutionary ‘give and takes’, of ‘failures’ in Margulis’s terms, what Roos calls a ‘tortuous path’.68 In other words, eukaryotes appear very ‘secluded’ compared with the extreme openness toward foreign DNA exhibited by prokaryotes.69 Mixis was not directly selected for, so the typical evolutionary theorist’s question – the problem of sex – is not valid because sexually reproducing animals have had ‘no way to opt out of the ancient cycles of meeting, mating, and cell growth to make a body and return to in the primordial single cell form’.70

Quiet revolutions Margulis’s symbiogenesis theory is not unique in its attempt to theorize the origin of sexual reproduction as other-than the selective advantage of heritable variation. Matthew Meselson and his colleagues’ research, for instance, shows that bdelloid rotifers (a class of small freshwater invertebrates divided into four families, 19 genera and about 350 species) practice extensive horizontal gene transfer. Rotifers are animals and yet there are no males and no meiosis: ‘instead eggs are produced by two mitotic divisions with no chromosome pairing and no reduction in chromosome number’: they have no form of genetic exchange.71 So far, Meselson and his team have found that retrotransposons are absent in bdelloid rotifers, when they would be expected to be abundant in eukaryotes. They have also found that these rotifers have many genes that seem to have originated in bacteria, fungi and plants concentrated in telomeric gene regions while absent in proximal gene-rich regions. What all this means is that bdelloid rotifers challenge evolutionary biology’s traditional thinking: rotifers seem to have no form of genetic exchange, and yet they have survived extinction. Root Gorelick’s research on cytosine methylation and epigenetics offers another interesting challenge to theories of sexual reproduction. With Margulis, Gorelick questions the theory that the primary function of sex is genetic mixing. For Gorelick, however, it is not symbiogenesis that explains the origin of meiosis, but rather that sex ‘reduces additive

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genetic variance of epigenetic signals, especially cytosine methylation, and of ploidy levels’.72 Basically, Gorelick argues the opposite of neoDarwinism; that sexual reproduction is beneficial because it reduces additive variance – that while evolution only works at all because of heritable variance, there can nevertheless be too much of a good thing. Gorelick argues that in eukaryotes, meiosis resets epigenetic signatures once or twice per generation – cytosine methylation being the most fundamental epigenetic signature – that allow stable and conservative development. Without this re-setting, developmental errors are thought to increase until the species itself experiences senescence. As such, Gorelick adopts a long-standing theory known as rejuvenesence.73 Cleveland reasoned that the first meiotic organism must have been automictic – it had to have had sex with itself – in which case no genetic mixing would have been involved.74 This, of course, parts company with symbiogenesis theory. For Margulis, Maynard Smith and Hickey and Rose, syngamy – through symbiotic contagion – preceded meiosis. Gorelick argues instead that the first sex was self-sex and endoploidy: first, environmental stress led to a decrease in maintenance methylation; second, meiosis and syngamy are the only ways to reset lost cytosine methylation; starvation (or other environmental stress) led to the selective advantage to taxa that could undergo meiosis and/or syngamy. Meiosis had nothing to do with genetic mixing if meiosis preceded syngamy and if the primary function of meiosis is to correct environmentally-induced epimutations (8). The evidence for this theory is that parasex (syngamy without meiosis) occurs only in some fungi and protists such as the slime mold Acrasia that we saw earlier in this chapter. To some degree, symbiogenesis and cytosine methylation reset theories emphasize different things: Gorelick describes as ‘peculiar’ all prokaryotic and eukaryotic exceptions to the rejuvenescence theory. Examples such as Acrasia tend to be the very examples that Margulis uses to support her theory of the origin of sex. What they share is a curiosity about the origin of sexual reproduction and a willingness to question the initial premise of evolutionary biology that sexual reproduction increases heritable variation. The neoDarwinian account resonates with its overarching narrative of individuality whereas symbiogenesis theory emphasizes that associations between individuals transform those individuals into something other – ongoing symbiotic associations and mergings. In this regard, Fausto-Sterling’s diagnosis leads to the right question: ‘why have Margulis and Sagan been ignored while evolutionary biologists continue to produce volumes of articles in their search for the evolutionary advantages of sex?75 For

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Fausto-Sterling, ‘whether sex itself is actually important, clearly theorizing about sex is good for something’: ‘[Evolutionary biologists], Margulis and Sagan excepted, use narratives of cellular and genetic evolution to create cultural accounts of gender, and to provide narratives of human behavior that unquestioningly justify stereotypes and provide ammunition for continuing inequalities between men and women in educational, marital, civil, and sexual arenas. More than scientific evidence or logic, it is the power of this rhetoric that makes contemporary theorists blind to the strengths of Margulis’s views and forecloses the possibilities of new theories of multicellular evolution.76 Rather than unreflexively reject evolutionary biology, how might feminist theory, as Vicki Kirby puts it, ‘generously engage’ with the myriad implications for understanding the origin and maintenance of sexual differences?77 As a first step, I find Elizabeth Grosz’s call for feminist engagements with Darwin timely. Her work is particularly strong in its elaboration of Darwin’s eschewal of teleology, and Grosz specifically connects diversity (variation) with evolution: ‘evolution produces variation for no reason; it values change for no particular outcome; it experiments, but with no particular results in mind; it has prolific means but no ends’.78 Grosz’s own considered engagement brings to the fore feminist theory’s struggle to engage with the material in ways that do not reinforce established patriarchal and humanist epistemologies. Grosz writes that ‘subjectivity, sexuality, intimate relations are in part structured not only by institutions and social networks but also by impersonal or pre-personal, subhuman, or inhuman forces, forces that may be construed as competing microagencies rather than as the conflict between singular, unified, self-knowing subjects or well-defined social groups’.79 While Grosz is cognizant of the historical and contemporary use of evolutionary theory to maintain women’s exclusion from full participation in society, she nevertheless sees in Darwin something not available to feminist cultural and political analyses alone: a detailed account of ‘the movements of difference, bifurcation, and becomings that characterize all forms of life.’80 If it works at all, Darwin’s nonhumanist theory applies to all life and is explanatory all the way down; that is, evolution as an explanatory model refers equally to the biological and the cultural: … culture is not different in kind from nature. Culture is not the completion of inherently incomplete nature (that is to attribute to

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Man, to the human, and to culture the position of destination of evolution, its telos or fruition, when what Darwin makes clear is that evolution is not directed toward any particular goal.81 Evolution all the way down is nowhere more apparent than in the concept of difference. Grosz also distinguishes between cultural and evolutionary senses of the term origin and its relation to difference. Culturally, ‘origin is a consequence of human, or rather, scientific taxonomy, a function of language’ and that ‘individual differences form continua, whose divisions remain relatively arbitrary, contingent on the pragmatic purposes of the division’.82 Phenotypically, differences between individuals exist on a continuum, yet these individual differences, over evolutionary time, become differences of kind rather than degree through natural selection. It is here that my engagement with symbiogenesis theory leads me in a different direction. For Grosz, humans come in two nonreducible forms. She writes ‘there is an irreducible difference between the sexes, and this difference is not only irreducible to one of its terms, in the case of socio-biology, its reproductive cells; it is also irreducible to any other level, whether cellular, morphological, cultural or historical.’83 Grosz points to the irony of agreement between socio-biological and feminist accounts on this point. I see, rather, an agreement based upon an implicit endorsement, by feminist theorists, of the neoDarwinian account of evolution, which emphasizes species differentiation through competition. For instance, Grosz adopts the typically neoDarwinian rhetoric of uniparental advantage over sexual reproduction: ‘a large part of sexual bifurcation is the consequence of natural selection and the evolutionary advantages that sexual difference bestows on hermaphroditic or self-fertilizing modes of reproduction.’84 Elsewhere Grosz writes: ‘those beings that reproduce sexually have an evolutionary advantage over their hermaphroditic counterparts in most but not all situations by virtue of the maximum variation generated by sexual reproduction’.85 Symbiogenesis’s account of the haphazard and contingent development of sexual reproduction as a by-product of multicellularity and cell differentiation presents, to my mind, the kind of nonhuman perspective that Grosz seeks. Grosz’s detailed analyses of James, Bergson and Nietzsche, while intending to illuminate creative ways of working through evolution and nature eventually reduce to human agency. I am interested in theories that help us to think about how matter organizes itself, and how nonhuman organisms organize matter. In other words, Darwin’s major insight that evolution is nonteleological

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is, to my mind, submerged in humanist approaches that think of matter in terms of what it is ‘for’. I steer toward other generous engagements with scientific research, and my compass is Luciana Parisi’s wonderfully complex ‘abstract sex’.86 Parisi’s abstract sex is primarily an event, born of Moneric sensibilities that defy organic-inorganic, nature-technology bifurcations as they affiliate, infect, cannibalize and sometimes merge within and between stratifications of particles, membranes, DNA, RNA, protein, cells and organisms, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘molecular sexes’ or ‘n-1 sexes’. This biophysical strata of sex is co-extensive with other layers: the biocultural (the anthropomorphic level of the human body-sex defined by psychoanalysis, thermodynamics, evolutionary biology and anatomy in industrial capitalism); and the biodigital (the engineering level of the body-sex defined by information science and technologies such as in vitro fertilization, mammal and embryo cloning, transgenic manipulation and the human genome in cybernetic capitalism) layers of the virtual body-sex.87 Sex is stratified rather than signified or represented: ‘sex lies neither before nor after discourse.’88 Sex is the ontogeny of affinities rather than identities as molecular elements self-organized into molar compounds. Hypersex extends Haraway’s insight that sex precludes faithful reproduction as the contagion of others are ‘enfolded in every cellular and multicellular body.’89 Mitochondria provide no better contagion. The symbiogenetic merger of mitochondria within eukaryotic cells became obligate some one to two thousand million years ago: mitochondria convert chemicals such as oxygen and provide energy in the form of adenosine 5’-triphosphate (ATP) for the cell. These microscopic powerhouses are also involved in cellular signaling and differentiation, control of the cell cycle and growth, and cell death. Through mitochondria, eukaryotes remember their bacterial beginnings: although far fewer in number, mitochondrial DNA reproduce by binary fission within the cytoplasm. Mitochondrial DNA is a gift of matrilineal inheritance through hypersex. For Parisi, mitochondria exceed the germline (nuclear DNA) and somaline (cytoplasm) bifurcation, expressing more of a ‘threshold between parallel networks of sex and reproduction.’90 In this way, Parisi describes a Deleuzian rhizomatic phylum that exceeds linear hereditary transmission of nucleic DNA. This latter sex is overcodified in the anthropomorphic stratum that orders bodies into nucleic forms and functions of

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reproduction.’91 The biophysical and biocultural strata are connected via this overcodification – no more evident than in gender difference – in which bodies are ordered (through the oedipal complex, signs and symptoms and so on). In other words, the constant biocultural production of gender difference matters. For this reason, I cannot travel with Parisi in her association of the neoDarwinian filiation with the masculine/sadistic and symbiogenetic contagion with the feminine/ masochistic. To do so invokes an overcodification, even if metaphorical, of gender difference. Nature, of course, provides the twist in every evolutionary theory’s tale. It turns out that mitochondria do not mutate at a constant rate; they can be inherited through the paternal line; and can recombine (à la nuclear DNA). The numbers are stacked in favor of the maternal line: there are some 100,000 mitochondria in human egg cells, compared with fewer than 100 in sperm. Selfish gene theories suggest that mitochondrial genomes compete and so selection pressures favor mitochondria with identical genomes. For this reason, when mitochondria from males get into the egg, they tend to be destroyed (in humans, for instance, male mitochondria are tagged with ubiquitin, a protein that identifies and marks these mitochondria for destruction). In this way, organelles from more than one parent are not inherited in the offspring. The recombination of mitochondrial DNA in yeast and mussels was thought to be an anomaly of ‘primitive’ eukaryotes until recombination of mitochondrial DNA was found to take place in the human heart muscle. Because this recombination occurred from different copies of the same chromosome (mitochondria store five to ten copies of their chromosomes for free-radical damage control) it does not in itself undermine the selfish gene theory that uniparental mitochondrial is a response to natural selection pressures (i.e. it is favored by natural selection and conforms to the neoDarwinian emphasis on direct filiation). But what if paternal mitochondrial DNA was able to survive destruction in the egg? What if it then recombined with maternal mitochondrial DNA (known as heteroplasmy)? In 2002, a 28 year old man was reported to have a mixture of paternal and maternal mitochondrial DNA.92 In 2004, Kraytsberg et al. reported that 0.7 percent of this man’s mitochondrial DNA had recombined in his muscles.93 This is not to say, however, that recombined mitochondrial DNA is inheritable, and so far, no evidence has been reported that this occurs. It does, however, in yet another twist to the tale, show that paternal and maternal mitochondrial populations can co-exist, suggesting that the

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neoDarwinist selfish gene approach overemphasizes competition in evolution. Just to show that the tale twists continue, Nick Lane argues for the dual-control theory whereby two mating types are advantageous because the dual genome system (nuclear and mitochondrial DNA) is needed to maximize respiration and decrease the risk of apoptosis (programmed cell death) and developmental abnormalities.94 Lane argues that one set of nuclear genes paired with one set of mitochondrial genes is the best way to ensure the fittest outcome. Again, we see yet another example of the rationalization of gender difference through fitness arguments. Margulis’s symbiogenesis theory, as one particularly provocative taletwist, provides us with a way of understanding sex as an event, ‘a mixture of the necessary and the abstract: the necessary production of an effect by its cause or the contingent effective presence of those causes at that particular moment’.95 Symbiogenesis is the quiet revolution that has been taking shape since the Archean: a revolution of contagion, filiation and infection whereby new tissues and new organisms are formed through symbiogenesis.96 Symbiogenesis theory’s account of inhospitable environmental conditions, historical accidents, symbiogenetic mergers, diverse genders, sex, reproduction and sexuality diverges from the neoDarwinian evolutionary landscape in which sexual selection is indelibly associated with genetic codes, meiotic sex, gender difference, sexual reproduction as function, causation, and linear transmission. That is, abstract – symbiogenetic sex – exceeds nucleic, reproductive levels. Contagion, via the assemblage of bacterial ancestors and symbiotic inhabitants, is the lively undercurrent of a genealogical economy, a linear transmission of nucleic genetic variation. It ‘delineates the potential becomings of matter: the power of nature-matter-body to mutate, to be affected by new assemblages of bodies (a bacterium, a human being, an egg cell, a microchip) that in turn affect the organization of society, culture, economics and politics.’97 Rather than see this formulation as a critique of feminist theories of the body-politic, symbiogenetic sex presents a way to harness all that feminist theory has learned about the machinations of gender – precisely through the body-politic – that moves between and within biophysical, biocultural and biodigital strata.

6 Microontologies of Environment

Introduction A recent talk by John Urry on environmental issues and social theory cited James Lovelock’s latest contribution to environmental debates, The Revenge of Gaia in which Lovelock discusses (among other things) positive feedback ‘tipping points’ that can lead to significant changes in climate systems.1 As a sociologist researching symbiogenesis, I am curious about the viscidities of favor that Gaia theory – which Margulis calls symbiosis from space – attracts. Lovelock’s invocation in a sociological venue surprised me: I had understood my current interest in Gaia theory as a late-comer to social scientific discussions that have long abandoned Gaia. And while Margulis believes that Gaia theory is becoming more acceptable in ‘polite scientific society’, the two foremost scientific magazines, Nature and Science, have both labelled Gaia a ‘pseudo-science’ – the kiss of death in most academic communities.2 And in so far as social scientists associate Gaia with new-age goddess worship and failed social and deep ecology movements, Gaia seems to engender a ‘been-there, done-that’ reaction.3 Urry’s presentation prompted me to consider whether social scientists are re-engaging with Gaia theory beyond its significance as a truth-claim within modern environmentalism discourse. The direction of analysis tends to be from sociology to environmental issues, rather than in terms of how environmental issues might usefully inform social theory. In these latter analyses, sociology may be seen as ‘marginal to environmental discussions: able to criticize but not to act, eager to deconstruct existing categories but not to engage or persuade, unhappy with the role of “underlabourer” but unwilling to adopt a position of intellectual leadership’.4 Clearly social scientists are no less 116

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concerned about the environment than any other disciplinary body. Rather, the paucity of social scientific interest in grappling with the science of environmental issues might largely be explained by the traditional disciplinary carving up of nature and culture, with culture defined as the social scientists’ feast. We know that modern social theory did much to bifurcate the natural from the social, no more so perhaps than the Adelard of Bath’s dictum that natural phenomena may only be explained by other natural phenomena (and Emile Durkheim’s later addendum that social facts must be explained by other social facts).5 Thus, social scientists have been more interested in ‘explor[ing] the processes whereby certain problems come to acquire “real” status at particular moments and in particular contexts’ than in determining how real an environmental problem is and what sociologists might do about it.6 The impasse is further compounded by the fact that considering the environment in anything other than social constructionist terms raises foundational issues for social scientists with regard to our proper object and domain of study – challenging definitions of nature necessarily challenge the meanings of sociality – and that social science’s long history of scepticism towards any recourse to ‘nature’ to justify cultural customs and behavior is never far from the social scientist’s modus operandi. Environmental issues provide a challenge to Urry’s forecast that sociology will only survive if it ‘embodies the ambitions of one of more social movements’.7 Indeed, focusing on nonenvironmental concerns seems increasingly akin to rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in June 1992 produced a ‘Warning to Humanity’ signed by 1,500 senior scientists from 69 countries, stating that overpopulation and environmental deterioration put the future of humanity at risk. Describing global warming in his latest book, Lovelock gives humanity no more than two decades to avert the biosphere’s shift to a new (much higher) temperature steady state. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report gives us longer, but is no less sober in its assessment of the impact of global heating on humans. Global heating joins a cacophony of biospheric issues we have grown accustomed to hearing about in tandem with homo ecophagus – ‘man who devours the ecosystem’.8 Our human population of six billion is projected to level off at a staggering ten billion by 2150; within 50 years we will have killed 25 percent of all organisms on earth – 11 percent of birds, 18 percent of mammals, 7 percent of fish and 8 percent of plant species are already extinct; we kill species at 1,000 times nonhuman induced extinction rates (100 species per day); at the present rate of environmental

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degradation one quarter of all existing plant and animal species will become extinct within 30 years, and half by the end of the twenty-first century; more than half of all wild habitat has been destroyed in 49 out of 61 old world tropical countries; we devote almost 75 percent of the earth’s fertile land to nearly exclusive mono-agriculture (corn and beef); 60 percent of what are anthropocentrically termed ecosystem ‘services’ have been degraded; a growing consensus acknowledges that we have already surpassed the earth’s oil supply peak; biofuels require as much or more energy to make than fossil fuels, and so on.9 Our ‘spaceship Earth’ faces a grim reality: We humans are the only first-class passengers on the mixed metaphorical ‘spaceship Earth’. On gravitational autopilot, we circle the Sun passively at that ‘just right’ distance. Our imaginary flight attendant encourages us to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. As members of the Mile High Club, we eat and drink like gluttons. The galley refrigerators are defrosting and the frozen entrees have begun to spoil. Our swelling human numbers force the remaining non-human passengers into the last few seats left in coach. We are oblivious to the plight of non-humans who are our life support system. Constant fights over who merits a window or aisle seat have already trashed the passenger compartment. The lavatory smoke detectors are disabled. Our waste has overflown the toilets; now a fetid slurry of blue chemical, urine and excrement spreads across the floor and down the aisle. We just ran out of toilet paper and bottled water. We have encountered turbulence, but no one pays attention to the illuminated ‘FASTEN SEAT BELT’ sign.10 A number of social analyses now proceed on the basis on an ‘enlivened nature’, and what makes Gaia theory useful is its focus on the inescapable connection between all living and nonliving matter on earth, what Keith Ansell Pearson – referring specifically to symbiosis – describes as the ‘filthy lesson’ of our human connection with the world.11 Bacteria’s myriad ongoing symbiotic relationships connect living to nonliving matter and sustain the biosphere. Margulis and Lovelock’s longstanding research collaboration connects microcosmos (symbiosis at the microscopic scale) to macrocosmos (symbiosis at the planetary scale), in order to recognize the biosphere as a highly complex and responsive system subject to irreversible change.12 They call for human responses to pressing environmental issues such as climate change that appreciate microbial communities and depreciate humanity.

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The aim of this chapter is to consider the utility of engaging with Gaia theory within the context of environmental crisis. I am not interested in Gaia theory’s adoption within new age/spiritualist movements, but rather Gaia theory within science. First, I outline the major principles of Gaia theory, distil its major scientific criticisms and then précis’s how Gaia theory defends itself against these criticisms. Following Karen Barad, I attempt to provide an intra-active account of Gaia theory within science. This intra-action is as much about the world before and with ‘man’ as it is about scientific disciplinary boundaries and the carving up of space, time and matter.13 It is also an account of epistemic cultures that define concepts – the evolutionary ‘unit of selection’ for instance. I then attempt to move the discussion forward toward a meaningful reformulation of environmentalism within the context of present and future (animal) environmental crises; in other words, toward ‘what then must be done’ initiatives. While I argue that Gaia theory provokes interesting ways to regard naturecultures, it seems to get caught in the very problem of selfhood that symbiogenesis theory challenges. As such, I argue that Gaia theory sustains the same critique that undermines deep ecology theory, which is the problem of difference. Taking my direction from the biophilosophy of difference and relation in the works of Duerr, Lingis, Deleuze, Haraway and van Wyck, I am concerned with what Duerr refers to as two sides of the ethical encounter: on one side nature and human are connected through representation – thinking like/for microbes (sameness) – while on the other side humans attempt to comprehend the strange, the other – meeting/speaking with microbes (difference).14 Lingis describes this as the difference between a ‘depth-perception’ of the other and a ‘surface-sensitivity’ which recognizes that the other faces the same imperative.15 With biophilosophy, I argue the former concerns what van Wyck calls an ‘ecology of strength’ in which differences are foreclosed through reduction to the Same, while the latter creates an ethics open to differences within and between those who encounter each other, as well as within the encounter itself, what van Wyck refers to as an ecology of weakness. Here, my concern with Gaia theory’s ethical foreclosures come to the fore. To anticipate my conclusion, I argue that Gaia theory fencesits between an ecology of strength and weakness, unclear as to its ethical relation to the other.

Gaia’s filthy lesson, symbiosis from space Coining the term ‘biosphere’ in 1875, Eduard Suess recognized the codependencies of life and nonlife: ‘The plant, whose deep roots plunge

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into the soil to feed, and which at the same time rises into the air to breathe, is a good illustration of organic life in the region of interaction between the upper sphere and the lithosphere, and on the surface of continents it is possible to single out an independent biosphere’.16 Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky elaborated the concept of the biosphere. Taking an explicitly holistic approach, Vernadsky identified the difficulty of studying the biosphere as a whole through traditional disciplinary specialisms: ‘among numerous works on geology, none has adequately treated the biosphere as a whole, and none has viewed it, as it will be viewed here, as a single orderly manifestation of the mechanism of the uppermost region of the planet – the Earth’s crust’.17 While the basic ideas that formulated Gaia theory are found throughout the history of science, it is indisputably associated today with James Lovelock. Lovelock’s route to Gaia theory was rather circuitous. Employed by NASA to develop life-detecting equipment for the 1975 Viking mission to Mars, Lovelock and Dian Hitchcock determined, before the mission literally took off, that the atmospheres of both Mars and Venus precluded life.18 Mars is a very cold planet (–53 degrees Celsius) and its atmosphere is composed of 95 percent carbon dioxide, 2.7 percent nitrogen, 1.6 percent argon, 0.13 percent oxygen and no methane. Venus is very hot (459 degrees Celsius) and is composed of 96.5 percent carbon dioxide, 3.5 percent nitrogen, 70 parts per million of argon and only a trace of oxygen. Currently, the earth’s temperature is about 15 degrees Celsius, and its atmosphere is composed of 0.03 percent carbon dioxide, 79 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, 1 percent argon and 1.7 parts per million of methane. Lovelock and Hitchcock knew from geological and astronomical research that the earth’s atmosphere initially resembled that of Mars and Venus. They also knew that while the Sun’s solar radiation has increased by 30 percent over the course of earth’s existence, the earth’s temperature has decreased from 66 degrees four billion years ago to today’s 15 degrees, a significant overall cooling of 51 degrees. Lovelock and Hitchcock reasoned that what makes the difference between the earth’s atmosphere and that of Mars or Venus (or any other planet in our solar system) is life.19 According to Margulis, Lovelock had three choices: either God created the atmosphere for humans (and changed it dramatically over time), the atmosphere has changed so dramatically to support life as a matter of pure chance (the ‘Goldilocks theory’: Mars is too cold, Venus is too hot, and earth is just right), or life itself produces the atmosphere in which it survives. The original Gaia hypothesis involved the biotic regulation of the earth’s temperature, its acidity-alkalinity, and the composition of its reactive atmospheric gases, especially oxygen. Since these initial predic-

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tions, Gaia theory has undergone several definitional permutations, and the ‘true’ definition remains a matter of some dispute. Lovelock currently defines Gaia as: … a biotic-planetary regulatory system. Over 30 million types of extant organisms, descendant from common ancestors and embedded in the biosphere, directly and indirectly interact with one another and with the environment’s chemical constituents. They produce and remove gases, ions, metals and organic compounds through their metabolism, growth and reproduction. These interactions in aqueous solution lead to modulation of the Earth’s surface temperature, acidity-alkalinity and the chemically reactive gases of the atmosphere and hydrosphere.20 In other words, Gaia theory proposes that the biota alters its physical environment to maintain conditions conducive to life, despite destabilizing effects such as increasing solar energy.21 To say that the biosphere is Gaian is to say that, since its formation, the evolution of the earth (and all of its inhabitants) has been a consequence of a profound, immutable and inextricable association between life and nonlife. It is also to say that biota, oceans, atmosphere and soils – the biosphere – actually (unconsciously) controls the chemical and thermal systems.22 As Margulis puts it ‘one hundred percent of organisms…alter their surroundings 100 percent of the time’.23 Describing resource transfer in a way that resonates with symbiotic and Gaian perspectives, Freese writes: By the mere process of living, organisms change the very conditions upon which they depend for subsistence. Their resource supply is changed by the effects of their own interactions. The individual effects may be small but the compound effects are large. Eventually they change the ecosystem. As new effects are added over sufficient series they eventually become interactive and there emerges a different resource regime. In other words, augmentative interactions are cumulative. As the resources of an ecosystem are developed, exploited, depleted, and otherwise transformed because of its own organic activity, eventually the system becomes something it was not. As it does, the probabilities that it can return to what it was decline. That’s because some of the changes it will have endured will be irreversible.24 This is not co-evolution: according to Gaia theory, co-evolution limits the biosphere to a series of responses between living organisms and their environment, and does not view the earth as a living system that actively

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self-regulates. Recall that in symbiogenesis, the environment becomes the organism. For this reason, scientists pursuing Gaian research (often under the name Earth Systems Science) focus on life-nonlife interactions. For instance, Schwarzmann and Volk have shown that microbes facilitate rock weathering by as much as one thousand times.25 Lowman and Armstrong’s research suggests that plate tectonics is a fundamentally Gaian phenomenon. While the earth’s major concentric layers – the liquid core, the convecting mantle and the outer crust – were formed by the same kinds of processes found on other (silicate-rich) planets: the broad aspects of the Earth’s geology as it is now – continents, ocean basins, the oceans themselves, sea floor spreading and related processes – are the product of fundamentally biogenic processes, acting on a crustal dichotomy formed by several enormous impacts on the primordial Earth. The fundamental structure of the Earth, not just its exterior and outer layers, thus appears to have been dominated by water-dependent – and thus life dependent – plate tectonic processes.26 Stephan Harding and Lynn Margulis, drawing on L.J. Henderson’s original idea, argue that water is a biotic interaction in that microorganisms are responsible for the earth’s water retention: earth has more than 104 times the quantity of water than a planet without life would be expected to have.27 Tyler Volk’s research on cycling ratios describes the biosphere as a ‘wasteland world’ – surely appreciated by car-boot sale folks – in which one organism’s waste is another’s treasure, to be used as food or any other ‘stuff’ of living (oxygen, for instance, is bacterial waste). Volk writes: [The Earth is] one big wasteworld… Regarding the atmosphere’s CO2, more than 99 percent of the entire reservoir has recently been ejected by a living respirer rather than a volcano. For nitrogen, more than 99 percent has been discharged from living denitrifiers rather than volcanoes. And for methane and many other trace gases, more than 99 percent has been expelled from living prokaryotes rather than volcanoes. The atmosphere is one giant waste dump.28

Gaian meetings with science Two American Geophysical Union Chapman Conferences in 1988 and 2000 and the Amsterdam Declaration (issued by a joint meeting of

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the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, the World Climate Research Programme, and the International Biodiversity Programme on July 13, 2001) support the Gaian principle that the earth’s biosphere is a product of biota interacting in ongoing complex feedback systems. Scientists also agree that the earth’s climate is affected by life in at least two major ways: life alters the composition of the atmosphere, and life changes how solar energy heats up and is distributed around the earth’s surface, for instance in the ways in which land plants (dependent upon microbes) improve the absorption and distribution of the Sun’s energy, produce more water, and provide greater leaf surfaces to evaporate rainwater.29 However, Gaia theory also sustains scientific criticism. The first criticism is that Gaia is not science since it cannot be falsified. The overall claim that the global biotic system tends toward long-term stability cannot, indeed, be tested. Barlow and Volk argue that Gaia theory is less a set of falsifiable hypotheses and more a Kuhnian-style paradigm vying for a new research program. As such, according to Barlow and Volk, Gaia is ‘a heuristic: not a hypothesis, but a hypothesis generator’, akin to Maxwell’s Demon in physics.30 Proponents also argue that Gaia theory offers smaller falsifiable predictions that are testable, and Lovelock outlines several such predictions in Nature, and scientists are clearly now testing falsifiable hypotheses.31 The second charge is that permutations of Gaia theory range from banal to nonDarwinian. Kirchner argues that what he calls the ‘weak version’ of Gaia theory (‘Coevolving Gaia’, ‘Optimizing Gaia’ and ‘Geophysiological Gaia’) – that living and nonliving matter affect each other – provokes no controversy because it restates well-known and accepted facts.32 These weak versions are not Gaia theory as proposed by Lovelock, for whom co-evolutionary theory ‘accepts the dogma of mainstream biology, which is that organisms simply adapt to changes in their material environment modified by the organisms themselves’.33 Gaia, by contrast, insists that the biospheric system actively regulates the earth’s chemical composition and climate. Kirchner’s ‘strong version’ (‘Homeostatic Gaia’) consists of the restriction of environmental conditions through biotic feedback. Homeostatic Gaia might occur through luck (‘Lucky Gaia’) in which case the earth would be highly improbable; or Gaia might be the statistically likely outcome (‘Probable Gaia’). ‘Homeostatic Probable Gaia’ has been criticized on a number of counts. Some scientists claim that ‘Homeostatic Gaia’ is teleological and (therefore) non-Darwinian. In response to this

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charge, Lovelock created Daisyworld, a computer program demonstrating a nonteleological feedback cycle in which white (light reflecting) and black (light absorbing) daisies regulate the temperature of planet Daisy World, where regulation is defined as ‘the return of a variable to a stable state after a perturbation’ and self-regulation includes both positive and negative feedback.34 Regulation occurs without daisy forethought or ‘consciousness’ as to the optimal environment in which to thrive.35 Another criticism concerns the ‘character’ of the feedback between life and nonlife. Lenton differentiates between two types: feedback on growth (in which traits selected for their individual fitness have beneficial side-effects on the environment which in turn benefits life) and feedback on selection (in which traits effect environmental variables which then directly effect their selective advantage).36 In both types of feedback, the effects on the environment are by-products rather than adaptations. Free and Barton add feedback on adaptation to the mix; effectively extended phenotypes selected for at the individual level. A biosphere is required in order for life-environment feedback to control the earth’s environment. The biosphere requires a large energy source (the Sun), which is somehow harnessed (photosynthesis) and that nutrients be recycled in cycling ratios between different biochemical guilds.37 Gaia scientists maintain that the earth resembles a ‘superorganism’ by maintaining biological control through homeorrhesis as an emergent property.38 By contrast, Dawkins argues that the earth cannot be an evolving superorganism unless it has other superorganisms (that is, other planets) to compete with in natural selection. In other words, Dawkins argues that evolution cannot occur with a single individual (even an individual as large as the earth). By taking the gene/individual as the unit of evolutionary selection, Dawkins and Doolittle argue that organisms cannot regulate anything beyond their own phenotypes.39 A related point is that all known self-regulating entities are alive (or in the case of mechanical self-regulating entities) created by something alive. Saying that the biosphere self-regulates effectively means that the biosphere is both alive, has a self, and was created by another living entity – much to close to creationism for scientific comfort.40 In response, Lenton argues that Gaia theory does conform to the principles of Darwinian evolution. The important tenets of the theory, according to Lenton, are that: ‘(1) life affects its environment; (2) growth [occurs] (including reproduction); (3) the environment constrains life; and (4) nature selects: once a planet contains different

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types of life (phenotypes) with faithfully replicated, heritable variation (genotypes) growing in an environment of finite resources, the types of life that leave the most descendants come to dominate their environment’.41 According to Lenton, natural selection is not required for global environmental feedback: the first three conditions are sufficient. The supposition that regulation must be selected for through natural selection fails to recognize that regulation is an emergent property in many systems. As well, Lenton cautions that in emphasizing natural selection as ‘red in tooth and claw’ we create the opposite problem of assuming that natural selection never favors traits that enhance their environments. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria, for instance, increase their own supply of available nitrogen, and in so doing they increase the amount of nitrogen in their environment to be used by other organisms such as plants. The selective advantage reduces as more ‘leaked’ nitrogen is released, producing a homeostatic system of nitrogen-fixers and nonfixers. As Schneider and his colleagues put it ‘biologists, especially neoDarwinians, have argued that the Earth understood as a global ecosystem actively “managing” environmental parameters for the benefit of life as a whole is incompatible with the view of living organisms as competitively and selfishly inclined toward narrowly definable survival and reproductive success’.42 For proponents of Gaia theory, species that, in the process of maximizing their own survival and that of their offspring, also benefit the environment have a selective advantage. As Lovelock puts it: … soon after its origin, life was adapting not to the geological world of its birth but to an environment of its own making. There was not purpose in this, but those organisms which made their environment more comfortable for life left a better world for their progeny, and those which worsened their environment spoiled the survival chances of theirs. Natural selection then tended to favour the improvers. If this view of evolution is correct, it is an extension of Darwin’s great vision and makes neoDarwinism a part of Gaia theory and Earth system science.43 Organisms do not consciously construct the environment for their own benefit, according to Gaia theory, but rather those organisms that benefit their environment will have a selective advantage. Daisyworld and Robert Axelrod’s well-known ‘tit-for-tat’ research on altruism show that cooperative behavior can evolve, even in the presence of ‘cheats’

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(there is a significant difference between the existence of ‘cheats’ and their survival). More generally, social evolution theory demonstrates ‘how collective behavior arises from individual self-interest’; a synthesis of individualism and collectivism’ or what Sachs and his colleagues call ‘by-product reciprocity’ and what microbial ecologists call ‘syntrophy’.44 Rather than restrict altruism to direct filiation arguments, Gaia theory points to the symbiont – the unit of selection that exists only because of a relational community – as an already merged entity.45 All this said, thorny questions remain about the status of Gaia as a superorganism. The problem is that ‘self-regulation implies a self.46 The related problem is autopoiesis, as discussed in Chapter 4. My issue is not that we should continue to define life in terms of replication: in Chapter 5 I argue strenuously that life be understood as a verb in which life gets on with the messy processes of living through repair, contagion, affiliation and the like.47 Rather, my concern is that symbiosis and symbiogenesis so nicely indict the concept of the individual that Gaia theory then seems to recuperate. Astrid Schrader makes another compelling criticism that Gaia theory posits the human as something both within and (as observer) outside of Gaia.48 Which brings us back, full-circle, to the problem with autopoiesis and its assumption of self-making organisms that ‘generate the components that produce its own organization’.49 Part of the issue here is the organism-environment relationship. Rather than see organisms as individuated selves that produce the environment outright, I conceptualize a kind of life-comes-at-us ontology in which it is messy entangled relations – symbionts all the way down – rather than self-maintenance that is the ultimate commonality of life. To wit, in the case of symbiogenesis, the environment becomes the (becoming) organism.

Flagships and the rest of us Contemporary social theory increasingly recognizes the importance of human and animal relationships: ethics, animal rights, companion species, xenotransplantation, vegetarianism and agriculture are all on the social scientists’ menu. While this burgeoning interest is surely a positive indication that the social sciences are moving away from an exclusive interest in humans, for Gaia theory, studying animals is essentially another way of studying ourselves (humans are animals): humanocentric business-as-usual.50 Humans tend to focus (through the bulk of research funding, publications and lay interest) on the shortest and most recent evolutionary timeline in which animals appear (the Phanerozoic began only 541 million years ago) because that’s when we appear (actually,

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humans do not appear until the Neogene, 0.01 million years ago).51 On a Gaian timeline, the most important eon is the Archaean.52 Trying to effect an analytic orientation, Lovelock writes ‘the cuddly animals, the wild flowers, and the people are all to be revered, but they would be nothing were it not for the vast infrastructure of the microbes’.53 Latour delineates the challenge: ‘…the nature whole into which politics and human society would supposedly have to merge transcends the horizons of ordinary citizens. For this Whole is not human, as is readily seen in the Gaia hypothesis’.54 The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Life began in the Archaean soon after, about 3.8 billion years ago (give or take a few million years). Before life, the planet’s atmosphere was rich in carbon dioxide, contained nitrogen, traces of hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, and very little oxygen. The oceans held large amounts of iron, other elements and compounds that act as reducing agents (reacting with, and thereby removing, oxygen). LUCA – the last universal common ancestor was bacterial, and for 85 percent of the earth’s history, the biota consisted solely of microorganisms.55 Four types of bacteria – fermenting, swimming, oxygenbreathing and photosynthesizing – created all life on earth through the natural selection of organisms created through symbiogenesis and random mutation. Bacteria sustain the chemical elements crucial to life on earth – oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur and carbon, and some 25 other gases – through ongoing (re)cycling processes that enable flora and fauna to thrive.56 For example, photosynthesis, the ability to split water by light energy to reduce carbon to sugar, led to what scientists call the ‘oxygen Holocaust’ – the single greatest mass extinction of living organisms on earth – that resulted when oxygen-producing bacteria multiplied and spread, killing the vast majority of organisms for which oxygen was poisonous.57 Bacteria, then, not only evolved all life (reproduction, photosynthesis and movement) on earth; they provided (and continue to provide) the environment in which different kinds of living organisms can exist. Bacteria have thrived since, quite literally, life began. The key elements of biosphere – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur (known as CHNOPS to science students cramming for exams) – are all cycled by bacteria. Bacteria evolved the earth’s production economy: phototrophs convert solar energy; chemotrophs convert chemical energy; lithotrophs gain electrons from inorganic compounds (such as hydrogen and sulfur) or simple organic compounds (such as water and hydrogen sulfide); organotrophs convert complex organic substances

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(such as proteins in dead biomass and carbohydrates in grasses and grains) and so on.58 Bacteria are Gaian because they make up the bulk of living biota, and they entangle all life in relations. As Vladimir Vernadsky put it, the earth’s crust is ‘saturated with life’. Bacteria are also Gaian because they are responsible for the bulk of the biosphere’s regulation through metabolitic recycling. Bacteria achieve this through avid replication (both vertical (heritable) genetic exchange and lateral gene transfer (LGT)), quick reproduction – unimpeded by environmental constraints, an E. coli bacterium would equal the weight of the earth’s crust in 1.75 days; a single cyanobacterium on a sterile earth could oxygenate the atmosphere in 40 days – and their organization into community structures that facilitate complex communication.59 As Sonea and Mathieu put it, in community structures bacteria ‘form one global, exceedingly diversified, yet functionally unified peculiar being’. 60 Bacteria, in short, are the means through which all living matter not only survives but also thrives.61 Bacteria are adept at creating and sustaining symbiotic relationships. The number and diversity of planetary symbioses involving bacteria is beyond fathom. For instance, cyanobacteria exist in both unicellular and colonial forms (their blooms can be seen from space) and live symbiotically with protists, worms, sponges and other land and aquatic plants. Bacteria fix nitrogen for more than 17,000 kinds of leguminous plants.62 Without hindgut bacteria, these ‘tropical cows’ would not be able to process (break down and make available to the biosphere in recycling) one-third to two-fifths of the phytomass in their environments.63 The biosphere did not become a frozen wasteland thanks to bacteria that decompose cyanobacteria living in ocean sediments, releasing methane that attracts solar energy. All symbiotic relationships, if looked at closely enough, involve bacteria, because bacteria are necessary for all life. In short, the ‘biosphere’s evolution is unimaginable without symbioses’.64 While I have no doubt that there remain communities of people who do not believe that humans are, at least in part, responsible for climate change and environmental degradation, there is a growing consensus that humans are precipitating incalculable shifts in the biosphere. In 1970, Scientific American published a special issue entitled ‘The Biosphere’, in which the founder of American limnology, G. Evelyn Hutchinson wrote: Many people… are concluding on the basis of mounting and reasonably objective evidence that the length of life of the biosphere as an

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inhabitable region for organisms is to be measured in decades rather than in hundreds of millions of years. This is entirely the fault of our own species. It would seem not unlikely that we are approaching a crisis that is comparable to the one that occurred when free oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere.65 NeoDarwinism’s principle that natural selection works at the level of the individual permeates E.O. Wilson’s, ‘juggernaut theory of human nature’, Hamilton’s ‘selfish gene’ theory and the general emphasis on nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ to argue that individuals are selfish and global responsibility for the environment is far too esoteric a commitment compared with immediate individual desires.66 That the explanation for our current state of affairs comes from neoDarwinism is not unimportant. It directs our attention away from alternative formulations including possible ethical encounters between species, and sets parameters on agendas for environmental change.67 Given the clear limits set, according to neoDarwinism, by evolution vis-à-vis innate individualism and selfishness, human approaches to the environment tend to be humanocentric, and focused on sustainability. Sustainable development proceeds on the basis that the biosphere can (and should) be continually developed by humans in ways that will increase economic growth without precipitating a tipping point of ecological crisis. ‘Valuation exercises’ – assigning a monetary value to biospheric services such as trees’ production of oxygen – are entirely formulated from the perspective of services for humans.68 Critics argue that solar panels, organic foods and the like are essentially a Western middle-class means of assuaging environmental guilt while maintaining ever increasing consumerist lifestyles.69 To my mind, the real challenge is to recognize that humans are not the central players in climate (or any other biospheric) regulation. Humans might ultimately render the biosphere inhospitable for humans and other animals, but this shifted biosphere will certainly survive our extinction. We may, in other words, precipitate global heating, but we are not capable of extinguishing the biosphere altogether.70 Responding to Mother Theresa’s comment that we need ‘to take care of the poor, the sick and the hungry, and leave God to take care of the Earth’, Lovelock said ‘If we as people do not respect and take care of the Earth, we can be sure that the Earth, in the role of Gaia, will take care of us, and if necessary, eliminate us’.71 Margulis is equally acerbic, referring to Gaia as a ‘tough bitch’.72

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A reorientation to Gaia means recognizing the most important meetings are not between humans and animals, but between microbes and microbes: ‘We need’ writes Stephan Harding, ‘to develop a sense of ourselves as beings in symbiotic relationship with Gaia, just as the mitochondria live in an intimate relationship with their larger, unseen host’.73

Toward an ecology of weakness Gaia theory presents social theory with two challenges. First, Gaia theory emphasizes lively biotic/abiotic co-productions that sustain the biosphere. In so doing, it collapses the traditional social scientific distinction between living and nonliving matter. Second, Gaia theory shifts the focus from animals to bacteria. As we have seen, for Gaia theory, studying animals is essentially another way of studying ourselves: humanocentric business-as-usual. The second challenge, then, is to recognize that humans are not the central players in climate regulation. Bacteria and microbial symbionts are far more central. Humans might well precipitate global heating, but this is nothing compared with the oxygen Holocaust. If, as Gaia theory argues, living and nonliving matter cannot be so easily bifurcated, and if bacteria are the primary means through which the biosphere is sustained, how then might we proceed? In this concluding section, I focus on the ethics of ecological concern. I am interested in our ethical relationship with an environment largely made up of, and regulated by, bacteria. How, in other words, might we figure future meetings-with bacteria? Gaia theory challenges us to consider who we invite and who we overlook when we meet the other in ethical encounters. Thus far, we seem mainly directed toward the human protection of particular animals: flagship species such as polar and panda bears obscure the vast number of symbiotic relations that sustain their survival.74 Yet while Gaia theory focuses on the inescapable entanglement of life and nonlife, its own characterization of the biosphere as a superorganism invites criticisms associated with autopoiesis and self-organization. It also, I argue, constitutes the point at which Gaia theory reveals ambivalence towards difference. To the degree that this ambivalence operates, it limits Gaia theory to an ecology of strength, and thereby necessarily forecloses the form of ethical encounter, through environmentalism, that it seeks. The theoretical compass that orients my analysis is Peter van Wyck’s thoughtful exegesis of deep ecology theory.75 In what he calls ‘the

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move to the outside’, van Wyck points to deep ecology’s tendency to represent humans as a single ecological category, thereby effecting a reduction of important social, political, economic and cultural differences amongst humans; the kind of reduction which social scientists are so well attuned to critique. If/when global heating reduces the human population from six billion to two million, social scientists want to know which humans will survive and why. In other words, difference becomes deep ecology’s remainder: Gaia’s collective ‘we’ ‘is both the possibility for collective dissent, and a means for silencing it’.76 This remainder leads, I argue, to calls for a kind of ‘panoptic efficiency’.77 Lovelock would like to reverse the current geography in which humans are taking up more and more land and sea while flora and other fauna are restricted to ever decreasing habitats. He would like to see humans restricted to small geographic ‘islands’, subject to heavy environmental surveillance (likely more Orwellian than Newby’s Green Leviathan), and the majority of the earth’s surface left to the biosphere.78 This re-creation of wilderness also undoes the very collapse of naturecultures entanglement that Gaia theory seeks to effect. Wilderness is that from which the human is absent. Finally, this remainder (of difference) speaks to the possible ethical encounters in which humans might engage. Is the invocation of wild(er)ness a means of, paraphrasing Thoreau, ‘preserving the world’ through a paradoxical collapse of difference, or might we better see it as a first step toward speaking with rather than for the other? In the first invocation of wilderness, humans seek an encounter in order to recover ourselves. In the second invocation we might think of wilderness as that which ‘marks a kind of reflective limit in which humans may bear witness to strangeness, to otherness… It is a place where we encounter otherness, and thereby come to know ourselves… this wilderness-as-other [as] radical alterity, which stubbornly refuses to reflect back anything at all’.79 The encounter itself transforms us into something other than what we were prior to the encounter. In The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Alphonso Lingis distinguishes between a depth-perception of the other (van Wyck’s ecology of strength) ‘that represents the concepts and laws of disciplining, education, job training, professional etiquette, kinesics, linguistics, and ultimately ethnobiology and animal psychology’ and a surface-sensitivity (van Wyck’s ecology of weakness) that, while it cannot obviate the practicable field afforded by depth-perception, acknowledges this same depthperception imperative in the other. While social environmentalism may

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assume too much difference, Gaia theory seems unable to think with microbial-nonliving co-productions in terms that do not efface difference. An ecology of weakness leaves open the question of difference of both degree and kind in encounters/meetings with microbial others.80

7 Eating Well, Surviving Humanism

In an important sense, it matters to the world how the world comes to matter.1 We must be more open to being theoretically and empirically surprised by what the world throws up. But we can only be surprised, and then act appropriately, if collectively we stand open to it.2

H’ordeuvre This book details my attempt to build a microontology, as a way of engaging seriously with the microcosmos. I am interested in the ways in which bacteria are ally-assembling concrete actants who form, over and over again, obligate and nonobligate symbiotic companions with life on earth. I am equally interested in the ways in which bacteria are almost entirely absent from current formulations interested in the origins and parameters of, and possibilities for, sociable life. In this final chapter, I want to contemplate the possibility of a microbial ethics; how we might ‘meet well with’ – to evoke Donna Haraway’s compelling term – bacteria. My conviction is that social scientists must find ways to begin to theorize an ethics of the microbial – particularly outside pathogen histories and characterizations – and that this is fundamental to our future disciplinary enterprise. I believe this is a tall order: considering an ethics of (human)animal relations confronts enduring humanist foundational assumptions as outlined in Chapter 2. To think beyond the animal seems literally and figuratively beyond our ken. My desire to think with bacteria – in a literal sense I do this already, as the neural pathways in my brain were imagined by my bacterial 133

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ancestors – is helpfully informed by Donna Haraway’s contemplation about what can happen When Species Meet.3 At the outset, Haraway details the community of the human body: I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many.4 Haraway’s primary interests in this text are the meetings of Canidae and Hominidae, and she delights in the telling of her cells’ colonization by her companion species dogs, Ms. Cayenne Pepper and Roland. Haraway asks of these families of kin and (taxonomic) kind important questions about the possibilities for becoming-with companion species. In this becoming-with, relating precedes identity: the relating itself forms constituent identities, or actants as Latour would have it. Not, as Haraway points out, that species do not have ontologies-inthemselves ‘sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter.’5 But there is contagion at work in Haraway’s speciesmeeting: kin and kind defined less through ‘arboreal descent’ and more through ‘the play of bodies’: a kind of forbidden fertilization of species-meeting:6 Genes are not the point, and that surely is a relief. The point is companion-species making. It’s all in the family, for better or worse, until death do us part. This is a family made up in the belly of the monster of inherited histories that have to be inhabited to be transformed. I always knew that if I turned up pregnant, I wanted the being in my womb to be a member of another species; maybe that turns out to be the general condition. It’s not just mutts, in or out of the traffic of international adoption, who seek a category of one’s own in significant otherness.7 Haraway’s companion species impregnation is metaphoric to be sure in its weaving of histories of co-dependence and production; but it is more than this. A literal enmeshing of bodies and all of their resident

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companion species (and those species) in a recursive cascade that defines what and how we know what we know; ‘turtling all the way down’ as Haraway puts it.8 Turtling all the way down defines the event of Haraway’s speciesmeeting. In other words, Haraway works toward an ethics preceded by the recognition of an always already incalculable enmeshing of species, and an urgent need to reach beyond the kinds of ‘speaking for’ species licensed through persistent claims of human exceptionalism: Disarmed of the fantasy of climbing into heads, one’s own or others’, to get the full story from the inside, we can make some multispecies semiotic progress. To claim not to be able to communicate with and to know one another and other critters, however imperfectly, is a denial of mortal entanglement (the open) for which we are responsible and in which we respond… Response is comprehending that subject-making connection is real. Response is face-to-face in the contact zone of an entangled relationship. Response is in the open. Companion species know this.9 This incalculable enmeshment seems to me to proceed from a different, nonhuman-centered ontology than Kant’s sublime, Wittgenstein’s lion, Lyotard’s inhuman and Differend, Heidegger’s Hand-Werk, Levinas’s dog Bobby and ultimately Derrida’s cat. I will not rehearse the fine analyses undertaken of these philosophical treatises here: only to say that each pivots on a comparison between humans and animals (the animal), that leads to an ultimate disavowal (which at least for Levinas and Derrida seems disquieting).10 And the philosophical limit remains the human-animal, which, given that humans are animals, says something important about the limits of bacterial ‘faciality’ within a human imaginative horizon. Facilitated enormously by Haraway’s thoughtful exegesis of ethical encounters, I am interested in those companion species that are not species at all: companion with not-species as it were.11 That bacteria do not live up to/defy (depending on our microbial politics) taxonomic expectations, is a first clue to the ontological and epistemological questions that bacteria invite us to consider. Put another way, I am struck by the ways in which microbial becomings – becomings with bacteria, becomings with microbial communities – somehow fall below our line of view. Reflecting upon Jacques Derrida’s framing of ethics in terms of what it means to ‘eat well’ (in both literal and figurative senses), the final

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chapter of When Species Meet is devoted to ‘parting bites that might nourish mortal companion species who cannot and must not assimilate one another but who must learn to eat well, or at least well enough that care, respect, and difference can flourish in the open.’12 Haraway asks ‘What do they [species] contribute to the flourishing of the land and its critters (naturalcultural in that sense)? That question does not invite a disengaged “liberal” ethics or politics but requires examined lives that take risks to help the flourishing of some ways of getting on together and not others’ (288–9, original emphasis). We might work through Haraway’s insightful questions in a literal sense to consider how organisms ingest, use or otherwise transform living/nonliving matter. All animals are, metabolically, consumers (heterotrophs must use ready-made organic compounds). Autotrophic bacteria, by contrast, do not ‘eat’ (they ‘fix’ or otherwise convert the elements on which all living organisms depend). These bacteria are producers, engaging in a different economy of eating and thus relating with the world. Other kinds of bacteria, such as those found in rumens, termite guts and human intestines, live symbiotically with animals and other organisms, enabling food digestion. The difference between consumers and producers also invokes a metaphoric sense of eating well – the flourishing of care, respect, and difference as Haraway describes – at the same time that humans confront what Pollan acerbically calls ‘the omnivore’s dilemma’.13 Given our relation to the biosphere as consumers, it is unsurprising that humans focus on eating. As Pollan notes: … the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds… Our eating also constitutes a relationship with dozens of other species – plants, animals, and fungi – with which we have coevolved to the point where our fates are deeply entwined… Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us.14 I want to extend Haraway’s epistemology to focus on production as a prevalent relational economy on earth, and as one important aspect of our entanglement with bacteria. While appreciating the complex interdependencies within-and-between living and nonliving matter, Haraway’s species-meeting might obscure bacteria and the inorganic figures only as ‘land’ (which is, itself, composed mainly of bacteria).

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Indeed, bacteria – the last universal common ancestor and on which the biosphere intimately depends – are typically excluded from the literature concerned with human animal bonds (even while they are an immutable material part of all such bonds). Put another way, eating well with bacteria requires an ethics absent from most current formulations. By fore fronting those organisms on whom eating well literally depends, I invite critical reflection upon the serious limitations we create by eclipsing the much more significant relations all animals enjoy with microorganisms – how our eating (well with) bacteria requires a different relational economy.

Eating well with bacteria In the economy of eating, all (human)animals are defined as consumers. Put another way, we are entirely dependent upon fungi and plants, who in turn are entirely dependent upon autotrophic bacteria (bacteria engage in cascading relations of symbioses – mutually sustaining, pathogenic, obligate or otherwise – with other organisms, including other bacteria). Autotrophic organisms: build their bodies exclusively from inert, non-living matter. Their essential mass is composed of organic compounds containing nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen – all derived from the mineral world. Autotrophs transform this raw material into the complex organic compounds which are necessary for life. The preliminary labors of autotrophs are ultimately necessary for the existence of heterotrophs, which obtain their carbon and nitrogen largely from living matter.15 Chemically, autotrophy looks like this: Photoautotrophy: Light energy + CO2 + H2O ⇒ sugar + O2 (waste) Chemo autotrophy (ex. Methanogenesis): Chemical bond energy + CO2 + H2 ⇒ sugar + CH4 (waste) (Human)animals are omniecophagic (converting all plant, animal, organic and inorganic matter into one form or another of human biomass), and omnivoric, a term derived from the latin omne meaning

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everything and vorare meaning to devour.16 In essence, we will eat nearly anything, plant or animal. Michael Pollan eloquently argues that we face a dilemma every time we eat; that is, every time we enter into the earth’s economy of consumption.17 The dilemma arises because we must eat to live, but in doing so we engage ourselves in dependencies on other lives, a dependency that involves killing (whether fauna and/or flora). Animals must also digest the food they eat. All (human)animals’ digestive tracts house millions of bacteria per gram of content, and it is these bacteria that break down the food and enable digestion.18 According to Lora Hooper and her colleagues, who study Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron microflora in mice intestines, the human intestine is the most densely populated organ of the body, and the site of the most intense humanbacterial relationships.19 In our guts, bacteria influence our biology by modulating the expression of genes that shape various physiological functions (884).20 Ruminant animals (cows, sheep, goats, camels, buffalo, deer, elk and so on) live symbiotically with untold multitudes of bacteria that digest their food. The rumen is an organ in which food (grasses and shrubs primarily composed of cellulose) are digested by bacteria and ciliated protozoans. Cows, bacteria, ciliated protozoans, and grass are entangled in a superb collegial symbiotic relationship. Grasses benefit because cattle expand the grasses’ habitat by preventing the spread of trees and shrubs, by fertilizing the soil with manure and spreading and planting grass seeds with their hooves. Bacteria benefit both the cattle and the grass by inventing a way for cattle to digest what would otherwise be indigestible. Without their bacterial companions, ruminant animals, like their termite compatriots, could not digest their food. The beef empire would not exist without bacteria.21 And what an empire it is. In the United Kingdom, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding remain popular food choices.22 In America, eating beef is considered a right, and certainly surpasses apple pie as symbolic of the American white middle-class lifestyle. The Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis provided the public with an insight into human-animal, animal-animal and animal-biota relations. To maximize beef production, large-scale farmers and corporations have not only significantly increased and changed cattle’s diet, they have also made herbivores into carnivores and, indeed, cannibals.23 The enormous increase in the human consumption of steer meat (as well as chickens, pigs and sheep) is dependent upon the monumental shift from the small farm multi-crop approach to the corporate-funded and directed monoagriculture of corn. Mono-agriculture is hazardous: single nonrotated

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crops divest the soil of its resources (such as bacteria) and make its replenishment difficult; corn does not self-fertilize and requires human intervention; and single crops decrease biodiversity. Most of the corn grown in North America (about 60 percent) is used to feed cows, bulls and steers – fed in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) or what Pollan calls ‘new animal cities’.24 The economic logic is simple: feed as many cattle as possible in the shortest amount of time to create the most beef possible. It is exactly opposite to the closed ecological loop of old-style farm logic where animals were fed crop waste products, and crops were fed animal waste products.25 Pollan’s detailed description of the lives of cattle in the beef production industry in North America is sobering. Here, cattle are inseminated via mail-order semen straws. Beef cattle live with their mothers for the first six months of their lives where they live on their mothers’ milk and field grasses. From there the cattle are moved to CAFOs (their mothers have long since been inseminated again to produce another cohort of beef and milk) where they are taught through a process that Pollan describes as ‘backgrounding’ (confined to a pen and made to eat from a trough) to eat corn. For the first time, the rumen encounters an entirely new diet, consisting of liquefied fat (such as beef tallow – the FDA ban on cannibalism makes exceptions in the form of blood products and fat) and protein supplements (including synthetic oestrogen), antibiotics (Rumensin and Tylosin), alfalfa hay and silage (roughage) and corn. About 37,000 cattle consume a million pounds of feed on CAFOs per day. This diet is not good for cattle. As Pollan describes, most cattle on CAFOs are sick from bloating, acidosis, diarrhoea, ulcers, rumenitis, liver disease and a weakening of the immune system which can in turn lead to polio, enterotoxemia, coccidiosis and pneumonia.26 Cattle spend only 150 days on feedlot diets: it is all their bodies can withstand before risking dire illness, and it is long enough to make their bodies fat enough for the food industry to profit from their slaughter for human (and cattle) consumption. Beef itself is not good for human consumption, particularly at the rate of three times a day as in many American diets. Corn-fed meat is worse because it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids. Consuming CAFO-produced beef also means consuming what these cattle consume, including liquefied fat (meaning cattle that have already gone through CAFO production and slaughter), antibiotics, synthetic oestrogen, corn, feather meal, chicken litter, chicken, fish and pig meal and faecal dust. And this is to say nothing of the microbial ecosystem found

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on CAFOs. Commenting on the ‘deep pile of manure’ in which CAFO cattle stand and sleep, Pollan observes that ‘the speed at which these animals will be slaughtered and processed – four hundred an hour… – means that sooner or later some of the manure caked on these hides gets into the meat we eat’ (81–2).27 The four meat-packing companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift and Company, and National) that kill and market four out of every five beef cattle born in America attempt to sterilize the manure by irradiating the cattle carcasses. The feedlots themselves are not good for the environment. They occupy vast swathes of land that could otherwise provide a habitat for biodiverse flora and fauna. And they pollute. Referring to the cattleproduced ‘manure lagoons’ Pollan notes this waste cannot be recycled into the earth as soil fertilizer as old-style farming would do. The nitrogen and phosphorous levels are so high that they would kill the crops. As it is, these lagoons contain heavy metals, hormones and chemicals that end up in downstream waterways, even as far as the Gulf of Mexico where an 8,000 mile zone is so starved of oxygen that only algae and anaerobic microbes can live in it. And CAFOs are linked to the environment and the global food chain through (it will come as no surprise) fossil fuels, and more specifically, petroleum. Pollan estimates that feeding one steer to slaughter-weight uses up 35 gallons – nearly one barrel – of oil.

Remembering and forgetting Like its theoretical companion, gifting, ethics involves remembering and forgetting.28 So, as Pollan describes: the short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represent[s] the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution… Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing or, now, forgetting… What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. [It is] a journey of forget-ting… how and what we eat determines to a great extent what use we make of the world – and what is to become of it (my emphasis).29 Pollan, as I read him, invokes forgetting in terms of human connections with nature; with animals and our environment. Commenting

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on the entanglement of ethics and human connections with the environment, John Urry notes that until very recently, the West had no sense of an ‘inclusive ethical community’: nature had no rights and nature existed only to serve humans.30 In this sense, nature was conceived of as something forgettable. Distilling this shift into terms that strongly resonate with social scientists, and invoking the Lockean concept of natural rights with irony, Roszak states: ‘we are finally coming to recognize that the natural environment is the exploited proletariat, the downtrodden nigger of everybody’s industrial system… Nature must also have its natural rights’.31 This necessitates that we ‘treat “natural” non-humans as autonomous participants…in the world’ and that non-humans have responsibilities as well.32 This is a tall order: non-human participation, let alone responsibilities, challenges the humanocentric restriction of citizenship to people. And to a large degree, ‘the problem of the other is the problem of knowing the other’.33 Haraway’s political project is deeply concerned with this point: that we proceed from an ethics in which the other (animals) cannot relate in and of themselves. It is why Lyotard pivots ethical discussions around a concept of the victim: Some feel more grief over damages inflicted upon an animal than over those inflicted upon a human. This is because the animal is deprived of the possibility of bearing witness according to the human rules of establishing damages, and as a consequence, every damage is like a wrong and turns it into a victim ipso facto. – But, if it does not at all have the means to bear witness, then there are not even damages, or at least you cannot establish them… That is why the animal is a paradigm of the victim.34 The (nonhuman) animal, then, is a victim because of its capacity to both forget (forgive?) and not bear witness (take revenge?).35 Levinas, we know, thought about this too. Zygmunt Bauman observes that Levinas’s theory of ethics ‘is not based on a model of “fair exchange and reciprocity of benefits” (as in John Rawls’s influential social-contract model…), but rather on what Levinas has called a “total responsibility” to the Other “without waiting for reciprocity”’.36 Even so, or perhaps because of this, Levinas does not ultimately enter into a relationship with concentration camp dog Bobby; a relationship in which Bobby may well have responded but remained outside of Levinas’s ken.37 Bobby remains faceless. And if animals ‘big like us’ are precluded from responding – are faceless – how far below our ethical horizon do bacteria fall?38

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Once again, Joost Van Loon’s insightful work on viruses and ‘parasite politics’ provides a way forward: The parasite gives us a rather different ‘Other’ than that elusive figure that is central to the work of Levinas…. Instead of a morally imperative and highly evolved figure, the parasite ‘Other’ is other in its lowness. It is thus more able to resist the idolatry of otherness and total self-negation commonly found in Levinasian-inspired ethics. This resistance is essential if we are not to be entrapped in another, inverse, form of identity politics. In its ‘becoming-host’ the parasite does not allude to the high ground, yet it cannot engage in survivalism either as survival is essentially based on the negation of any form of becoming. In becoming-host, the parasite is the most effective ethical Other to engender a sense of ‘community-in-difference’. That is, rethinking community through the figure of the parasite allows us to steer clear of both the survivalism of the solitary-autonomous but authentic individual and the mediocre identity politics of the herd collective.39 To the parasite, we might well add the multitudes of bacteria that form symbiotic or otherwise relational entanglements with (human)animals. Symbiogenesis is a form of ‘becoming-host’ in which community-in-difference is durational, involving past, present and future.

Surviving humanism A microbial ethics – an ethics of eating well with bacteria – requires that we remember the first (and last) link in the food chain. It must begin with an appreciation of these minute creatures, the stuff of life. From a purely humanocentric perspective, we want to remember that we share (and intimately depend upon) the same microbial ecosystem as everything that we eat. Now, I think it is a safe bet that rumen bacteria will continue to find ingenious ways to digest the corn and whatever else humans see fit to force-feed cattle, chickens, sheep and pigs. So I am not arguing that we replace our ‘save the baby seals’ with ‘save the bacteria’ banners, for the simple reason that we are not capable of eradicating all microbes. Nor, if we define parthenogenesis as defying death, are we capable of killing bacteria. And while I appreciate Haraway’s desire for the kind of eating well that occurred through her colleagues’ discussion of human placental ingestion and carnivore versus vegan diets, I also appreciate that someone who wants to eat well with bacteria will have a quantitatively and qualitatively more difficult time with these issues. Eating well with

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bacteria is decidedly beyond animal rights rhetoric. What it does effect is a startling extension to those with whom we meet-with: To take back our personhood in relation to other animals changes everything. Anyone who seriously engages in this task comes to realize that our planet is replete with opportunities to form personal relationships with many different kinds of beings. Even if most of us end up forming bonds only with domestic animals, it is important to fully digest the fact that millions and millions of potential nonhuman friends exist in our forests and oceans, savannas and swamps. Radically rethinking our relations with other species can change the future; for example, in the context of an endangered species, what if we expanded our concerns about the disappearance of an abstract category to include the concrete reality of death by starvation or disease or poaching or multitudes of feeling, thinking, relational individuals?40 Microbial ethics, then, must appreciate encounters as already deeply and endemically contagious. As Derrida observes: One never eats entirely on one’s own: this constitutes the rule underlying the statement ‘one must eat well.’ It is a rule offering infinite hospitality. And in all differences, ruptures and wars (one might even say wars of religion), ‘eating well’ is at stake. Today more than ever. One must eat well – here is a maxim whose modalities and contents need only be varied, ad infinitum… A discourse thus restructured can try to situate in another way the question of what a human subject, a morality, a politics, the rights of the human subject are, can be, and should be. Still to come, this task is indeed far ahead of us.41 The microbial Other constantly responds. It is a question of how we respond to, as Jamie Lorimer calls it, ‘nonhuman charisma’ outside of current pathogen (and to a much smaller degree, biomimicry) formulations.42 Wonderfully invoking eating, digestion and incorporation as metaphors for theorizing itself, Sara Ahmed writes, ‘we might consider the ontological encounter as a form of eating and digestion; the other is valued as that which one is with, but only so far as it can be taken in by, and incorporated into, the philosophical body’.43 Symbiogenesis, as a kind of failed digestion, environment becoming entangled meshwork organism, offers opportunities to eat well both literally and philosophically.

Notes Preface and Acknowledgments 1 John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 129–46, 139. Epitaph courtesy of Lynn Margulis, in THE THIRD CULTURE: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman. Copyright © 1995 by John Brockman. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 2 Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickenson (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1941), 61. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. 3 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Sex? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).

Chapter 1 1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, 2. 2 Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997); Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999); Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Vicky Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York: Routledge, 1997); Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve, 2000); Elizabeth Wilson, Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (New York and London: Routledge, 1998); Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1994); Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, MerleauPonty, and Levinas (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002). 3 Perhaps I shall be accused of suffering from a bad case of microbiology and geosciences envy. If this means that I have gained a much more nuanced appreciation of the reflexive ways in which my natural scientific colleagues negotiate science and philosophy, then I affirm such an accusation. And yet, might this castigation itself be a ruse to dismiss further critical reflection? I worry that a sense of smugness pervades the social sciences generally and licenses the false impression that natural scientists are largely ignorant of philosophical and social studies of science (they/scientists are observed; we/social scientists are observers) while we can proceed with social scientific 144

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4 5

6

7

8 9

10 11

analyses that assume we may gain sufficient understanding of phenomena by studying what we distinguish as social aspects of materiality. The way in which Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, co-editors of Social Text, referred to Alan Sokal’s article as ‘a little hokey’, revealing of Sokal’s ‘sense of vulnerability’ and their publication of his article as a small act of kindness mixed with pity leaves me cold. Moreover, I have yet to read an article published in a reputable scientific magazine about, say, quantum field theory, written by a sociologist. See Andrew Ross, Science Wars (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996). Alan Sokal, ‘A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,’ Lingua Franca (1996), 51. Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Selected Letters to the Editor,’ in The Sokal Hoax, ed. Editors of Lingua Franca (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 59. Indeed, Alfred North Whitehead described ‘all of Western philosophy’ as ‘a footnote to Plato’ and Martin Heidegger’s more cryptic assessment was that Plato single-handedly set Western philosophy on the dead-end path it still follows today. See Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It (Chantilly, VI: The Teaching Company, 2006), 231. Modern science largely defines itself, explicitly, as the reasoned alternative (or, more forcefully, the catastrophic blow) to religion (and bearing in mind that modern science is impregnated with a heavy dose of ideas from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which infused religion, paganism and all sorts of other influences that we today might identify as more or less ‘scientific’). Witness the Catholic Church’s vehement reaction to Galileo’s endorsement of the Copernican sun-centred account of the solar system. It was Galileo’s insistence that the sun-centerd account was the Truth, that it was certain, universal and necessary, rather than confining the theory to a system that predicted the movement of the planets with greater precision than Ptolemy’s system that got him into trouble. The Bible states that the sun normally moves, since it stood still for Joshua in Aijalon. Copernicus’s system requires the earth to move and the sun to remain still. Galileo was essentially saying that the Bible should be read as a figurative document (and thus open to interpretation) rather than literally. In the context of the Church fighting the Thirty Years War (from 1618–1648) in which millions of people were killed in the name of religion (Protestantism versus Catholicism) the Church understandably took exception to Galileo’s ideas. It is no accident that the motto of the British Royal Society, founded some 300 years ago, is nullius in verba – take nothing on authority. See Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It. Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It, 56. René Descartes, so familiar to social scientists, epitomized Plato’s form of rationalism. Descartes argued that experiments were equivocal because they were particular (to the experimenter, context and so on) and that true knowledge was achievable only through universal hypotheses from which knowledge would be logically deduced. Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It, 112. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 31.

146 Notes 12 Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It, 31. See also the 2007 CBC podcast ‘How to Think About Science’, interview with Steven Shapin. 13 Francis Bacon, The New Organon (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1960), 97. 14 Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It, 44–5. 15 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer present a finely argued exposition of science on the side of the earth giants in Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1985). See also the 2007 CBC podcast ‘How To Think About Science’ interview with Steven Shapin. 16 Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It. 17 Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It, 78. 18 Norman Campbell, Physics, The Elements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1920). 19 Ian Hacking, ‘The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,’ in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 52. 20 Steve Fuller, Philosophy of Science and its Discontents (New York: Guilford Press, 1992), 420. See also Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It, 138; Ian Hacking, ‘The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences’, 55. Another thread woven through the debates between the gods and earth giants is termed naïve realism. This idea takes as its starting point the contention that knowledge ‘good enough’ to make things happen, that is to progress in science and technology, is more important than arriving at Truth per se. ‘Another way of stating this is [to say that] a theory can explain to the satisfaction of a group of thinkers, can make correct predictions, and can even lead to technological applications that work and still be wrong, still not be true of reality’, what Duhem calls the ‘underdetermination of theory by data’. See Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954). This approach is exemplified by Joseph Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1823), in which Fourier devised a mathematical theory of heat independent of what heat actually is. Known as ‘Fourier’s Move,’ it effectively states that understanding the truth of heat is less important, less practical, than understanding how heat behaves. Bacon’s theory echoes this approach insofar as he argued that a method that delivers knowledge about how nature works, is more important than a theory of knowledge in philosophy per se. A number of critics of this approach, best voiced perhaps in Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1975), argue that knowledge derived from method cannot be distinguished from philosophical concerns with true knowledge in this way. 21 Schrödinger formulated the equation for the wave behavior of matter, while Heisenberg formulated the particle behavior equation. 22 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 76.

Notes 147 23 Barad calls this paradox ‘quantum weirdness’ and Bohr wrote ‘Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it’. See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 83. 24 Planck’s Constant (h = 6 × 10–34 joule-seconds) is the point at which micro (quantum) phenomena diverges from macro (Newtonian) phenomena. In other words, phenomena exist at the macro level when Planck’s Constant = 0. I defer here to my father, a physicist, according to whom physics isn’t interested in why this constant exists or how the universe would look if this constant was even slightly different (atoms would be a different size, and life as we know it might not be possible). Concerned about the attraction of thinking in terms of two worlds (the micro and the macro), Erwin Schrödinger produced the famous gedanken known colloquially as ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’. A cat is placed in a sealed box containing a table on which rests a Geiger counter and a radioactive source. If the Geiger counter detects decay, it releases poison, which kills the cat. If the machine does not detect decay, the cat remains alive. The fate of the cat is, in Bohr’s terms, ‘entangled’ with the fate of the atom. Schrödinger’s point is that a simultaneously alive and dead cat defies common sense, which holds that the cat is either alive or dead but not both simultaneously. Schrödinger’s Cat reminds me of Margaret Lock’s fine analysis of the differences in the concept of death between Western and Japanese cultures. But once the test has been actualized, we have crossed the line from probability to certainty. See Edward Norbeck and Margaret Lock, Health, Illness, and Medical Care in Japan: Cultural and Social Dimensions (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987) and Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (2003) Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2003). I also think about the scene from the film The Princess Bride in which the wizard describes one of the characters as only ‘mostly dead’. 25 Quantum theory comes with a number of implications that are worth making explicit. First, quantum theory does not mean chaos all the way down. Indeed, at the quantum level we get patterns, and hence a higher degree of order (all electrons in the known universe are the same: not similar, but exactly the same.) Nor is quantum theory the material proof of anarchism. Second, the universe is not divided up into two simultaneously existing worlds – one at the quantum and one at the macroscopic level (the division itself is anthropocentric: we think atoms are small because we have adopted a particular size scale). Third, and contrary to strong claims about physics as more ‘objective’ because it deals only in empiricism, physics makes liberal use of philosophy through gedankens; practical tools used by physicists to think the unthinkable. Moreover, discussions between Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and others took seriously the metaphysical implications of quantum theory, and Bohr’s writings are replete with commentaries on metaphysics. 26 Personal communication with Brian Hird (2007). 27 William I. Thompson, Gaia 2 Emergence: The New Science of Becoming (New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1991), 14, my emphasis. 28 Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,’ The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr. Vol. 2 Essays 1933–1957 On

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Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: Science Edition Inc, 1949/ 1961), 72. Cliff Hooker, ‘The Nature of Quantum Mechanical Reality’, in R.G. Colodny, ed., Paradigms and Paradoxes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 156. Einstein, Bohr and other physicists debated the ontological and epistemological implications of quantum theory in a series of articles and face-toface meetings including the International Physics Congress and the Fifth Physical Conference in 1927, the Solvay Conferences in 1930 and 1933, the International Congress on Light Therapy in 1932, the Second International Congress for the Unity of Science in 1936, and the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations meeting in 1938. It was in one of these discussions between Einstein and Bohr that Einstein’s famous dictum ‘God does not play dice’ reflected Einstein’s concern with the ontological implications of quantum theory for physicists studying matter. D. Howard, ‘Einstein and Duhem’, in R. Ariew and P. Barker, eds., Pierre Duhem: Historian and Philosopher of Science, Sythese, 83 (1989): 240–1. Einstein, taking the side of the gods, believed that this uncertainty might simply reflect the ‘incompleteness’ of quantum mechanics. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘hidden variable hypothesis’ because it refers to the idea that complete knowledge is possible given the right measurement. Albert Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Descriptions of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ Physical Review 47 (1935): 777–80, 696, my emphasis. Einstein’s disquiet was evident throughout his life. Commenting on the implications of quantum theory, he wrote: ‘To believe this is logically possible without contradiction; but it is so very contrary to my scientific instinct that I cannot forego the search for a more complete conception’ (Albert Einstein, ‘Physics and Reality,’ Journal of Franklin Institute 221 (1936): 349). Einstein’s unease was not without justification: spin-off theories such as Everett, Wheeler and Graham’s (EWG) Model speculate that natural laws are actually probability manifolds producing an almost infinite number of universes, so that not only is everything possible, but everything conceivable will happen in at least one universe. ‘Bell’s Theorem’ states that ‘nonlocal’ correlations exist between any two particles that have once been in contact (see J.S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, 1989)). These sorts of ideas led to Einstein’s famous comment about entanglement: that every time a mouse looks at the universe, the universe must change (and Wolf’s calculation that the mouse’s brain is so small as to make the changes caused by the mouse’s observations negligible. See Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon, 1990). Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,’ 41, 60–1. Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,’ 50. Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,’ 64; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 56.

Notes 149 36 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 205. 37 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 197. My own reading of Bohr’s work sustains Barad’s argument that Bohr is not ‘antirealist’. What his work does suggest, and has been reiterated by others, is that ‘[i]n all these theories there are many quantum descriptions of the same universe. Each of them depends on a way of splitting the universe in two parts such that one part contains the observer and the other part contains what the observer wishes to describe… The quantum description is always the description of some part of the universe by an observer who remains inside it’ (Lee Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 47–8; see also Carlo Rovelli, ‘Relational Quantum Mechanics,’ International Journal of Theoretical Physics 35, no. 8 (1996): 1637–78). As such, the totality of the universe is inaccessible (in an ontological sense) from the observer. 38 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. There is insufficient space here to detail how each physicist’s research contributed to the development of quantum theory (see Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics’). Planck’s discovery of the universal quantum of action, Einstein’s discovery that photo-effects and other physical phenomena depend upon individual quantum effects, Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus, Franck and Hertz’s experiments producing spectra through the impact of electrons on atoms, and a host of other developments, all contributed to what is known today as quantum theory. Quantum theory is now a mature branch of physics with good predictive power at the microlevel: in other words, quantum mechanics works (this was the basis of Fourier’s description of heat: it doesn’t matter that we don’t understand the ontology of heat; it works and that is sufficient). Applications of quantum theory have enabled the development of cell phones, CD players and laptops – about 30 percent of the US gross national product (Tim Folger, ‘Quantum Shmantum,’ Discover 22 no. 9 (2001)). 39 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 88. 40 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 37. Pickering also refers to developments in particle physics to outline his theory of post-humanist ‘noncorrespondence realism’ in which the ‘the representational chains of science terminate not “in the world itself” but in specific captures and framings of material agency’ which are, in effect, closures effected by the outcome of ‘machinic, conceptual, and social maneuverings in fields of material and disciplinary agency’. See Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 186, 194. 41 Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,’ 20–1. 42 Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,’ 22. While he ventured into the implications of quantum theory for understanding metaphysical problems such as consciousness, Bohr was cautious: ‘… I should like to emphasize that considerations of the

150 Notes kind here mentioned are entirely opposed to any attempt of seeking new possibilities for a spiritual influence on the behavior of matter in the statistical description of atomic phenomena’ (Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,’ 11). Social scientists recognize this position because it challenges anthropocentric and popularized notions, not to mention liberal humanist conceptions of the individual as ultimately responsible for her/his willed behavior (expounded in the film What the Bleep? and the like). A number of these applications make strong claims about the applicability of quantum theory to human political, psychological or spiritual concerns. These popularized accounts share a narrative route that goes like this: quantum theory (the hardest of the hard sciences and therefore most objective, valid and so on) proves the nonbifurcation of observer-observed which means that people can control every aspect of their lives (getting rich, having more sex with more attractive partners, overcoming infertility, obesity and so on), and collectively, we can create a peaceful, environmentally responsible humanity – all this by recognizing quantum theory’s ‘message’. For a more explicit link between quantum theory and religion see M. Ricard and T. Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004). But as Barad cautions: ‘In the popular literature, quantum physics is often positioned as the scientific path leading out of the West to the metaphysical Edenic garden of Eastern mysticism. Paralleling these popular renditions, one can find suggestions in the literature that quantum physics is inherently less androcentric, less Eurocentric, more feminine, more post-modern, and generally less regressive than the masculinist and imperializing tendencies found in Newtonian physics. But those who naively embrace quantum physics as some exotic Other that will save our weary Western souls forget too quickly that quantum physics underlies the workings of the A-bomb, that particle physics (which relies on quantum theory) is the ultimate manifestation of the tendency toward scientific reductionism, and that quantum theory in all its applications continues to be the purview of a small group of primarily Western-trained males’ (Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 67–8). 43 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Michael Callon and John Law, ‘After the Individual in Society: Lessons on Collectivity From Science, Technology and Society,’ Canadian Journal of Sociology 22, no. 2 (1997): 1–11; Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science, Trans. P. Bains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); John Law, Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge, 1986); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science; Michel Serres, Les Cinq Sens (Paris: Hachette, 1985); Michael Kearnes, ‘Geographies That Matter: The Rhetorical Deployment of Physicality?’ Social and Cultural Geography 4, no. 2 (2003); Steve Fuller, Social Epistemology (Indiana University Press, 1988); Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory, Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911); Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006); Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and

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Science (London: Yale University Press, 1985); Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). H.M. Collins and Steven Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken’, in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 304. The ‘weak program’ is defined as ‘the idea that sociopsychological causes need only be sought for error, irrationality and deviation from the proper norms and methodological precepts of science. As such, the weak program resembles representationalism in the belief that ‘errors’ in the scientific method can be both measured and taken into account (i.e. eliminated). See David Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30, no. 1 (1999): 113–29. William I. Thompson, Gaia 2 Emergence: The New Science of Becoming, 20. David Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour,’ 90. This seems to come close to Bohr’s definition of objectivity: ‘… however far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is simply that by the word “experiment” we refer to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangement and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics’ (Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,’ 39). David Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour,’ 110. David Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour,’ 87. H.M. Collins Steven Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken,’ 310. See the Bloor-Latour debate in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and the Collins and Yearley debate with Woolgar, Callon and Latour in Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 193. Latour lists the terms he has variously adopted to document the indivisibility of ‘nonsocial’ nature and ‘social’ nature: ‘inscription, visualization, translation, trials, mediation, names of action, black-boxing, historicity of things’. ANT’s approach requires science studies practitioners to take actants seriously, as, according to Latour, scientists already do: ‘any scientist worth the name has been thoroughly redefined by the actors he or she has dealt with’. Bruno Latour, ‘For Bloor and Beyond: A Reply to David Bloor’s “Anti-Latour,”’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30, no. 1 (1999): 121, 126. Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath (draft manuscript, 2008), 2. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 205–6. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 4. Steve Woolgar, ‘Some Remarks about Positivism: A Reply to Collins and Yearley,’ in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 327–42, 332. Michael Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School!,’ in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 350. Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 12. Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 61.

152 Notes 60 Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 20, 29. 61 Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 144. 62 Steve Woolgar, ‘Some Remarks about Positivism: A Reply to Collins and Yearley,’ 335. 63 Michael Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School!,’ 346. 64 Bruno Latour, ‘For David Bloor… and Beyond: A Reply to David Bloor’s “Anti-Latour,”’ 118. 65 Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 26. 66 Michael Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School!,’ 355. 67 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 159. 68 Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 29. 69 Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 7. Again, the strong program argues that everything is ultimately part of nature (such as observers and consciousness), but that causal explanations for scientific phenomena are to be found in social explanations (resonant with Durkheim), which, by its own definition, must be already within nature. Kearnes makes the point that ‘a reductive logic of causality haunts current calls for a “material culture” approach or a rematerialization of contemporary social and cultural geography. An external materiality is acted upon by socio-cultural consumption and thus becomes an object.’ Michael Kearnes, ‘Geographies That Matter: The Rhetorical Deployment of Physicality?,’ Social and Cultural Geography 4, no. 2 (2003): 148. 70 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 35. 71 Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 170. 72 See H. M. Collins Steven Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken’; Karin KnorrCetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); S. Schaffer, ‘Review of B. Latour, The Pasteurization of France,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 22 (1991): 175–92; S. Shapin, ‘Following Scientists Around,’ Social Studies of Science 18 (1988): 533–50; Alan Sokal and J. Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’, Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998). 73 For an example, see Bruno Latour, ‘A Relativistic Account of Einstein’s Relativity,’ Social Studies of Science, 18 (1988): 3–44, 20. In this analysis, Latour asks: ‘in what ways can we, by reformulating the concept of society, see Einstein’s work as explicitly social? Latour’s answer is surprising given his emphasis is on ‘things-in-themselves’ – which would presumably include time/space and gravity – having their own agentic existence. Latour argues that Einstein’s theory of special relativity is, at its root, semiotic theory. He analyzes Einstein’s discussion of special relativity to pivot on the difference between relativism and relativity. Relativism, defined by Latour reading Einstein (using the example of two observers, one on a moving train and one on the station platform), says that all observers can be ‘shifted out’ of a space and time, but when we shift them back in, their reports (of their location) will not be superimposable (they will not agree). Latour seems to think that Einstein’s ‘observers’ are human, whereas Einstein’s observers are simply measuring devices, which the other measuring devices need not

Notes 153 fear, as Latour assumes, ‘might betray, might retain privileges, and send reports that could not be used to expand our knowledge [or require] discipline… to turn them into dependent pieces of apparatus that do nothing but watch the coincidence of hands and notches…’ (Bruno Latour, ‘A Relativistic Account of Einstein’s Relativity,’ 22). Latour argues that Einstein’s theory of special relativity is commensurate with semiotics in which all narrators of texts must be ‘shifted out’ of that text. In other words, ‘… there is no difference to be made in principle, between internal sociology – how to manage the population of actants that make up the content of a text – and external sociology’ (Bruno Latour, ‘A Relativistic Account of Einstein’s Relativity,’ 27). This seems a curious slip. Latour’s point is to demonstrate, through special relativity, that distinguishing between observer (social) and observed (object) is an epistemological dead end. But in practice, the material seems to collapse into the cultural, which then occupies center-stage. 74 Ian Hacking, ‘The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,’ in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture, 52. 75 Adrian Mackenzie and Andrew Murphie, ‘The Two Cultures Become Multiple? Sciences, Humanities and Everyday Experimentation,’ Australian Feminist Studies, 23, no. 55 (2008): 87–100. 76 Adrian Mackenzie and Andrew Murphie, ‘The Two Cultures Become Multiple? Sciences, Humanities and Everyday Experimentation,’ 89.

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Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (New York: Organe Judd, 1868), 204. R.Y. Stanier and C.B. van Niel, ‘The Concept of a Bacterium,’ Archives of Microbiology 42 (1962): 17–35. Epitaph by permission of Archives of Microbiology and Springer Publishing. Albert Einstein. URL: < http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2310>. Accessed August 2008. Of course, and as Latour points out, the human eye, microscopes and laboratories have been key to understanding bacteria at all, at the same time that bacteria are notoriously resistant to laboratory culturing. See Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, 113–73. How small is small? Bacteria are about 1/10 to 1/100 the size of microorganisms such as Paramecium and Amoeba, can only be resolved with a microscope. How big is big? The largest bacteria is Epulsopiscium fishelsoni, a gram-positive bacteria that inhabits surgeonfish guts. It is rod-shaped and about 0.08 × 0.6 millimeters (half a millimeter) long, which is bigger than most animal cells, and can be seen with the unaided human eye. Betsey Dexter Dyer, A Field Guide To Bacteria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 14. R.A. Lafferty, ‘Slow Tuesday Night,’ in Nine Hundred Grandmothers (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press, 1999), 134–42. I thank Bronislaw Szerszynski for drawing my attention to Lafferty’s writing. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 309–10.

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CBC Radio, ‘How to Think About Science’, 2007. URL: Date accessed: March 2008. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, 100. Arthur C. Clarke, Greetings Carbon Based Bipeds! (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 333. For industrial mimicry of microbes see Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002). Judith Roof, ‘From Protista to DNA (and Back Again): Freud’s Psychoanalysis of the Single-Celled Organism,’ in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 101–20. Judith Roof, ‘From Protista to DNA (and Back Again): Freud’s Psychoanalysis of the Single-Celled Organism,’ 105. Anticipating my argument in Chapter 5, Roof points out that sexuality is not an ‘originary process’ if sexual reproduction turns out to be an evolutionary accident. It also means that protists would not be exceptions to ‘evolution’s rule’ (Judith Roof, ‘From Protista to DNA (and Back Again): Freud’s Psychoanalysis of the Single-Celled Organism,’ 113). Dorion Sagan, ‘Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity,’ in Incorporations, eds. J. Crary and S. Kwinter (New York: Urzone Books, 1992), 377. Haraway explicitly links symbiosis with epistemology: ‘Yoking together all the way down’, she writes, ‘is what sym-bio-genesis means’ (Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 31). See also Isabelle Stengers, ‘Turtles All the Way Down,’ in the chapter Power and Invention: Situating Science. Trans. P. Bains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 61–74. Interestingly, and foreshadowing the next section of this chapter, scientists have developed technology to allow SSU rRNA sequencing from uncultured organisms and mixed pools of DNA (called culture-independent PCR). Even with this, 99 percent of natural microbes are not cultured using standard techniques. See Norman Pace, ‘The Early Branches in the Tree of Life,’ in Assembling the Tree of Life, eds. Joel Cracraft and Michael Donoghue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 79. Sandra Blakeslee, ‘Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,’ The New York Times (October 15, 1996). This section is highly indebted to the following sources: Betsey Dexter Dyer, A Field Guide To Bacteria; Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis (1993) Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible World (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing); John L. Howland, The Surprising Archaea: Dis-covering Another Domain of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Tim Friend, The Third Domain: The Untold Story of Archaea and the Future of Biotechnology (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007). Although not the subject of this chapter, the other kingdoms consist of the following. Protoctists include nucleated microorganisms (eukaryotes) that are not animals, plants or fungi (protists are single-celled protoctists). Fungi are eukaryotes that grow from spores, do not form embryos, do not have undulipodia during any stages of their life cycle. Fungi do not ingest food via mouths, but rather absorb nutrients from water or from protoctist, animal and/or plant tissue. Animals are multicellular organisms with (usually) two sets of chromosomes in each cell that develop from fertilization and result in a zygote and then blastula. Blastulas are common to all animals. Plants are sexually reproducing, multicellular

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eukaryotes that develop from embryos that are never blastular. See Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible World, 86–7. Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible World, 61. Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible World, 61. A number of scientists hypothesize that life began in these anoxic, high alkalinity, very hot temperatures. See, for example, Michael J. Russell, ‘The Importance of Being Alkaline,’ Science 302 (2003): 580–1; W. Martin and Michael J. Russell, ‘On the Origin of Cells: A Hypothesis for the Evolutionary Transitions from Abiotic Geochemistry to Chemoautotrophic Prokaryotes, and from Prokaryotes to Nucleated Cells,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 10, no. 1098 (2002): 1–27. Of course, our 20 percent oxygen atmosphere oxidizes metals without bacteria. Betsey Dexter Dyer, A Field Guide To Bacteria, 118. Betsey Dexter Dyer, A Field Guide To Bacteria, 127. Betsey Dexter Dyer, A Field Guide To Bacteria, 147. Dwayne Savage, as cited in Betsey Dexter Dyer, A Field Guide To Bacteria, 279. Betsey Dexter Dyer, A Field Guide To Bacteria, 205. See Betsey Dexter Dyer, A Field Guide To Bacteria. Deb Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Lynn Margulis, ‘Spirochetes Awake: Syphilis and Nietzsche’s Mad Genius,’ in Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature, eds. Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis (White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). Because methane reacts completely in the presence of oxygen, the continuous presence of methane on earth means that it is continuously being manufactured. About 30 percent of atmospheric methane is produced by grazing animals. See Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible World, 113–15. Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia is Life in a Wasteland of By-products,’ in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, eds. Stephen Schneider, James Miller, Eileen Crist and Penelope Boston (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 27–36. Edward O. Wilson, ‘The Meaning of Biodiversity and the Tree of Life,’ in Assembling the Tree of Life, eds. Joel Cracraft and Michael Donoghue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 539–42, 540. Bruno Latour, ‘From Fabrication to Reality: Pasteur and His Lactic Acid Ferment’ and ‘The Historicity of Things: Where Were Microbes Before Pasteur?,’ in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, 113–44, 145–73. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, 122. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, 124. Latour defines propositions as occasions that allow entities to modify their definition over the course of an event. See Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 141. Astrid Schrader, ‘Phantomatic Species Ontologies: Questions of Survival in the Remaking of Kin and Kind,’ 4S Conference, Vancouver, B.C. (November 2006), 1–10.

156 Notes 39 40

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Astrid Schrader, ‘Phantomatic Species Ontologies: Questions of Survival in the Remaking of Kin and Kind,’ 15. See Jan Sapp, ‘The Prokaryote-Eukaryote Dichotomy: Meanings and Mytholog,’ Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, 69, no. 2 (2005): 292–305. Literalizing Deleuze’s event in a way that I particularly like, bacteria are known less for their morphology (indeed, it is notoriously difficult to distinguish between bacteria, even with microscope technology) and more for their activity: what they do. This goes back to my argument about the ocular imagination, as bacteria are often amorphous to human eyes and therefore cannot be easily distinguished on the basis of appearance. As such, other factors such as metabolism and motility become important practical descriptors. Herbert F. Copeland, The Classification of Lower Organisms (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1956); Thomas P. Curtis, William T. Sloan, and Jack W. Scannell, ‘Estimating Prokaryote Diversity and its Limits,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 99 (2002): 10494–9; Peter Edwards, ‘A Classification of Plants into Higher Taxa Based on Cytological and Biochemical Criteria,’ Taxon 25, no. 5/6 (1976): 529–42; Gordon F. Leedale, ‘How Many are the Kingdoms of Organisms?’ Taxon 23 (1974): 261–70; Robert H. Whittaker, ‘New Concepts of Kingdoms of Organisms,’ Science 163 (1969): 150–60; Robert H. Whittaker and Lynn Margulis, ‘Protist Classification and the Kingdoms of Organisms,’ BioSystems 10 (1976): 3–18; Carl Woese and George Fox, ‘Phylogenetic Structure of the Prokaryotic Domain: The Primary Kingdoms,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 74, no. 11 (1977): 5088–90; Carl Woese, O. Kandler and M.L. Wheelis, ‘Towards a Natural System of Organisms: Proposal for the Domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 87 (1990): 4576–9. Jan Sapp, ‘The Prokaryote-Eukaryote Dichotomy: Meanings and Mythology,’ 301. Molecular phylogeny consists of analyzing sequences of orthologous genes (homologous sequences are orthologous if they are separated by a speciation event) from different organisms such that corresponding DNA can be compared. In this way, scientists attempt to construct phylogenetic genealogies. The greater the differences in DNA sequences, the further apart, hypothetically, the evolutionary distance between organisms. According to W. Ford Doolittle, there are 20100 possible proteins, 100 amino acids long. A sequence identity of more than 15 percent between any two proteins is neither coincidence nor unlikely to be the result of evolutionary convergence (rediscovering the same solution twice). Assessing which genes might tell us something about ‘deep phylogeny’ is dependent upon a number of constraints: (1) the gene must occur in all forms of life; (2) the gene must have resisted lateral transfer; and (3) the genes must contain enough numbers of homologous nucleotides in order to infer relationships with some kind of validity and reliability. See Norman Pace, ‘The Early Branches in the Tree of Life,’ 76–85, 77. E.O. Wilson’s description of the bacteriologist’s field experience is meant to capture a sense of the challenge of classification. He writes, ‘Scientists expert in the classification of each of the most diverse groups, such as bacteria, fungi, and insects, are continuously burdened with new species almost to the breaking point. Working mostly alone and on minuscule

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budgets, they try desperately to keep their collections in order while eking out enough time to publish accounts of a small fraction of the novel life forms sent to them for identification’. Edward O. Wilson, ‘The Meaning of Biodiversity and the Tree of Life,’ in Assembling the Tree of Life, eds. Joel Cracraft and Michael Donoghue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 540. See Julie Sommerlund, ‘The Multiplicity of Classifications and Research Practices in Molecular Microbial Ecology,’ Social Studies of Science 36, no. 6 (2006): 909–28. Sommerlund asks: ‘if you cannot test the VBNC-bacteria – because they cannot live while being tested – how can you tell if they are alive, or even in existence?’ (914). Julie Sommerlund provides an interesting science studies analysis of the tensions between phylogenetic and naturalist approaches. Part of the tension, Sommerlund notes, is about intuition. Hippopotamus and wart hogs intuitively appear on nearby branches because they both have four feet. 16S sequencing, however, reveals that hippos are more genetically related to whales (Julie Sommerlund, ‘The Multiplicity of Classifications and Research Practices in Molecular Microbial Ecology’). Margulis needs to retain the prokaryote-eukaryote distinction because symbiogenesis theory is predicated on the hypothesis that all eukaryotes derive from prokaryotic ancestors. It also recognizes that prokaryotes are monogenomic while eukaryotes are polygenomic through symbiogenesis. Margulis and Whittaker have devised a schema meant to acknowledge the insights of molecular biology while retaining symbiogenesis as the major driving force of evolution. The schema includes the superkingdom Prokaryota, which includes the kingdom Monera (which itself contains Bacteria and Archaea); and the superkingdom Eukaryota, which includes the kingdoms Protoctista, Animalia, Plantae and Fungi. See also Lynn Margulis, Michael Dolan, and Ricardo Guerrero, ‘The Molecular Tangled Bank: Not seeing the Phylogenies for the Trees,’ Biology Bulletin 196 (1999): 413–14, 414. The authors argue that partial phylogenies can never be full phylogenies in the sense that all organisms (with the exception of a few bacteria) have thousands of proteins required at all times for metabolism. Others also argue against the theory that Archaea is a separate domain. See, for example, R.S. Gupta and E. Griffiths, ‘Critical Issues in Bacterial Phylogeny,’ Theoretical Population Biology 61, no. 4 (2002): 423–34; R.S. Gupta, ‘Evolutionary Relationships among Bacteria: Does 16S rRNA provide all the answers?’, ASM News 66 (2000): 189–90; R.S. Gupta, Life’s Third Domain (Archaea): An Established Fact or an Endangered Paradigm?: A New Proposal for Classification of Organisms Based on Protein Sequences and Cell Structure, Theoretical Population Biology 54, no. 2 (1998): 91–104. Jan Sapp, ‘The Prokaryote-Eukaryote Dichotomy: Meanings and Mytholog,’ 302. Julie Sommerlund further adds that the gene sequencing computer programs use assumptions about how close together the branches should be (Julie Sommerlund, ‘The Multiplicity of Classifications and Research Practices in Molecular Microbial Ecology’). Hervé Philippe hypothesizes that prokaryotes derived from eukaryotes. See Hervé Philippe, ‘The Origin and Radiation of Eucaryotes,’ in Assembling the Tree of Life, eds. Joel Cracraft and Michael Donoghue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 95–106. See also Hervé Philippe, Agnès Germot

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and David Moreira, ‘The New Phylogeny of Eukaryotes,’ Current Opinion in Genetics & Development 10, no. 6 (2000): 596–601. See also Joel Cracraft and Michael Donoghue, Assembling the Tree of Life. Maria Rivera and James Lake, ‘The Ring of Life Provides Evidence for a Genome Fusion Origin of Eukaryotes,’ Nature 431 (September 2004): 152–5. Time, as Norman Pace points out, also complicates the metaphor since different lines of descent change at different rates. See Norman Pace, ‘The Early Branches in the Tree of Life,’ 83–4. Nicholas Wade, ‘Life’s Origins Get Murkier and Messier: Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune,’ The New York Times (June 13, 2000). Norman Pace, ‘The Early Branches in the Tree of Life,’ 79. Another set of agential cuts produces a Tree of Life reversal such that eukaryotes preceded prokaryotes within a biota in which an RNA molecule performed tasks now carried out by RNA, DNA and proteins together. This theory is not well supported. See David Penny and Anthony Poole, ‘The Nature of the Last Universal Common Ancestor,’ Current Opinion in Genetics & Development 9, no. 6 (1999): 672–7. See also Hervé Philippe, ‘The Origin and Radiation of Eucaryotes,’ in Assembling the Tree of Life, 95–106. Maria Rivera James Lake, ‘The Ring of Life Provides Evidence for a Genome Fusion Origin of Eukaryotes,’ Nature 431 (September 2004): 154. ‘Noise’ is defined as the degree to which interference obscures a phylogenetic signal. See W. Ford Doolittle, ‘Bacteria and archaea,’ in Assembling the Tree of Life, 92. D. Brochier, E. Bapteste, D. Moreira and H. Philippe, ‘Eybacterial Phylogeny Based on Translational Apparatus Proteins,’ Trends in Genetics 18 (2002): 1–5. James R. Brown, Christophe J. Douady, Michael J. Italia, William E. Marshall and Michael J. Stanhope, ‘Universal Trees Based on Large Combined Protein Sequence Datasets,’ Nature Genetics 28 (2001): 281–5. W. Ford Doolittle, ‘Bacteria and archaea,’ in Assembling the Tree of Life, 93. Hervé Philippe, ‘The Origin and Radiation of Eucaryotes,’ 97–8. Hervé Philippe, ‘The Origin and Radiation of Eucaryotes,’ 98. Hervé Philippe, ‘The Origin and Radiation of Eucaryotes,’ 98. In a cascade of complications, slow-evolving lineages can also be misplaced by the LBA artifact, at least in Aquificales and Thermotogales. Hervé Philippe, ‘The Origin and Radiation of Eucaryotes,’ 99. A good accessibly written book on the scientific search for the origins of life is Robert M. Hazen, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007). Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944); Sorin Sonea and Leo Mathieu, Prokaryotology: A Coherent View (Les Presses de L’Universite de Montreal, 2000); Bernard Dixon, Power Unseen: How Microbes Rule the World (New York: Freeman, 1994). Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 158. Researchers meet-with bacteria through a variety of techniques including computer modeling and environment-manipulating in Petri dishes. See Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine, ‘Self-Engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ Journal of the Royal Society Interface (Published online, 2005), 1–18.

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A. Lazcano, A. Becerra and L. Delaye, ‘Perception: When Life First Perceived its Surroundings,’ in Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution and the Sensory Self, eds. Lynn Margulis and Celeste Asikainen (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishers, forthcoming). Alarmones are modified purine-ribotides, including cyclic AMP (cAMP, adenosine 3′,5′-cyclic monophosphate), cGMP (guanosine 3′,5′-cyclic monophosphate), AppppA (diadenosine tetraphosphate), and ZTP (5-amino-4imidazole carboxamide riboside 5'-triphosphate). See Lazcano, A., Becerra, A. and Delaye, L. (forthcoming). Bacteria also sample (‘taste’) their food before they consume it. Photosynthetic bacteria store low entropy-energy (visible light in the solar spectrum between 350 and 650 nano meters) in nano-sized quanta of ATP molecules that they inject into molecular assemblages for movement and into enzymes for timed (nonrandom, heterogeneicly dispersed) catalysts. The ATP that bacteria create further acts as a kind of sensory system for the genome. For instance, in E. coli, different sets of genes digest different sugars. When a cell can digest a better sugar (say, glucose rather than lactose), a specific gene produces a repressor of the lactose gene (required for lactose digestion). Other genes produce a catabolic activator protein (CAP) that activates the lactose gene. So the lactose genes are expressed only in circumstances in which lactose is present and glucose is absent. Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Generic Modeling of Cooperative Growth Patterns in Bacterial Colonies,’ Nature 368 (1994): 46–9; Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Complex Bacterial Colonies,’ Nature 373 (1995): 566–7; Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Bacterial Wisdom, Godel’s Theorem and Creative Genomic Webs,’ Physica A 248 (1998): 57–76; Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Bacterial Self-organization: Co-enhancement of Complexification and Adaptability in a Dynamic Environment,’ Philosophical Transactions – Royal Society. Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 361(2003): 1283–312; Eshel Ben-Jacob et al., ‘Bacterial Linguistic Communication and Social Intelligence,’ Trends in Microbiology 12, no. 8 (2004): 366–72; Eshel Ben-Jacob, Y. Shapira and A.I. Tauber, ‘Seeking the Foundations of Cognition in Bacteria: From Schrödinger’s Negative Entropy to Latent Information,’ Physica A 359 (2006): 495–524; Eshel Ben-Jacob, Y. Shapira and A.I. Tauber, ‘Bacterial Sociality: Communication and Social Intelligence in Bacteria,’ in Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution and the Sensory Self, eds. L. Margulis and C. Asikainen (White River Junction: VT: Chelsea Green Publishers, forthcoming). See also B.J. Crespi, ‘The Evolution of Social Behavior in Microorganisms,’ Trends in Ecological Evolution, 16 (2001): 178–83. James A. Shapiro and Martin Dworkin, Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Bacterial Self-organization: Co-enhancement of Complexification and Adaptability in a Dynamic Environment,’ 1300. Ben-Jacob (forthcoming). See http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/movie.html for video clips of the bacterial processes described here. Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Bacterial Self-organization: Co-enhancement of Complexification and Adaptability in a Dynamic Environment,’ 1300. Eshel Ben-Jacob, I. Cohen, I. Golding, D. Gutnick, M. Tcherpakov, D. Helbing and I. Ron, ‘Bacterial Cooperative Organization Under Anti-

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biotic Stress,’ Physica A 282, no. 1 (2000): 247–82; Ilan Ron, Ido Golding, Beatrice Lifsitz and Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Bursts of Sectors in Expanding Bacterial Colonies as a Possible Model for Tumor Growth and Metastases,’ Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 320 (2003): 485–96. Richard Losick and D. Kaiser, ‘Why and How Bacteria Communicate,’ Scientific American 276, no. 2 (1997): 73. Bonnie Bassler, ‘Small Talk: Cell-to-Cell Communication in Bacteria,’ Cell 109 (2002): 421–4. Bonnie Bassler, ‘Small Talk: Cell-to-Cell Communication in Bacteria,’ 421. Richard Losick and D. Kaiser, ‘Why and How Bacteria Communicate,’ 68–73. I. Cohen, I. Golding and E. Ben-Jacob, ‘Biofluiddynamics of Lubricating Bacteria,’ Mathematical Methods Applied to Science 24 (2001): 1429–68; Mark Lyte, ‘Microbial Endocrinology and Infectious Disease in the 21st Century,’ Trends in Microbiology 12 (2004): 14–20. Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine, ‘Self-engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ 2–3. For a detailed description of the biochemical processes involved in Myxococcus xanthus sporulation, see J.M. Kuner and D. Kaiser, ‘Fruiting Body Morphogenesis in Submerged Cultures of Myxococcus xanthus,’ Journal of Bacteriology 151, no. 2 (1982): 458–61. Eshel Ben-Jacob, Israela Becker, Yoash Shapira and Herbert Levine, ‘Bacterial Linguistic Communication and Social Intelligence,’ Trends in Microbiology 12, no. 8 (2004): 366–72. James A. Shapiro, ‘The Significance of Bacterial Colony Patterns,’ BioEssays 17, no. 7 (1995): 597–607. Although it goes against the traditional Kotchian isolation of a single bacterium, studying bacteria as multicellular colonies affords new ways to meet-with bacteria. As Ben-Jacob and Levine write, ‘the idea that bacteria act as unsophisticated uncommunicative and uncooperative cells stems from years of laboratory experiments where the bacteria are grown in Petri dishes under benign conditions’. Eshel BenJacob and Herbert Levine, ‘Self-engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ 1. James A. Shapiro, ‘The Significance of Bacterial Colony Patterns,’ 597. Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine, ‘Self-engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ 10. Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine, ‘Self-engineering Capabilities of Bacteria,’ 2. Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Bacterial Self-organization: Co-enhancement of Complexification and Adaptability in a Dynamic Environment,’ 1285. Eshel Ben-Jacob, Israela Becker, Yoash Shapira and Herbert Levine, ‘Bacterial Linguistic Communication and Social Intelligence,’ 367. Eshel Ben-Jacob, Israela Becker, Yoash Shapira and Herbert Levine, ‘Bacterial Linguistic Communication and Social Intelligence,’ 367. Greg Bear, Blood Music (New York: I Books, 2002). Eshel Ben-Jacob, Israela Becker, Yoash Shapira and Herbert Levine, ‘Bacterial Linguistic Communication and Social Intelligence,’ 371. Eshel Ben-Jacob, Israela Becker, Yoash Shapira and Herbert Levine, ‘Bacterial Linguistic Communication and Social Intelligence,’ 371. Transposons are DNA sequences that can move to different positions within a

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single cell’s genome. Transposons are classified into one of two classes: retrotransposons in which RNA copy and paste sequences back into the genome; and DNA transposons which cut and paste DNA into the genome. J.P. Rasicella, P.U. Park, P.U. and M.S. Fox, ‘Adaptive Mutation in Escherichia coli: A Role for Conjugation,’ Science 268 (1995): 418–20. Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Bacterial Wisdom, Godel’s Theorem and Creative Genomic Webs,’ 65. Margulis maintains that these bacterial ancestors were already ‘conscious entities’ insofar as awareness of the surrounding environment is a condition of life. Eukaryotes’ neurons derive from symbiogenetic bacterial mergers: as we have already seen, cells (including neurons) are heterogenomic, complex and with multiple ancestors. Spirochetes, Margulis theorizes, became the undulipodia of eukaryotic cells. With their 24-nanometer tubules, spirochetes are homologous to the neurotubules of the neurons. Indeed, animal sense organs – auditory, visual, tactile and gustatory – are composed of undulipodiated cells. Eshel Ben-Jacob, ‘Bacterial Wisdom, Godel’s Theorem and Creative Genomic Webs,’ 70. Gregory Bateson, ‘Form, Substance, and Difference: Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Memorial Lecture,’ in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 448–64. C.S. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (vols. 1–6) and A. Burks (vols. 7–8) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958). Biosemiotics is also associated with Jakob von Uexküll, Yuri Stepanov and Gregory Bateson. Zoosemiotics concerns the scientific study of signaling behavior amongst nonhuman animals where ‘a living animal is the transcoder in a biological version of the traditional information-theory circuit’. While zoosemiotics has initiated studies much more concerned with animal communication in its own right – inevitable comparisons with human communication are made, with humans decidedly in the complexity and sophistication lead. See Thomas A. Sebeok, ‘Zoosemiotics,’ American Speech 43, no. 2 (1968): 143. See also Thomas A. Sebeok, Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994) and Thomas A. Sebeok, Global Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Jesper Hoffmeyer, ‘Biosemiotics,’ in Encyclopedia of Semiotics, ed. P. Bouissac (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 82. Jesper Hoffmeyer, ‘Biosemiotics,’ 83. Alexei Sharov, ‘What is Biosemiotics?’ URL: Accessed September 2, 2008. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Jesper Hoffmeyer, ‘Biosemiotics,’ 84. Jesper Hoffmeyer, ‘Biosemiotics,’ 84. Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign and its Masters (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1979). See also Jesper Hoffmeyer, Signs of Meaning in the Universe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). I am in agreement with Hoffmeyer’s characterization of the ‘seclusion’ of eukaryotic organisms relative to bacterial openness to foreign DNA. On the other hand, I think that Ben-Jacob and colleagues’ research on bacterial decision-making might

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complicate Hoffmeyer’s suggestion that eukaryotes developed greater semiotic degrees of freedom than prokaryotes. See Jesper Hoffmeyer, ‘How Can It Be the Case That the World Contains Human Beings?’ Australian Feminist Studies, 23, no. 55 (2008): 19–30, p. 25. Robert E. Park, ‘Human Ecology,’ The American Journal of Sociology 42, no. 1 (1936): 1–15; Robert E. Park, ‘Symbiosis and Socialization: A Frame of Reference for the Study of Society,’ The American Journal of Sociology XLV, no. 1 (1939): 1–25. I thank Martin French for drawing my attention to these articles. Rober E. Park quoting J. Arthur Thompson, in ‘Human Ecology,’ 3. Robert E. Park, ‘Human Ecology,’ 13. G. Runciman, Personal email communication (May 1, 2008). Graham Harman, The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath, 118. Anna Tsing, ‘Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,’ in Thinking With Donna Haraway, ed. S. Ghamari-Tabrizi (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming). See also Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), especially Chapter 5. For Tsing, the Meratus people’s relationship with the flora and fauna is neither naïve nor romantic: it is a practical living-with in symbiotic domestication. Alphonso Lingis, ‘Animal Body, Inhuman Face,’ in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 166. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), chapters 7 and 11. Alphonso Lingis, ‘Animal Body, Inhuman Face,’ 168. Joost Van Loon, ‘Parasite Politics: On the Significance of Symbiosis and Assemblage in Theorizing Community Formations,’ in Politics at the Edge, eds. C. Pierson and S. Tormey (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 241–53. Joost Van Loon, ‘Parasite Politics: On the Significance of Symbiosis and Assemblage in Theorizing Community Formations,’ 250. Joost Van Loon, ‘Epidemic Space,’ 46. Joost Van Loon, ‘Epidemic Space,’ 49. Joost Van Loon, ‘Epidemic Space,’ 48–9.

Chapter 3 1 Joel Cracraft and Micheal Donoghue (eds.), Assembling the Tree of Life, 86. Epitaph by permission of Oxford University Press Inc. 2 Roger Stanier, ‘Some Aspects of the Biology of Cells and Their Possible Evolutionary Significance,’ in Organization and Control in Prokaryotic Cells, eds. H.P. Charles and B.C. Knight. Twentieth Symposium of the Society for General Microbiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 31. Epitaph reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Reproduced with permission. 3 George Orwell in Michael Crichton, State of Fear (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), ix.

Notes 163 4 Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, Second Ed. (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1981). 5 J.B. Edelmann and M.J. Denton, ‘The Uniqueness of Biological SelfOrganization: Challenging the Darwinian Paradigm,’ Biology and Philosophy 22, no. 4 (2007): 579–601. 6 I take on board critiques of Kuhn’s thesis concerning paradigm shifts, but nevertheless find Kuhn’s general theory of use in thinking through neoDarwinism as normal science. For critiques see Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science (Columbia University Press, 2005). 7 See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. 8 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. 9 Anna Tsing, ‘Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,’ in Thinking With Donna Haraway, ed. S. Ghamari-Tabrizi (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming). 10 Cleveland, L.R. and Grimstone, A.V. ‘The Fine Structure of the Flagellate Mixotricha paradoxa and its Associated Microorganisms,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society, B (1964), 159: 668–860. Michael F. Dolan, ‘Speciation of Termite Gut Protists: The Role of Bacterial Symbionts,’ International Microbiology 4, no. 4 (2001): 203–8; Michale F. Dolan and H. Melnitsky, ‘Patterns of Protist-Bacteria Associations in the Gut of the Wood-feeding Cockroach Cryptocerus,’ Journal of the North Carolina Academy of Science 121, no. 2 (2005): 56–60. 11 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, ‘The Beast with Five Genomes,’ Natural History (June 2001). 12 A. Vucinich, ‘Foreword’, in Concepts of Symbiogenesis: A Historical and Critical Study of the Research of Russian Botanists, L.N. Khakhina (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), vii–xiv, viii, x. 13 See Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, and Helga Nowotny, The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1994); Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 14 Donna Mehos, ‘Appendix: Ivan E. Wallin and His Theory of Symbioticism,’ in Concepts of Symbiogenesis: A Historical and Critical Study of the Research of Russian Botanists, L.K. Khakhina (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 149–64. The abject rejection of Wallin’s theory provides further evidence for (it is indeed a veritable ‘sub-plot’ of the symbiogenesis story) the ways in which normal science responds to anomalies through cognitive reasoning and normative sanctioning (in this case attacks on Wallin’s credibility as a scientist) (Mehos in Khakhina, 1992). 15 Sapp (J. Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) makes the point that Marx was aware of mutualism arguments that engaged evidence of symbiosis and speculates that Marx

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found the neoDarwinian emphasis on struggle for survival fit more closely with his developing theory of class conflict. The outline of Margulis’s symbiogenesis theory can be found in Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution; Lynn Margulis, ‘Big Trouble in Biology: Physiological Autopoiesis versus Mechanistic neo-Darwinism,’ in Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution, eds. L. Margulis and D. Sagan (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997); Lynn Margulis and Rene Fester, Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and Lynn Margulis and Karlene Schwartz, Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth, Third Ed. (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1998). Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. S. Sonea and L. Mathieu, Prokaryotology: A Coherent View (Les Presses de L’Universite de Montreal, 2000); I.E. Wallin, Symbioticism and the Origin of Species (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1927). T.M. Embley and R.P. Hirt, ‘Early Branching Eukaryotes?’, Current Opinions in Genetic Development 8, no. 6 (1998): 624–9; Hervé Philippe, ‘The Origin and Radiation of Eucaryotes,’ 97. Interestingly, findings that the first three eukaryote lineages to emerge (diplomonads, microsporidia, and trichomonads) do not have mitochondria, suggests that mitochondrial symbiogenesis occurred relatively late during eukaryote evolution. Other research suggests that mitochondria were lost for some organisms through LGT. Ernsy Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001). These propositions are taken from Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Boston: MIT Press, 2005), 29. Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 204, my emphasis. For symbiogenesis theory, evolution is characterized by greater discontinuity than the ‘variable speedism’ espoused by Dawkins or Eldridge and Gould’s ‘punctuated equilibria’ because it does not depend on sexual reproduction. See Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (London: Penguin Books, 1996) and Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). For instance, ciliates have been found to show Lamarckian inheritance. If a piece of a ciliate’s (a eukaryotic protist) cortex is removed, inverted and reinserted, its offspring’s cortex will also be inverted. See William Martin and T. Martin Embley, ‘Early Evolution Comes Full Circle,’ Nature 431 (9 September 2004): 134–7; Maria Rivera and James Lake, ‘The Ring of Life Provides Evidence for a Genome Fusion Origin of Eukaryotes,’ Nature 431 (9 September 2004): 152–5. See also J.B. Edelmann and M.J. Denton, ‘The Uniqueness of Biological Self-Organization: Challenging the Darwinian Paradigm,’ Biology and Philosophy 22, no. 4 (2007): 579–601 (on biological self-organization as Lamarckian). This and the previous quote by Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 140, 141, 143, my emphasis.

Notes 165 24 J.B. Edelmann and M.J. Denton, ‘The Uniqueness of Biological SelfOrganization: Challenging the Darwinian Paradigm,’ Biology and Philosophy 22, no. 4 (2007): 579–601. 25 Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 75. Margulis argues that while symbiogenesis theory is clearly at odds with neoDarwinism, it does not contradict Darwin’s original theory. The literature suggests that Darwin, although convincing his colleagues of evolution itself, struggled to situate natural selection as the heart of the evolutionary process – the ‘law of higgledy-piggledy’ as physicist Herschel called it (in S. Kingsland, ‘Evolution and Debates Over Human Progress from Darwin to Sociobiology,’ Population and Development Review, 14 Suppl. (1988): 167–98, 174). However, the only available alternatives at the time sought some force internal to the organism (as in Lamarckism) or external (God). Young alludes to Darwin’s own intuition that there was more to evolution by natural selection by renaming his famous book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and All Sorts of Other Things, 107. 26 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 318. See also Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 27 J.B. Edelmann and M.J. Denton, ‘The Uniqueness of Biological SelfOrganization: Challenging the Darwinian Paradigm,’ 586. 28 For critiques of this position see Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Theresa Marie MacPhail, ‘The Viral Gene: An Undead Metaphor Recoding Life,’ Science as Culture 13, no. 3 (2004): 325–44; Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, Second Ed. (Duke University Press, 2000); Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2004); and Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 29 Lynn Margulis, ‘Genetic and Evolutionary Consequences of Symbiosis,’ Experimental Parasitology 39 (1976): 279. 30 Lynn Margulis, ‘Big Trouble in Biology: Physiological Autopoiesis versus Mechanistic neo-Darwinism,’ in Slanted Truths. Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution, eds. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997), 273. 31 E. White, ‘In the Beginning was Slime Mold: Evolution and the Grotesque,’ SLSA Conference paper (November 2006). 32 Joan Strassmann and David Queller, ‘Altruism among Amoebas,’ Natural History (September 2007): 24–9. 33 Lynn Margulis and Karlene Schwartz, Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth, Third Ed. (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1998). 34 Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis, 206. 35 Within the cascade of corollaries, we must also consider the agential cut enacted by the epistemic privileging of disciplinary boundaries. Symbiogenesis theory remains a meta-disciplinary discourse focused on interactions that, unlike genetics, requires the integration of research from a range of disciplines including microbial and cell biology, biochemistry, genetics, geology, marine biology and paleontology. Requiring scientists in diverse specializations to collaborate is challenging: sub-disciplines use their

166 Notes

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own languages and epistemes and scientists are generally not encouraged to work outside their sub-discipline. See Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) first described microbes, using the best microscopes that could magnify objects 270 times. Swabbing his teeth with a stick (aka toothbrush), van Leeuwenhoek observed a microcosmos teeming with minute organisms. Joseph Amato notes that it did not take long for this teeming mass to be enveloped within a negative biopolitics of germ theory, a kind of ‘what you don’t know (and can’t see) does hurt you’. See Joseph Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 97, 103. A number of prokaryotologists also object to biological language that describes bacteria as pathogens, as ‘simple’ life forms compared with the ‘complexity’ of larger forms of life, while simultaneously obfuscating Homo sapiens’ bacterial origins and current status as symbionts. See Sonea and Mathieu (2000). Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, 143. Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life, 132. According to Margulis, even most molecular biologists do not explicitly recognize that they are studying symbioses. She writes, ‘The literature of eukaryotic molecular biology grows, but the practitioners of this science do not think of themselves as analysts of integrated symbioses. That they are studying a latter-day microbial community and its interactions has not yet been factored into their thinking’. See Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, The Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 18. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 60. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 35, 40. Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis, 208. ‘Cytoplasmic heredity’ in sexually reproducing organisms is the inheritance of genetic traits from a single parent and independent of nuclear genes (Jinks, 1964). A number of phenomena once considered to conform to nuclear (vertical) inheritance principles are now known to be cases of uni-parental or nonMendelian bi-parental transmission (see Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 1981); Moraes et al., ‘Mitochondrial DNA deletions in progressive external ophthalmoplegia and Kearns-Sayre syndrome,’ New England Journal of Medicine 320, no. 20 (1989): 1293–9; G. Singh, M.T. Lott and D.C. Wallace, ‘A Mitochondrial DNA Mutation as a Cause of Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy,’ New England Journal of Medicine 320 (1989): 1300–5. David Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988) provides a succinct account of the gene/cell/organism/species unit of selection debate. Symbiogenesis theory’s understanding of the symbiont differs from Hull’s definition of ‘interactor’ (408) insofar as the ‘entity’ cannot be distinguished from its environment (i.e. the entity is its environment). This entity also replicates, for instance in mitosis. Woese argues that the Archaean was a pre-Darwinian time in which there were no such thing as individuals that competed. See Carl Woese, ‘A New

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Biology for a New Century,’ Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 68, no. 2 (2004): 173–86 and Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese, ‘Connections Biology’s Next Revolution,’ Nature 445 (25 January 2007). Charles Mann, ‘Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother,’ Science 252 (1991): 378–81, p. 252. See also David Stamos, The Species Problem: Biological Species, Ontology, and the Metaphysics of Biology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003). Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese, ‘Connections Biology’s Next Revolution,’ Nature 445 (25 January 2007): 369. Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 86–7. Lynn Margulis, ‘Gaia is a Tough Bitch,’ in The Third Culture, ed. J. Brockman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 135. Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis. As Sahl wryly notes, ‘Remember that no matter how selfish, how cruel, how unfeeling you have been today, every time you take a breath, you make a flower happy’, in Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 55. Newly discovered symbiotic relationships are consistently reported in scientific journals. Symbiosis has been identified in monads and polymonads, dyads and polydyads (such as mitochondria), triads and polytriads (such as ‘anaerobic’ worms, amoebae and photosynthetic animals), quadrads and polyquadrads (such as wood-eating insects and nitrogen fixation by legumes) and pentads and polypentads (for instance invertebrate animals and land plants). See H. Timourian, ‘Symbiotic Emergence of Metazoans,’ Nature 226 (18 April 1970): 283–4; L. Marquez et al., ‘A Virus in a Fungus in a Plant: Three-way Symbiosis Required for Thermal Tolerance,’ Science 63 (2007): 545–58; Lynn Margulis, ‘Genetic and Evolutionary Consequences of Symbiosis,’ Experimental Parasitology 39 (1976): 277–349; D.J. Depew and B.H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002); R. Law, ‘The Symbiotic Phenotype: Origins in Evolution,’ in Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation, eds. Lynn Margulis and Rene Fester (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 57–71; W. Martin and T.M. Embley, ‘Early Evolution Comes Full Circle,’ Nature 431 (9 September 2004): 134–7; J. Maynard Smith, Evolutionary Genetics, Second Ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); P. Nardon and A.M. Grenier, ‘Serial Endosymbiosis Theory and Weevil Evolution: The Role of Symbiosis,’ Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation, eds. Lynn Margulis and Rene Fester (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 153–69; M. Rivera and J. Lake, ‘The Ring of Life Provides Evidence for a Genome Fusion Origin of Eukaryotes,’ Nature 431 (9 September 2004): 152–5; D.C. Smith and A.E. Douglas, The Biology of Symbiosis (London: Edward Arnold, 1987). W. Ford Doolittle, ‘Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree,’ Science 284 (1999): 2124–9; Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese, ‘Connections Biology’s Next Revolution.’ H. Ochman, J.G. Lawrence and E.A. Groisman, ‘Lateral Gene Transfer and the Nature of Bacterial Innovation,’ Nature 405 (2000): 299–304.

168 Notes 51 Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese, ‘Connections Biology’s Next Revolution,’ 369. 52 Fredrik Bäckhed, Ruth Ley, Justin Sonnenburg, Daniel Peterson and Jeffrey Gordon, ‘Host-Bacterial Mutualism in the Human Intestine,’ Science 307, no. 5717 (25 March 2005): 1915ss–1920ss; Steven Gill et al., ‘Metagenomic Analysis of the Human Distal Gut Microbiome,’ Science 312, no. 5778: 1355–9; E. Singer, ‘A Better Biofuel,’ Technology Review (Tuesday 3 April 2007): 1; Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis; J.B. Edelmann and M.J. Denton, ‘The Uniqueness of Biological Self-Organization: Challenging the Darwinian Paradigm,’ 579–601. 53 See for example C.G. Kurland, L.J. Collins and D. Penny, ‘Genomics and the Irreducible Nature of Eukaryotic Cells,’ Science 12 (19 May 2006): 1011–14; P. Godfrey-Smith, ‘Is it a Revolution?’ Biology and Philosophy 22 (2007): 429–37. 54 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 197. 55 Joe Collier, ‘The Politics of Scientific Reputation,’ British Medical Journal 313 (1996): 888. 56 Thomas Cavalier-Smith, ‘Microbial Muddles,’ BioScience 53 (10 October 2003): 1008–13, 1009, 1010. 57 For excellent work on women’s continued struggles in science see Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1994); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Helen Longino, Women, Gender and Science: New Directions (Osiris 12) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997); M. Mayberry, B. Subramaniam and L. Weasel, Feminist Science Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001). For public understandings of science literature see Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology. Biographies of Margulis invariably make reference to her early marriage to astronomer Carl Sagan, and employ various terms (such as ‘Gaia’s Unruly Earth Mother’) to preference the fact that she is a woman scientist (Charles Mann, ‘Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother.’) They also frequently recount that she has four children and that she and her son Dorion Sagan write science books for public consumption. By contrast, how many people know how many children Mayr, Maynard-Smith, Gould, Cavalier-Smith or Dawkins have, or who they have been married to. 58 Mayr in Charles Mann, ‘Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother,’ Science 252 (1991): 378. 59 W. Ford Doolittle in Charles Mann, ‘Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother,’ Science 252 (1991): 3381. 60 Maynard Smith in Charles Mann, ‘Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother,’ Science 252 (1991): 379. 61 This is part of what Pickering refers to as the ‘mangle of practice’. Whether symbiogenesis theory will, eventually, display greater or lesser correspondence, is a scientific point. My argument is that this correspondence cannot be easily separated from the mangle, including every minute element of the whole science program (from measuring instruments, funding and so on). See Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. 62 This title is taken from ‘Darwin’s Metaphor: Does Nature Select?’ The Monist 55 (1971): 442–503.

Notes 169 63 See, for example, Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment; Richard Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, Second Ed. (New York: New York Review Books, 2001); Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 64 Carl Zimmer, ‘Now: The Rest of the Genome,’ New York Times (10 November 2008). URL: . Accessed November 11, 2008. I thank Christopher Canning for directing my attention to this article. 65 My interest here in not in detailing intelligent design or creationist critiques of evolutionary theory. 66 For critiques of neoDarwinism that emphasize symbiosis, see Connie Barlow, The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991); Frank Ryan, Darwin’s Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002); Jaroslav Flegr, Frozen Evolution (Prague: Charles University in Prague, 2008); Christian deDuve, Singularities: Landmarks on the Pathways of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 67 Margaret McFall-Ngai, ‘Unseen Forces: The Influence of Bacteria on Animal Development,’ Developmental Biology 242 (2002): 1. See also L.V. Hooper, M.H. Wong, A. Thelin, L. Hansson, P. Falk and J. Gordon, ‘Molecular Analysis of Commensal Host-Microbial Relationships in the Intestine,’ Science 291 (2001): 881–4. 68 D.A. Relman and S. Falkow, ‘The Meaning and Impact of the Human Genome Sequencing for Microbiology,’ Trends in Molecular Biology 9, no. 5 (2001): 206–8. 69 Margaret McFall-Ngai, ‘Unseen Forces: The Influence of Bacteria on Animal Development,’ Developmental Biology 242 (2002): 4. 70 Lora V. Hooper, Melissa H. Wong, Anders Thelin, Lennart Hansson, Per G. Falk and Jeffrey I. Gordon, ‘Molecular Analysis of Commensal Host-Microbial Relationships in the Intestine,’ Science 291, no. 5505 (2001): 881–4. 71 Margaret McFall-Ngai, ‘Unseen Forces: The Influence of Bacteria on Animal Development,’ 9. I am struggling with a terminology that doesn’t reiterate the term ‘host’ because of its long association with pathogens. 72 Margaret McFall-Ngai, ‘Unseen Forces: The Influence of Bacteria on Animal Development,’ 9–10. 73 Conrad H. Waddington, ‘Epigenetics and Evolution,’ in Evolution, eds. R. Brown and J. Danielli, Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 186–99. 74 Scott Gilbert, ‘The Genome in its Ecological Context: Philosophical Perspectives on Interspecies Epigenesis,’ 214. 75 John Protevi’s three lectures on Deleuze and Biology provide a useful introduction to ‘evo-devo’ (www.protevi.com/john). See also Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life.

170 Notes 76 This is a synopsis of the central dogma explained by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. 77 Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 7. 78 As Sapp writes, ‘Bacteria are composites; they have acquired and integrated genes from diverse taxa. Lateral gene transfer blurs the boundaries between ‘species’. The ease with which genes are interchanged among bacteria has led many microbiologists to suggest that the biological species concept does not apply. See Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology, 231. To give flavor to my ‘and other phenomena’ consider nucleotide replacement. In a sequence of only 100 units (and DNA strands are often much longer), made up of four modules (adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine), 4100 different sequences are possible. This is more than the number of atoms in the galaxy. Sickle cell anemia is caused by a one nucleotide change (an A instead of a T) in the nucleotide sequence in hemoglobin. See Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 55. Consider also that infectious disease microbiologists have found that antibiotic resistance is so successful because bacteria readily exchange antibiotic resistance genes via plasmids. This challenged the expected mechanism of random mutation followed by natural selection. Selection does occur, but the mutations are not ‘within genes within species, but whole genes (or suites of genes) transferred across species boundaries, on which selection was acting’ (Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 88). Now microbiologists talk of ‘pathogenicity islands’ (bacterial specialized clusters of genes that carry virulence factors facilitating bacterial defense and transfer of the island itself), ‘saprophytic islands’ that facilitate decay and ‘ecological islands’ that facilitate metabolism in unusual circumstances (Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 89). And LGT also occurs between domains, between bacteria and archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes and so on: ‘rumor in the field now has it that similar analyses will show that one-third of the genes in the yet-to-be-published genome sequence of the methane-producing archaean Methanosarcina mazei are of bacterial provenance – an astonishing result!’ (Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 90). 79 Eva Jablonka ad Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. 80 Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 7. 81 Jablonka and Lamb make the important point here that Herbert Spencer was among those who took it for granted that evolutionary principles went beyond biology to explain social change as well. In this sense, Spencer and his contemporaries of similar conviction supported Lamarckian evolution. We see a re-formulated extension in Dawkin’s writings on ‘memes’. 82 A logic that works in step with the central dogma argues that gene sequence data is more fundamental than organismal form and function because DNA

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84 85 86

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sequence determines form and function rather than the other way around. Interestingly, and as W. Ford Doolittle points out, this is based on the assumption that different genes in a genome might have different phylogenetic histories, something that Margulis’s research on mitochondria and chloroplasts showed to be the case: ‘the fact that [all of an organism’s genes do not have the same phylogeny] proved the endosymbiont hypothesis’. Moreover, Doolittle asserts that the majority of genes in any bacterial or archaeic genome show different phylogenies, and are produced through nonsymbiogenetic means, leading him to conclude that there is no unique universal genomic tree. See W. Ford Doolittle, ‘Bacteria and Archaea,’ in Assembling the Tree of Life, 86–94, 88. Jablonka and Lamb refer to Lindegren’s research on the bread mould Neurospora in which two-thirds of the mutations do not follow Mendel’s principle in which offspring do not show intermediate characteristics but rather a segregation of traits. Jablonka and Lamb argue this research, like research showing epigenetics in bacteria, transposons (‘jumping genes’) in maize and the like were either ignored or explained away. See Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 43–4; Carl Lindegren, The Yeast Cell, its Genetics and Cytology (St. Louis: Educational Publishers, 1949). Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 87. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 92–7. James Shapiro, as cited in Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 70–1. Mark and Mary Anne Alliegro at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Wood’s Hole are researching the possibility that centrosomes contain DNA. So far, they have established that Spsula oocyte centrosomes contain RNA. See Mark Alliegro and Mary Anne Alliegro, ‘Centrosomal RNA Correlates with Intron-poor Nuclear Genes in Spisula Oocytes,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 19 (5 May 2008): 6993–7. Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis, 204. P. Godfrey-Smith, ‘Is it a Revolution?’ Biology and Philosophy 22 (2007): 430. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 94. Symbiogenesis is the microbial version of the historicity that Latour writes about with regard to humans. A historicity in which there is linear time (the symbiogenesis of nuclear material precedes the symbiogenesis of mitochondria) and also a Bergsonian time in which the past is inherited within the present and future. See Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, 159–62, 171, Figure 5.2. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, 102. Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, 133, 137, 159, 161, and 257. Dawkins used the term ‘misfirings’ to describe all of those actions that do not fit with his selfish gene theory of natural selection during my interview with him on 16 June 2008.

172 Notes 94 Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Sociobiology and the more recent evolutionary psychology is founded upon the application of evolutionary theory to human and animal behavior. See, for instance: Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, Homicide (Aldine Transaction, 1988); David Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of Mind, Third Ed. (Allyn and Bacon, 2007); David Buss, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Wiley, 2005); Stephen Sanderson, The Evolution of Human Sociality: A Darwinian Conflict Perspective (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing, Inc, 2001). 95 For examples of feminist, queer and post-colonial theories see Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird, Queering the NonHuman (Ashgate, 2008) and Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna Haraway (New York: Routledge, 1999). For examples of engagements with symbiogenesis see Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2004).

Chapter 4 1 Marcel Mauss, The Gift. The Form and Reason For Exchange in Archaic Societies, Translated by W.D. Halls (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1950/1990). 2 Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On giving with Nietzsche, MerleauPonty, and Levinas (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002). 3 Nigel Clark, ‘Disaster and Generosity,’ The Geographical Journal 171, no. 4 (2005): 384–6. 4 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet; Karalyn Kendall, ‘The Face of a Dog: Levinasian Ethics and Human/Dog Coevolution,’ in Queering the (Non-)Human. 5 Haraway does make the point that ‘“Companion species” is a bigger and more heterogeneous category than companion animal, [which] must include such organic beings as rice, bees, tulips, and intestinal flora, all of whom make life for humans what it is – and vice versa’ (Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, 15). 6 Richard Feynman, ‘There’s plenty of Room at the Bottom,’ Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems 1, no. 1 (1992): 60–6. 7 Maureen O’Malley and John Dupré, ‘Size Doesn’t Matter: Towards a More Inclusive Philosophy of Biology,’ Biology and Philosophy 22 (2007): 155. 8 Maureen O’Malley and John Dupré, ‘Size Doesn’t Matter: Towards a More Inclusive Philosophy of Biology,’ 155. 9 Nick Bingham, ‘Bees, Butterflies, and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship,’ Environment and Planning A 38 (2006): 483–98, 496.

Notes 173 10 Parts of this section are taken from Myra J. Hird ‘The Corporeal Generosity of Maternity’, Body and Society, 2007, 13 (1): 1–20. Reprinted with kind permission from Sage Publishing. 11 Marcel Mauss, The Gift. The Form and Reason For Exchange in Archaic Societies, ix. 12 Marcel Mauss, The Gift. The Form and Reason For Exchange in Archaic Societies, 12. 13 Marcel Mauss, The Gift. The Form and Reason For Exchange in Archaic Societies, 12. 14 Morna Joy, ‘Beyond the Given and the All-giving: Reflections on Women and the Gift,’ Australian Feminist Studies 14, no. 30 (1999): 315–32. See also M. Godelier, ‘Some Things You Give, Some Things You Sell, But Some Things You Must Keep For Yourselves: What Mauss Did Not Say About Sacred Objects,’ in The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice, eds. E. Wyschogrod; J.J. Goux. and E. Boynton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 19–37. 15 Nigel Clark, ‘Disaster and Generosity,’ 384–6; Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983). 16 Nigel Clark, ‘Disaster and Generosity,’ 93. 17 Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 174–5. 18 Jacques Derrida, Given Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 19 Lingis refers to Nietzsche’s directive that ‘whenever you do a good deed, you should take a stick and thrash any bystander to muddle his [sic] memory. Then you should take that stick and thrash your own head, to muddle your own memory’ (Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, 179). 20 Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On giving with Nietzsche, MerleauPonty, and Levinas, 75. 21 Nigel Clark, ‘Disaster and Generosity,’ 7. 22 Lingis states that ‘what gifts give is the ability to give gifts’ (Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, 181). 23 It is precisely this tension between the generosity and violence of the corporeal that leads Rackham to refer to the HIV virus inside her body as a ‘viral lover’ (2000). 24 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 9. 25 Karalyn Kendall, ‘The Face of a Dog: Levinasian Ethics and Human/Dog Coevolution,’ in Queering the (Non-)Human, eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008), 185–204. 26 Nigel Clark, ‘Disaster and Generosity,’ 7. 27 Robert Wilson, ‘Recent work in individualism in the social, behavioral and biological sciences,’ Biology and Philosophy 19 (2004): 397. 28 Maureen O’Malley and John Dupré, ‘Size Doesn’t Matter: Towards a More Inclusive Philosophy of Biology,’ Biology and Philosophy 22 (2007): 156. 29 Scott Gilbert, ‘Cells in Search of Community: Critiques of Weismannism and Selectable Units in Ontogeny,’ Biology and Philosophy 7 (1992): 478. 30 Scott Gilbert, ‘Cells in Search of Community: Critiques of Weismannism and Selectable Units in Ontogeny,’ 478. 31 Burnet in Thomas Pradeu and Edgardo Carosella, ‘The Self Model and the Conception of Biological Identity in Immunology,’ Biology and Philosophy 21 (2006): 235. 32 Eileen Crist and Alfred I. Tauber, ‘Selfhood, Immunity, and the Biological Imagination: The Thought of Frank Macfarlane Burnet,’ Biology and Philo-

174 Notes

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34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41

42

sophy 15, no. 4 (2000): 510. This genealogy of the association between economic theories of competition, struggle and individualism on the one hand and biology on the other has been taken up within the philosophy and biology literature. See Scott Gilbert, ‘Cells in Search of Community: Critiques of Weismannism and Selectable Units in Ontogeny,’ 473–87. Crist and Tauber argue that the immunological self was not simply ‘imported from a cultural and historical milieu into a scientific context, but rather emerged as an immanent concept within immunology itself (Eileen Crist and Alfred I. Tauber, ‘Selfhood, Immunity, and the Biological Imagination: The Thought of Frank Macfarlane Burnet,’ 517). Alfred Tauber, ‘Postmodernism and Immune Selfhood,’ Science in Context 8, no. 4 (1995): 579–607, 584. In Chapter 5 I discuss Zuckerman and Lederberg’s notion of ‘post-mature’ scientific discoveries, which refers to science’s nearly exclusive concentration on bacteria as pathogens. See Harriet Zuckerman and Joshua Lederberg, ‘Postmature Scientific Discovery?’ Nature 324 (December 1986): 629–31. Eileen Crist and Alfred I. Tauber, ‘Selfhood, Immunity, and the Biological Imagination: The Thought of Frank Macfarlane Burnet,’ 524. In an insightful analysis, Tauber describes Nietzsche’s approach to biology in similar terms: the ‘sovereign subject relates only to that which it constructs or confronts’ (Alfred Tauber, ‘Postmodernism and Immune Selfhood,’ Science in Context 8, no. 4 (1995): 581). The account of symbiogenesis in this paper attempts to exceed Nietzsche’s characterization. Eileen Crist and Alfred I. Tauber, ‘Selfhood, Immunity, and the Biological Imagination: The Thought of Frank Macfarlane Burnet,’ 526. Eileen Crist and Alfred I. Tauber, ‘Selfhood, Immunity, and the Biological Imagination: The Thought of Frank Macfarlane Burnet,’ 526. Myra J. Hird, ‘Chimerism, Mosaicism and the Cultural Construction of Kinship,’ Sexualities 7, no. 2 (2004): 225–40. Gilbert notes that the complex ongoing interaction with the changing environment means that there really isn’t such a thing as identical twins with respect to immunity since no two individuals will have had identical interactions with an identical environment. For these reasons, Pradeu and Carosella propose their ‘continuity hypothesis’ whereby immune activation is triggered by discontinuity of interaction. Understanding commensal bacteria as ‘self’ becomes intelligible within the continuity hypothesis, as a more ‘heterogeneous view of biological identity’. Scott Gilbert, ‘The Genome in Its Ecological Context: Philosophical Perspectives on Interspecies Epigenesis,’ Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 981 (2002): 202–18. See also Thomas Pradeu and Edgardo Carosella, ‘The Self Model and the Conception of Biological Identity in Immunology,’ Biology and Philosophy 21 (2006): 248. Scott Gilbert, ‘The Genome in Its Ecological Context: Philosophical Perspectives on Interspecies Epigenesis,’ 210. Yolanda Lopez-Boado, Carole Wilson, Lora Hooper, Jeffrey I. Gordon, Scott J. Hultgren and William Parks, ‘Bacterial Exposure Induces and Activates Matrilysin in Mucosal Epithelial Cells,’ Journal of Cell Biology 148, no. 6 (2000): 1305–15. Margaret McFall-Ngai, ‘Unseen Forces: The Influence of Bacteria on Animal Development,’ 8; Lora V. Hooper, Melissa H. Wong, Anders Thelin, Lennart Hansson, Per G. Falk and Jeffrey I. Gordon, ‘Molecular Analysis of Com-

Notes 175

43 44

45 46

47 48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57

58 59

mensal Host-Microbial Relationships in the Intestine,’ Science 291, no. 5505 (2001): 881–4. G. Rook and J. Stanford, ‘Give Us This Day Our Daily Germs,’ Immunology Today 19, no. 3 (1998): 113–16. Margaret McFall-Ngai, ‘Unseen Forces: The Influence of Bacteria on Animal Development,’ 1–14. Here I adopt an inclusive definition of co-evolution, which assumes the evolution of already entangled organisms. See Myra Hird, ‘Symbiosis, Microbes, Coevolution and Sociology,’ Ecological Economics 2008, 10(001): 1–6. Lynn Margulis, ‘Genetic and Evolutionary Consequences of Symbiosis,’ 279. For this reason, O’Malley and Dupré argue that eukaryotic cells are a ‘superorganism composed of chromosomal and organellar genes and a multitude of prokaryote and viral symbionts’. Maureen O’Malley and John Dupré, ‘Size Doesn’t Matter: Towards a More Inclusive Philosophy of Biology,’ 157. Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology, 235. Dorion Sagan, ‘Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity,’ 368. Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 86; Eric White, ‘In the Beginning Was Slime Mold: Evolution and the Grotesque,’ SLSA Conference paper, November 2006, 2. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature. Alphonso Lingis, ‘Animal Body, Inhuman Face,’ 166. Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996). See also K. Sterelny, ‘Bacteria at the High Table,’ Biology and Philosophy 14 (1999): 459–70. Cary Wolfe, ‘Introduction,’ in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. C. Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), ix–xxiii. Hiroaki Kitano and Kanae Oda, ‘Robustness Trade-offs and Host-microbial Symbiosis in the Immune System,’ Molecular Systems Biology 2 (2006): 1. Alfred I. Tauber, ‘Postmodernism and Immune Selfhood,’ 579–607. Hiroaki Kitano and Kanae Oda, ‘Robustness Trade-offs and Host-microbial Symbiosis in the Immune System,’ 1–10. See Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene; Scott Gilbert, ‘Cells in Search of Community: Critiques of Weismannism and Selectable Units in Ontogeny’; Theresa Marie MacPhail, ‘The Viral Gene: An Undead Metaphor Recoding Life’; Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution; Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire; Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology. Gilbert observes that economic arguments put forward by political economists such as Adam Smith maintain that competition leads to cooperation. However, Gilbert argues that cooperation must be operative in any interaction in the first place in order for it to come to characterize the interaction (Scott Gilbert, ‘Cells in Search of Community: Critiques of Weismannism and Selectable Units in Ontogeny’). Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 311. Maureen O’Malley and John Dupré, ‘Size Doesn’t Matter: Towards a More Inclusive Philosophy of Biology.’

176 Notes 60 Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 40. 61 Given the historical association between symbiosis and ‘mutualism’ within anarchism at the turn of the previous century, it is not surprising that evolutionary biologists are wary of this anthromorphization (Gillian Beer, ‘The Face of Nature: Anthropomorphic Elements in the Language of The Origin of Species,’ Languages of Nature, ed. L. Jordanova (London: Free Association Books, 1986). Symbiosis and symbiogenesis may well draw particular attention to organismal mutual dependence, but this is a feature of all living organisms within the biosphere. As Sahl wryly notes, ‘Remember that no matter how selfish, how cruel, how unfeeling you have been today, every time ‘you take a breath, you make a flower happy’ (in R.C. Lewontin, The Triple Helix (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, 55). What they do suggest is that the concept of individualism, so closely implicated in neoDarwinian programs of research, is predicated on a paradigmatic preference of animals over all other life forms, generational gene transfer and random mutation. 62 Scott Gilbert, ‘The Genome in Its Ecological Context: Philosophical Perspectives on Interspecies Epigenesis,’ 202–18. 63 F.W. Doolittle, ‘Bacteria and Archaea,’ 88. 64 Joost Van Loon, ‘Parasite Politics: On the Significance of Symbiosis and Assemblage in Theorizing Community Formations,’ 250. 65 Joost Van Loon, ‘Epidemic Space,’ Critical Public Health 151 (2005): 49. 66 Joost Van Loon, ‘Epidemic Space,’ 49. 67 Joost Van Loon, ‘Epidemic Space,’ 41. 68 Joost Van Loon, ‘Epidemic Space,’ 41. 69 Julie Theriot in Philip J. Hilts, ‘Watching Host Cells Collaborate in Bacterial Infection,’ The New York Times (17 June 1997); Donna Haraway and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf (New York: Routledge, 2000), 75. 70 Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Teacher (New York: Viking, 1974). 71 Lynn Margulis, ‘Kingdom Animalia: The Zoological Malaise from a Microbial Perspective,’ American Zoology 30 (1990): 861–75. 72 G.R. Fleischaker and Lynn Margulis, ‘Autopoiesis and the Origin of Bacteria,’ Advances in Space Research 6, no. 11 (1986): 53. 73 F.G. Varela, H.R. Maturana, and R. Uribe, ‘Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model,’ BioSystems 5, no. 4 (1974): 187–96; F.J. Varela, and D. Johnson, ‘On Observing Natural Systems,’ The CoEvolution Quarterly (1976): 26–31; H.R. Maturana, ‘Neurophysiology of Cognition,’ in Cognition: A Multiple View, ed. P. Garvin (New York: Spartan Books, 1979), 3–23; Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980); Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: New Science Library, 1987). 74 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, xxii. 75 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became PostHuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 136.

Notes 177 76 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, 48. 77 Maturana and Varela write explicitly that ‘reproduction and evolution are not essential for living organisms’ (Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, 11). 78 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became PostHuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 141. The displacement of replication with autopoiesis as the defining feature of life explains why Gaia theory is not concerned with the biosphere as a population of one and how it is able to reject the environment-organism distinction. Margulis and her colleagues argue that local processes, generated through symbioses, have brought about global self-regulation over the vast expanse of earth time. S. Brown, L. Margulis, S. Ibarra and D. Siqueiros, ‘Desiccation Resistance and Contamination as Mechanisms of Gaia,’ BioSystems 17, no. 4 (1985): 337–60. 79 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, 80. 80 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became PostHuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 146–7. 81 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became PostHuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 152. 82 Phillip Dunham explains that most of the dust we encounter (especially in the home) is actually us. This dust consists of miniscule fragments of dead skin that has peeled from our bodies. The outermost layers of the skin on our body is in the process of becoming dust. Rather than epitomize a boundary between nonmatter (culture) and matter (nature), ‘self’ and ‘other’, familiar and foreign, dust ‘… resists the modernist ennui, the weariness of classification, the strain of keeping things fixed… Dust is no respecter of boundaries, whether real or imagined’ (Phillip Dunham, ‘Dust,’ in Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, eds. Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (Reaktion Books, 2004), 99. 83 Alfred Tauber, ‘Postmodernism and Immune Selfhood,’ 601. 84 M. Rosengarten, ‘Thinking Menstrual Blood,’ Australian Feminist Studies 15, no. 31: 99. 85 Bruce Braun, ‘Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life,’ Cultural Geographies 14 (2007): 6–28. 86 Bruce Braun, ‘Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life,’ 17. 87 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, Trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001); Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, Trans. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003); Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism and the Other, Trans. Nidra Poller (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Jacques Derrida, Given Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997); John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); John Caputo, ‘Who is Derrida’s Zarathustra? Of fraternity, friendship, and a Democracy to Come,’ Research in Phenomenology 29 (1999): 184–98; Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 88 Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, x.

178 Notes 89 Timothy Campbell, ‘Bios, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito,’ in Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), vii–xlii, xxxi. 90 Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, 116. While I find Esposito’s arguments concerning community compelling, I do not agree with (Campbell’s reading of) Esposito’s supposition that there is not life without individuation through birth: bacteria effectively complicate individuation before, during and after life (xxxiii). Also, while I appreciate that Esposito is referring to political positions, the distinction between parasites as either symbionts or ‘true’ parasites obscures the transformative aspect of symbiosis itself, as harm may change to survival and vice versa (18). 91 Jean Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3, original emphasis. 92 Nick Bingham, ‘Bees, Butterflies, and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship,’ Environment and Planning A 38 (2006): 492. 93 John Caputo, ‘Who is Derrida’s Zarathustra? Of fraternity, friendship, and a Democracy to Come,’ 184. 94 Nick Bingham, ‘Bees, Butterflies, and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship,’ 489.

Chapter 5 1 Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 205. 2 Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Biologically Inspired Feminism: Response to Helen Keane and Marsha Rosengarten, “On the Biology of Sexed Subjects,”’ Australian Feminist Studies 17, no. 39 (2002): 283–5. 3 Sharon Kinsman, ‘Life, Sex and Cells,’ in Feminist Science Studies, eds. Mayberry, Subramaniam and Weasel (New York: Routledge, 2001), 193–203, 197. 4 Lambert, D. and the Diagram Group (2005) The Secret Sex Lives of Animals (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.). 5 Harriet Zuckerman and Josh Lederberg, ‘Postmature Scientific Discovery?’ Nature 324 (1986): 629–31, 629. Social studies of science are familiar with premature discoveries in science – those observations made in a scientific context that precludes their understanding. Within evolutionary theory, perhaps the best-known example of a premature discovery was Mendel’s theory of particulate inheritance. Only 35 years later, when Darwin had put forth the theory of evolution through natural selection, were the implications of Mendel’s experiments contextualized. 6 Harriet Zuckerman and Josh Lederberg, ‘Postmature Scientific Discovery?’ 629. 7 Janet Browne’s article, ‘Botany for Gentlemen’ provides a lively and thorough critique of Erasmus Darwin’s poem ‘The Love of the Plants’. The poem, meant as a vindication of Linneas’s plant taxonomy, reified very familiar and highly normative conceptions of 19th century British femininity and masculinity. See Janet Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen,’ Isis 80, no. 4 (1989): 593–621. See also Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern

Notes 179

8 9 10

11 12

13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

Science (London: Pandora, 1993); Myra Hird, Sex, Gender and Science (New York: Palgrave, 2004). Emile Durkheim, Suicide (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 385. Part of this section appears in Myra Hird, Sex, Gender and Science. John Maynard-Smith, The Evolution of Sex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Charles Darwin The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1890); Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001). J.L. Mackay, ‘Why Have Sex?,’ British Medical Journal 322, no. 7286 (2001): 623. Evolutionary theory’s ‘problem’ finds expression in the Red Queen Hypothesis. The idea here is that evolution is not concerned with progress because in a constantly changing environment, change is necessary just to survive. In Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen tells Alice that she must run very fast in Wonderland just to stay in the same place. See Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Sex? 120–1. See, respectively, William Hamilton, Robert Axelrod, and Reiko Tanese, ‘Sexual Reproduction as an Adaptation to Resist Parasites,’ Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 87 (1990): 3566–73; Aneil Agrawal, ‘Similarity Selection and the Evolution of Sex: Revisiting the Red Queen,’ PLOS Biol. 4 (2006): 1364–71; Alexey Kondrashov, ‘Deleterious Mutations and the Evolution of Sexual Reproduction,’ Nature 336 (1988): 435–40; R.A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); Joseph Felsenstein, ‘The Evolutionary Advantage of Recombination,’ Genetics 78, no. 2 (1974): 737–56. Graham Bell, The Masterpiece of Nature: The Evolution and Genetics of Sexuality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 99, emphasis in original. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, The Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination. See also Judith Roof’s critique of Freud’s utilitarian approach to protists as that ‘lowest organism’ through which a conservative Darwinism (neoDarwinism) illustrates the universalism of the replication drive. Although ‘obligingly stable, simple, persistent, and flexible’, protists nevertheless exist as ‘exception[s] to evolution’s rule’ insofar as they persist through evolutionary time ‘at their lowly level’ rather than evolving into ‘higher’ more complex organisms. Because their reproduction is uniparental, protists defy death – side-stepping desire that all organisms have to return to death as the originary state of quiescence through the pleasure principle (Judith Roof, ‘From Protists to DNA (and Back Again): Freud’s Psychoanalysis of the Single-Celled Organism,’ 105). Freud, reading Darwin, brings protists back into the evolutionary fold by arguing that repeated cloning weakens the organism, whilst the combining of genetic material from more than one source strengthens the organism, providing the quid pro quo that sexual reproduction goes hand-in-hand with ‘higher creatures’: ‘protista exception has become the incarnation of a rule’ (109, 110). Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 235. Margulis and Sagan, What is Sex?, 17. Margulis and Sagan, What is Sex?, 235. Lynn Margulis in Lawrence Joseph, Gia: The Growth of an Idea (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 63. Margulis and Sagan, What is Sex?, 17.

180 Notes 21 Susan Oyama, ‘The Conceptualization of Nature: Nature as Design,’ 171–84, 51. 22 Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination. 23 Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press, 2005). 24 Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 232. 25 Most, but not all, eukaryotes undergo mitosis when they divide. 26 In human males, sperm with a single set of chromosomes are meiotically reduced from diploid spermatocytes. In human females, eggs with a single set of chromosomes are meiotically reduced from diploid oocytes. 27 Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 62. 28 Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 233. 29 There has been a case of a boy born with an XX configuration, however. This boy’s ovum split several times before being fertilized by sperm, providing further evidence that parthenogenic reproduction extends to humans. P. Cohen, ‘The Boy Whose Blood Has No Father,’ New Scientist, 7 October, 1995, p. 16. 30 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London and New York: Routledge): 352. 31 Margulis and Sagan, What is Sex?, 57. 32 See Myra J. Hird, Sex, Gender and Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Press, 2004) for a detailed description of the historical identification, construction and tenacious refusal of chromosomes, hormones, genitals, gametes, personality types and the like to conform to human normative prescriptions of gender difference. 33 George Krizek, ‘Unusual Interaction Between a Butterfly and a Beetle: “Sexual Paraphilia” in Insects?’ Tropical Lepidoptera 3, no. 2 (1992): 118. 34 David Policansky, ‘Sex Change in Plants and Animals,’ Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 13 (1982): 471–95. 35 R.H. Denniston, ‘Ambisexuality in Animals,’ in Homosexual Behaviour: A Modern Reappraisal, ed. Judd Marmor (New York: Basic Books), 35–40. 36 Bruce Bagemihl notes that transvestism does not mean taking on activities or behaviors that are considered to be either typically ‘female’ or ‘male’. For instance, the sexual reproduction of offspring is typically considered a female prerogative. But for sea horses and pipe fish, the male bears and gives birth to offspring. So male sea horses and male pipe fish are not practicing transvestism when they produce offspring. Bagemihl notes this is also the case for behaviors involved in what biologists term ‘courtship’. In many species, females are more aggressive than males in these behaviors. Should a female in these species behave passively, she would be practicing transvestism. It is worth noting here that nonhuman animals who engage in transvestite behavior, like their human counterparts, specifically avoid homosexual behavior. The misconception that transvestites (usually male) attempt to be ‘feminine’ in order to attract sexual relationships with men is as erroneous for the nonhuman as the human animal world. See Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

Notes 181 37 See also Denis Owen, ‘Mimicry and Transvestism in Papilio phorcas,’ Journal of Entomological Society of Southern Africa 51 (1988): 294–6; Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 38 Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers, Our Stolen Future (London: Little Brown and Company, 1996). 39 Leonard Paulozzi, J. David Erickson and Richard J. Jackson, ‘Hypospadias Trends in Two American Surveillance Systems,’ Pediatrics 100 (1997): 831–4; Helen Dolk, M. Vrijheid, B. Armstrong, L. Abramsky, F. Bianchi, E. Garne, V. Nelen, E. Robert, J.E. Scott, D. Stone and R. Tenconi, ‘Risk of Congenital Anomalies Near Hazardous Waste Landfill Sites in Europe: The EUROHAZCON Study,’ The Lancet 352 (8 August 1998): 423–7. 40 Phillip Landrigan, Joy E. Carlson, Cynthia F. Bearer, Joan Spyker Cranmer, Robert D. Bullard, Ruth A. Etzel, John Groopman, John A. McLachlan, Frederica P. Perera, J. Routt Reigart, Leslie Robison, Lawrence Schell and William A. Suk, ‘Children’s Health and the Environment: A New Agenda for Prevention Research,’ Environmental Health Perspectives 106, no. 3 (1998): 787–94. 41 Edmund J. Clark, David O. Norris and Richard E. Jones, ‘Interactions of Gonadal Steroids and Pesticides (DDT, DDE) on Gonaduct Growth in Larval Tiger Salamanders,’ General and Comparative Endocrinology 109 (1998): 94–105; A.L. Reeder, G.L. Foley, D.K. Nichols, L.G. Hansen, B. Wikoff, S. Faeh, J. Eisold, M.B. Wheeler, R. Warner, J.E. Murphy and V.R. Beasley, ‘Forms and Prevalence of Intersexuality and Effects of Environmental Contaminants on Sexuality in Cricket Frogs,’ Environmental Health Perspectives 106, no. 5 (1998): 261–6. 42 Ann Oliver Cheek and John A. McLachlan, ‘Environmental Hormones and the Male Reproductive System,’ Journal of Andrology 19, no. 1 (1998): 5–10; Rober J. Golden, Kenneth L. Noller, Linda Titus-Ernstoff, Raymond H. Kaufman, Robert Mittendorf, Robert Stillman and Elizabeth A. Reese, ‘Environmental Endocrine Modulators and Human Health: An Assessment of the Biological Evidence,’ Critical Review of Toxicology 28, no. 2 (1998): 109–227; Geary Olsen, Frank D. Gilliland, Michele M. Burlew, Jean M. Burris, Jack S. Mandel and Jeffrey H. Mandel, ‘An Epidemiologic Investigation of Reproductive Hormones in Men with Occupational Exposure to Perfluorooctanoic Acid,’ JOEM 40, no. 7 (1998): 614–22; R. Santti, S. Makela, L Strauss, J. Korkman, M.L. Kostian, ‘Phytoestrogens: Potential Endocrine Disruptors in Males,’ Toxicology and Industrial Health 14, nos. 1–2 (1998): 223–7; N. Skakkeæk, ‘Germ Cell Cancer and Disorders of Spermatogenesis: An Environmental Connection?’ APMIS 106 (1998): 3–12; C.R. Tyler, C. et al., ‘Endocrine Disruption in Wildlife: A Critical Review of the Evidence,’ Critical Reviews of Toxicology 28, no. 4 (1998): 319–61. 43 Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 149–50. 44 This section is taken from Myra J. Hird, Sex, Gender and Science. 45 Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 315. See also Martin Reite and Nancy G. Caine eds., Child Abuse: The Nonhuman Primate Data (New York: Alan R. Liss Inc., 1983). 46 Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.

182 Notes 47 Darling in Anne Fausto-Sterling, ‘Feminism and Behavioral Evolution: A Taxonomy,’ in Feminism and Evolutionary Biology ed. Patricia Adair Gowaty (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1997), 51. Fausto-Sterling notes that this account was curiously absent from later reports of research on stags. See also Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. 48 P. Vasey, ‘Homosexual Behaviour in Primates,’ International Journal of Primatology 16 (1995): 173–204. 49 Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. 50 Mary S. McDonald Pavelka, ‘Sexual Nature: What Can We Learn from a Cross-Species Perspective?,’ in Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture, eds. P. Abramson and S. Pinkerton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17–36. 51 Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, 215. 52 Another critique of the saliency given to sexual reproduction over other evolutionary developments comes from Hoffmeyer, who points out that membrane formation is ‘the decisive step in pre-biotic evolution’ (see Jesper Hoffmeyer, ‘How Can it Be The Case That The World Contains Human Beings,’ 19–30. The importance of membrane as causative structures is mainly eclipsed by the focus on DNA. Cognizant of the importance of membrane formation to the evolution of cells, Margulis and Guerrero refer to sex as a consequence, an after-effect, of membrane formation: ‘individuals emerge when this interchange is restricted; the membrane toughens, the genes become packaged into a membrane bounded nucleus, and our world of sex and death emerges’ (Lynn Margulis and Ricardo Guerrero, ‘Kingdoms in Turmoil,’ New Scientist 129 (1991): 50. 53 Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 15. 54 Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 180. 55 Bacterial sex is complicated. It involves a number of conditions that must be met. First, two prokaryotes must make physical contact, and remain attached long enough for DNA to pass from one prokaryote to the other through the cell wall. The transferred DNA might or might not be integrated into the recipient prokaryote’s DNA. If it is combined, then the recipient’s DNA must be spliced, the donor DNA inserted, and the DNA ligated (patched) by enzymes. This, in and of itself, is a complicated process involving a sequence of necessary steps. In ‘crossing over’, chromatin might be transferred which then line up and exchange parts. The number of genes transferred depends upon environmental concerns such as temperature, length of mating and chemical factors. 56 Symbiogenesis theory hypothesizes that spirochetes became microtubuleorganizing-centers (MTOCs), a transition crucial to the origin of mitosis. The MTOCs of many protists are embedded in the nuclear membrane and large numbers of repeated DNA sequences have no direct role in protein coding (what scientists have called ‘junk DNA’ because they cannot account for its presence), and, that myriad ways of rearranging, detecting and copying nucleic acids from different sources exist in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, suggesting that these DNA sequences are remnants of genomes

Notes 183

57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

69 70 71 72 73

from what were once independent organisms. Bacterial intracellular symbiosis is also associated with speciation (as outlined in Chapter 3). Symbiogenesis theory takes these facts as indicators of the symbiogenetic origins of DNA from different sources, rather than as an indication of DNA ‘selfishness’. It is also associated with sex change in at least two genera of insects – boll weevils (Paul Nardon and Anne-Marie Grenier, ‘Serial Endosymbiosis Theory and Weevil Evolution: The Role of Symbiosis,’ in Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis, eds. Lynn Margulis and R. Fester (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) and lice (Andrew P. Martin, B.D. Kessing, and S.R. Palumbi, ‘Accuracy of Estimating Genetic Distance Between Species From Short Sequences of Mitochondrial DNA,’ Molecular Biology and Evolution 7 (1990): 485–8. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Dazzle Gradually: Reflections of the Nature of Nature, 111. Root Gorelick (under review) Origin of Sex: The Evolutionary Joys of Self Sex, 7. Multicellularity is not limited to animals or plants: bacteria can also be multicellular and their cells can differ both morphologically and physiologically. Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 166. Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 166. Margulis and Sagan, What is Sex?, 24. Anne Fausto-Sterling, ‘Feminism and Behavioral Evolution: A Taxonomy,’ 53. Margulis and Sagan, What is Sex?, 80. Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths, Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 71. Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 79. Margulis and Sagan refer to ‘jumping genes, “redundant” DNA, nucleotide repair systems, and many other dynamic genetic processes [that] exploit the “cut and paste” recombination of ancient bacteria-style sexuality that evolved long before plants, animals, or even fungi or protists appeared on this planet’ (Margulis and Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, 181). U.P. Roos, ‘From Proto-mitosis to Mitosis: An Alternative Hypothesis on the Origin and Evolution of the Mitotic Spindle Origins of Life,’ Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 13, nos. 3/4 (1984): 183–93. Jesper Hoffmeyer, ‘How Can It Be the Case That the World Contains Human Beings?’, 84. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Dazzle Gradually: Reflections of the Nature of Nature, 111. M. Meselson, URL: . Accessed August 18, 2008. Root Gorelick (under review) Origin of Sex: The Evolutionary Joys of Self Sex, 1. Emile F. Maupas, ‘Sur la Conjugaison des Paramécies,’ C.R. Acad. Se. III, 103 (1886): 482–4; Emile F. Maupas, ‘La Rajeunissement Karyogamique Chez

184 Notes

74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96

97

Les Ciliés,’ Archives de Zoologie Expéimentale et Générale (Serie 2) 7 (1889): 149–519. L.R. Cleveland, ‘The Origin of Evolution of Meiosis,’ Science 105 (1947): 287–9. Anne Fausto-Sterling, ‘Feminism and Behavioral Evolution: A Taxonomy,’ in Feminism and Evolutionary Biology, ed. Patricia Adair Gowaty (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1997), 54. Anne Fausto-Sterling, ‘Feminism and Behavioral Evolution: A Taxonomy,’ 57. Vicky Kirby, ‘Subject to Natural Law: A Mediation on the “Two Cultures” Problem,’ Australian Feminist Studies 23, no. 55 (2008): 5. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 91. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 6. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, 17. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time, 30. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time, 23, 24. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, 67. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, 68. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, 22. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 12. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 22. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 57. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 78. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 91. Marianne Schwartz and John Vissing, ‘Paternal Inheritance of Mitochondrial DNA,’ New England Journal of Medicine 347, no. 8 (2002): 576–80. Yevgenya Kraytsberg, Marianne Schwartz, Timothy A. Brown, Konstantin Ebralidse, Wolfram S. Kunz, David A. Clayton, John Vissing and Konstantin Khrapko, ‘Recombination of Human Mitochondrial DNA,’ Science 304 (2004): 981. Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 51. Bruce Bagemihl uses the term ‘quiet revolution’ to refer to the superabundance of diversity in a strong ecosystem. I like its association with the transformation of Quebec sexual culture during the 1960s and 1970s (Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity). Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, 196.

Notes 185

Chapter 6 1 John Urry, ‘Order on the Edge of Chaos,’ American Sociological Association Conference, (New York, 14 August 2007); James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 2 Stepehen Schneider, James Miller, Eileen Crist, Penelope Boston, ‘Preface,’ in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, eds. S. Schneider, J. Miller, E. Crist and P. Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), xiii–xvii. 3 Stepehen Schneider, James Miller, Eileen Crist, Penelope Boston, Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, xiii. Lovelock defends his continued use of the goddess symbol (and while Margulis does not herself favor the name, she defends Lovelock) because it resonates with the public imagination, allowing people to think about the planet as a whole. Scientists, on the other hand, display outright hostility toward the name because of its widespread appeal to lay persons who subscribe to ‘spiritual’ notions of the earth. For instance, the Liechtenstein-based Foundation for Gaia and the Gaia Institute of the Cathedral of St John the Divine offer massage, lifestyle instruction and the like. For most scientists, recourse to anything other than science on the side of Plato’s gods is too reminiscent of the long struggle to free society from religious dogma. Richard Dawkins, science’s most recent critic of religion, described Gaia theory thus: ‘the Gaia theory thrives on an innate desire, mostly among laypeople, to believe that evolution works for the good of all’. [It is] Profoundly erroneous… [and] sounds exactly like the origin of a religion to me’. Dawkins quoted in Lawrence E. Joseph, Gaia: The Growth of an Idea, 56, 69. 4 Alan Irwin, Sociology and the Environment: A Critical Introduction to Society, Nature and Knowledge (Oxford: Polity Press, 2001), 180. Howard Newby’s acerbic observation of sociology’s disinterest in moving beyond a social studies agenda is no less sobering: ‘the slender contribution of sociologists to the study of the environment has been, to put it mildly, disappointing’ (in Alan Irwin, Sociology and the Environment: A Critical Introduction to Society, Nature and Knowledge, vi). 5 Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It. For instance, SSK’s strong program ‘symmetry postulate’ argues that all ideas (whether rational, irrational, true or false) are social ‘through and through’. See David Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30, no. 1 (1999): 113–29. One of the long-term points of contention between the SSK and ANT pivots on the degree to which scientific claims are accorded explanatory status as things-in-themselves, or more accurately perhaps, thingsin-phenomena. See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. 6 Alan Irwin, Sociology and the Environment: A Critical Introduction to Society, Nature and Knowledge, 21. 7 John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty First Century (London: Routledge, 2000), 18. This latter concern assumes, of course, that social scientists consider the earth to be, to a greater or lesser extent, in an environmental crisis, that humans have precipitated this crisis, and that humans can do something to avert or otherwise mitigate the crisis’s effects.

186 Notes 8 Warren M. Hern, ‘Why Are There So Many of Us? Description and Diagnosis of a Planetary Ecopathological Process,’ Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 12, no. 1 (1990): 9–39. 9 See David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man (London: John Murray Publishers, 2007); Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002); James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2006); E.O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). 10 J. MacAllister, ‘Gaia and Symbiogenesis: Communities Become Individuals,’ in Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution and the Sensory Self, eds. L. Margulis, C. Asikainen and W. Krumbein (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, forthcoming). 11 Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition. For discussions of an ‘enlivened nature’ approach, see Vicki Kirby, ‘Subject to Natural Law: A Meditation on the “Two Cultures” Problem,’ Australian Feminist Studies 23, no. 55: 5–17; Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Introduction: Somatic Compliance – Feminism, Biology, and Science,’ Australian Feminist Studies 14, no. 29: 7–18, and Timothy Mitchell, ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?,’ in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). 12 Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, ‘The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere – The Gaia hypothesis,’ CoEvolution Quarterly 6 (1975): 30–40; Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, ‘Is Mars a spaceship, too?,’ Natural History 85 (1976): 86–90; Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, ‘The View from Mars and Venus,’ The Sciences 17 (1977): 10–13; Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, ‘Atmospheres and Evolution,’ in Life in the Universe, ed. J. Billingham (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 79–100; James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, ‘Atmospheric Homeostasis By and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis,’ Tellus 26 (1974): 2–10; Andrew Watson, James Lovelock, and Lynn Margulis, ‘Methanogenesis, fires and the regulation of atmospheric oxygen,’ BioSystems 10 (1979): 293–8. 13 For instance, geoscientists tend to obviate the role of organisms (primarily bacteria) in environmental evolution, and biologists tend to be unaware of the complex and intricate ways in which nonliving matter interacts with living organisms. 14 Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization. Trans. F. Goodman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. K. Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Donna Haraway, When Species Meet; Peter C. van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997). 15 See Peter C. van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject, 126. 16 Eduard Seuss in Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change, 1, my emphasis.

Notes 187 17 V.I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, ed. M. McMenamin (New York: Copernicus/ Springer-Verlag, 1926/1997), 39. G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the founder of the science of ecology, introduced Vernadsky’s work to the English-speaking world. See G.E. Hutchinson, ‘On Living in the Biosphere,’ The Scientific Monthly 67 (1948): 393–7. 18 James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 19 Realizing from the atmospheric data that life could not exist on Mars, Lovelock and Hitchcock informed NASA that millions of dollars could be saved. NASA spent the money anyway, equipping the Viking mission with three experiments that concluded there was no life on Mars. 20 James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (Santa Barbara, CA: Allen Lane, 2006). 21 Andrew Free and Nicholas Barton, ‘Do Evolution and Ecology Need the Gaia Hypothesis?’ Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, no. 11 (2007): 611–19. 22 C. Barlow and Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia and Evolutionary Theory,’ BioScience, 42 (1992): 686–93. 23 Margulis quoted in Lawrence E. Joseph, Gaia: The Growth of an Idea (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 7. 24 Freese, in Penelope Canan, ‘Bringing Nature Back: The Challenge of Environmental Sociology,’ Sociological Inquiry 66, no. 1 (1996): 29–37. 25 David Schwarzmann and Tyler Volk, ‘Biotic Enhancement of Weathering and Surface Temperatures on Earth Since the Origin of Life,’ Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (Global and Planetary Change Section), 90 (1991): 357–71. 26 Paul Lowman and Neil Armstrong, Exploring Earth, Exploring Space (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 279. 27 Stephan Harding and Lynn Margulis, ‘Water Gaia,’ in Search of Gaia, eds. E. Crist and B. Rinker (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming). 28 Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia is Life in a Wasteland of By-products,’ in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, eds. S. Schneider, J. Miller, E. Crist and P. Boston (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 27–36, 31. 29 Connie Barlow and Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia and Evolutionary Theory,’ 689. Some evolutionary theorists, while not advocating a reconciliation between the modern synthesis and Gaia, do suggest Gaia theory’s utility in provoking new lines of inquiry. For example, John Maynard Smith writes: ‘No Darwinist could accept the “Gaia” hypothesis, according to which the Earth is analogous to a living organism, because the Earth is not an entity with multiplication, variation and heredity. However, we should not be too contemptuous of that idea, logically flawed as it is, until we can give a better account of the long-term stability of the biosphere than is at present possible’. See J. Maynard Smith, ‘Evolutionary Progress and Levels of Selection,’ in Evolutionary Progress, ed. M. Nitecki (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 219–30. 30 Connie Barlow and Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia and Evolutionary Theory,’ 692. 31 James Lovelock, ‘A Physical Basis for Life Detection Experiments,’ Nature 207, no. 4997 (1965): 568–70. For a review of nine further testable hypotheses, see C. Barlow and Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia and Evolutionary Theory’ and Andrew Free and Nicholas Barton, ‘Do Evolution and Ecology Need the Gaia Hypothesis?’ Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, no. 11 (2007): 611–19.

188 Notes 32 James W. Kirchner, ‘The Gaia Hypothesis: Can It Be Tested?’ Review of Geophysiology 27 (1989): 223–35. 33 In Connie Barlow and Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia and Evolutionary Theory,’ 691. 34 Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Clarifying Gaia: Reflection With or Without Natural Selection,’ in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, eds. S. Schneider, J. Miller, E. Crist and P. Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 16. 35 See Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Gaia and Natural Selection,’ Nature 394 (1998): 439–47; and Timothy M. Lenton and James Lovelock, ‘Daisyworld is Darwinian: Constraints on Adaptation Are Important for Planetary Selfregulation,’ Journal of Theoretical Biology 206, no. 1: 109–14. Lovelock notes with some relish that all attempts since Daisyworld (his own and others’) to model evolutionary systems using large numbers of variables in complex interactions have found that nonteleological regulation works. 36 Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Gaia and Natural Selection.’ See also Andrew Free and Nicholas Barton, ‘Do Evolution and Ecology Need the Gaia Hypothesis?,’ 613. 37 Free and Barton point out that while microorganisms are essential for photosynthesis and cycling ratios to exist, Homoestatic Gaia does not require multicellularity. Nor does it require the stability of species composition. Indeed, while a diversity of microbial metabolic activities enhances stability of nutrient recycling, it seems to be the community structure of these microbial metabolic pathways that leads to stability (Andrew Free and Nicholas Barton, ‘Do Evolution and Ecology Need the Gaia Hypothesis?,’ 612–20). 38 Responding to criticisms that the earth does not resemble a homeostatic system (the atmosphere became aerobic after hundreds of millions of years), Lovelock offered the term ‘punctuated homeostatic’ to allow for system disturbances that then stabilize. Margulis uses the term ‘homeorrhetic’ from developmental biology to arrive at the same notion of change and stability. Lynn Margulis, ‘Kingdom Animalia: The Zoological Malaise from a Microbial Perspective,’ 861–75. See also C. Barlow and Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia and Evolutionary Theory,’ 686–7. 39 For scientific opposition to the biosphere as a superorganism, see Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1982); W. Ford Doolittle, ‘Questioning a Metaphor,’ in From Gaia to Selfish Genes, ed. Connie Barlow (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 235–6; Paul Ehrlich, ‘Coevolution and its Applicability to the Gaia Hypothesis,’ in Scientists on Gaia, eds. S.H. Schneider and P.J. Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 19–22; and D.S. Wilson and E. Sober, ‘Reviving the Superorganism,’ Journal of Theoretical Biology 136 (1989): 337–56. The charge that Gaia theory is nonDarwinian is the nub of scientific criticism. Remarking on the popularity of The Ages of Gaia amongst environmentalists and lay persons, Ford Doolittle remarked, ‘the good thing about this engaging little book by Jim Lovelock is that reading it gives one a warm, comforting feeling about Nature and man’s [sic] place in it. The bad thing is that this feeling is based on a view of natural selection – that force which alone is responsible for the existence and characteristics of the biosphere – which is unquestionably false’. Doolittle quoted in Lawrence E. Joseph, Gaia: The Growth of an Idea, 56. It is worth noting that this comment was made prior to the publication of Lovelock’s latest book The Revenge of Gaia, which describes the human environmental genocide (at least four billion people) that global warming

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will precipitate. To humanists and post-humanists alike, there is little comfort to be found in this scenario. Stephen J. Gould wrote that ‘the [Gaia] hypothesis says nothing new – it offers no new mechanisms. It just changes the metaphor, but metaphor is not a mechanism!’. D. Abram, ‘The Mechanical and the Organic: On the Impact of Metaphor in Science,’ in Scientists on Gaia, 66. Gould, in turn, fails to recognize that the mechanical is itself a metaphor, and one that has been critiqued by evolutionary theorists since its initial association with Darwinism. See Marcia Bjornerud, ‘Gaia: Gender and Scientific Representations of the Earth,’ Journal of the National Women’s Studies Association 9 (1997): 89–106. Ironically, Daisyworld has been criticized as ‘too mechanistic’ and not corresponding to ‘real life’. Connie Barlow and Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia and Evolutionary Theory,’ 686–7. Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Clarifying Gaia: Reflection With or Without Natural Selection,’ 17. Stepehen Schneider, James Miller, Eileen Crist and Penelope Boston, ‘Preface,’ in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, eds. S. Schneider, J. Miller, E. Crist and P. Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), xiii–xvii, xiii. Lovelock notes the irony that his Gaia metaphor was created around the same time that evolutionary biologist William Hamilton coined the powerful ‘selfish’ and ‘spiteful’ gene metaphors. The ‘selfish gene’ metaphor is also open to misinterpretation (James Lovelock, ‘Reflections on Gaia,’ in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, eds. S. Schneider, J. Miller, E. Crist and P. Boston (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004). James Lovelock, ‘Reflections on Gaia,’ 3. See also Tyler Volk, Gaia’s Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003). See Lawrence E. Joseph, Gaia: The Growth of an Idea, 69; Joel L. Sachs et al., ‘The Evolution of Cooperation,’ Quarterly Review of Biology 79 (2004): 135–60 and Andrew Free and Nicholas Barton, ‘Do Evolution and Ecology Need the Gaia Hypothesis?,’ 616. Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. Connie Barlow and Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia and Evolutionary Theory,’ 686–93. For the counter-argument that reproduction is spatial replication and metabolism is temporal replication see Vilmos Csányi, Evolutionary Systems and Society (Durham, DC: Duke University Press, 1989); Vilmos Csányi and George Kampis, ‘Autogenesis: The Evolution of Replicative Systems,’ Journal of Theoretical Biology 114 (1985): 303–21. For instance, Csányi argues that metabolism and reproduction are actually temporal and spatial (respectively) forms of replication, but that replication at local microbial levels can give rise to regulation at the biospheric level. V. Csányi, Evolutionary Systems and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989); V. Csányi, and G. Kampis, ‘Autogenesis: The Evolution of Replicative Systems,’ Journal of Theoretical Biology 114 (1985): 303–21. Other scientists focus on thermodynamics rather than ‘the population of one’ problem, arguing that nonequilibrium thermodynamics accounts for the biosphere’s evolution: the biosphere is an autocatalytic metabolism that emerges spontaneously and evolves, creating life as the fastest means of maximizing entropy. Schull goes further: he argues that species intelligence is an emergent property of evolutionary selection. Salthe goes beyond the neoDarwinian pale: he argues that as a ‘developing thermodynamically open autonomous system’, the biosphere will inevitably become

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senescent. For these perspectives on thermodynamics, see S. Schneider and R. Londer, The Coevolution of Climate and Life (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2004); Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life; J. Schull ‘Are species intelligent?,’ Behavioral Brain Science, 13 (1990): 63–108 and S. Salthe, ‘The Evolution of the Biosphere: Towards a New Mythology,’ World Futures, 30 (1990): 53–67. A. Schrader, ‘Time, Speed, and Delays in Environmental Crises,’ in Dinos & Demons: The Politics of Temporality and Responsibility in Science (Doctoral Dissertation, UCSC, 2008). A. Schrader, ‘Time, Speed, and Delays in Environmental Crises,’ 231. See also N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Margulis is fond of remarking that the only difference between humans and animals is that humans are capable of wholesale self-deception. See Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life? John Urry differentiates between ‘instantaneous’ and ‘social’ times through which technology and the human imagination conceive time in very short periods (the life-span of three human generations for instance) and ‘glacial’ time, which is a Gaian time-line of invisible long-term co-evolving processes at work (John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century (New York: Routledge, 2000)). Similarly, the most significant division is between the superkingdoms Eukaryota (including kingdoms Protoctista, Fungi and Plantae) and Prokaryota (including kingdom Monera and the sub-kingdoms Archaeobacteria and Eubacteria), not between humans and other animals (or even human/animals and all other organisms such as plants, fungi and protoctista). We know most about Eukaryota and least about Prokaryota – not because the former is more ‘complex’ and/or capable of ‘advanced’ survival, but because we are Eukaryota. As Margulis puts it, ‘most of what we know about the living world is large enough to see without a microscope’. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, xix. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 222. Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible World. Methanogens, for instance, exist only in the absence of oxygen, and live by decomposing organic matter and converting carbon to carbon dioxide and methane, which is then recycled into the atmosphere. During the Archaean, methanogens produced almost as much carbon as photosynthetic bacteria removed. See Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. Bacteria have also learned to combine these specialisms: for instance, photolithotrophs such as green and purple sulfur bacteria, cyanobacteria, phytoplankton, algae and land plants, thrive on solar energy and elemental and organic compound elements. Chemolithotrophic metabolism literally keeps the biosphere’s biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur functioning. Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere, 64. S. Sonea and L. Mathieu, Prokaryotology: A Coherent View, 9–10, my emphasis. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Sex?

Notes 191 62 Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. 63 Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. Termites, in turn, form symbiotic relationships with ants – they are myrmecophylous to put it in fancy language. Smil describes several functional categories of symbioses: pollination symbioses between insects, birds, flowering plants and bats (bees pollinate over 70 percent of the world’s top 100 crops); harvest symbioses occur during the gathering and/or processing of nutrients; and dispersal symbioses diffuse plant seeds into the biosphere; and protective symbioses have evolved to protect one or both species, for instance fungi living inside plant leaves, stems and bark. Consider the remarkable symbiotic relationship between ants and acacia trees. Remove the ants and the tree dies. 64 Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change, 225. Again, it is easy to see how Gaia theory conceptualizes the biosphere as a homeostatic system with emergent properties, since the prokaryotic world itself is a massive efficient system greater than the sum of its individual elements (themselves not easily distinguished). 65 G.E. Hutchinson, ‘The Biosphere,’ Scientific American 223 (1970): 53. 66 Take for example, the ‘Busselton Effect’ which describes a small Western Australian town that decided to ban the use of aerosol cans within its town limits with a view to restoring the shield of stratospheric ozone above their own heads. I was similarly bemused in New Zealand when a group of graduate students told me that they did not need to worry about the effects of nuclear fallout because New Zealand did not have nuclear bombs or use nuclear power. 67 Amory Lovins asks ‘why did the USA put its young people into 06 mpg tanks in the Gulf when the need for Gulf oil in the USA could have been totally removed by the same young people driving 32 mpg cars? (in Ann HendersonSellers, ‘Greenhouse, Gaia and Global Change: A Personal View of the Pitfalls of Interdisciplinary Research,’ Australian Geographer 20, no. 1 (1992): 25). 68 Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. 69 Within the scope of anthropocentric solutions, some efforts are more appealing than others. For instance, Van Jones’s ‘Green Jobs, Not Jail’ program is, to my mind, an inspiring effort to make the largely affluent Green Movement accessible to America’s poor. Through various Green Job programs, Jones seeks to yoke together the American middle-class desire to practice Green living with the Black underclass’s economic survival and desire to participate in Green living that is largely beyond their reach. See http://www.vanjones. net/. See also Alan T. Durning, Green-Collar Jobs: Working in the New Northwest (Seattle: Northwest Environment Watch, 1999). 70 Lovelock notes that Gaia’s current biodiversity is transient and subject to gradual and abrupt changes. The mass extinction in the late Permian (about 250 million years ago) thought to have been caused by giant volcanic eruptions, killed more than half of the families of marine species, 70 percent of vertebrate genera and countless species of rooted plants. Other nonhuman precipitated mass extinctions took place in the Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, and End-Cretaceous. 71 James Lovelock in Stepehen Schneider, James Miller, Eileen Crist and Penelope Boston, Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, 1906. Lovelock’s attitude toward humanity borders on ambivalence. He writes: ‘We must moderate our passion for human rights and being to recognize the rest of

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life on earth. The risk to individuals of cancer from exposure to nuclear radiation or to products of the chemical industry is personally important but should not be our most urgent concern. First in our thoughts should be the need to avoid perturbing what seems to be an unstable and failing superorganism. Above all, we do not want to trigger the jump to a new but unwanted stable climate.’ See James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, 228. Lynn Margulis, ‘Gaia is a Tough Bitch,’ 129–46. Stephan Harding, Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia (Totnes, Devon: Green Books, 2006), 226–7. E.O. Wilson likens the attempt to reassemble an endangered or extinct ecological community – because of their nearly limitless number of bacteria, species, symbioses and niches – to unscrambling an egg with two spoons. See D. Wilkinson, ‘Do We Need to Worry About the Conservation of Microorganisms?,’ in Earthy Realism: The Meaning of Gaia, ed. M. Midgley (Charlottesville, VA: Societas, 2007), 55. E.O. Wilson in Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002). Peter C. van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997). Peter C. van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject, 25. Peter C. van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject, 30. Interestingly, Lovelock’s deep ecology is sympathetic to technology (nuclear power and flotillas of vertical pipes in the tropical seas to boost the ocean’s take-up of CO2). See James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity and James Lovelock and Chris Rapley, ‘Ocean Pipes Could Help the Earth to Cure Itself,’ Nature 449 (September 2007): 403. Peter C. van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject, 92. Niche’ theory looks at the coevolution of genetic, organismal and environmental properties of organism-environment relations (see F. John OdlingSmee, Kevin N. Laland and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). De Laplante makes a cogent argument for a ‘more expansive conception of ecological science’ that includes the social sciences. See Kevin De Laplante, ‘Toward a More Expansive Conception of Ecological Science,’ Biology and Philosophy 19 (2004): 263–81. See also Ann Henderson-Sellers, ‘Greenhouse, Gaia and Global Change: A Personal View of the Pitfalls of Interdisciplinary Research,’ Australian Geographer 20, no. 1 (1992): 1–43.

Chapter 7 1 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 380. Copyright © 2007, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher. 2 John Agnew, ‘Open to Surprise,’ Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 1 (2006): 1–4. Reprinted by permission of SAGE. 3 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet.

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Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 3. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 25. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 30. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, 96. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 33. See Isabelle Stengers, ‘Turtles All the Way Down,’ in Power and Invention: Situating Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 60–74. Stengers asks whether we are able to ‘tackle the epistemological ‘obstacle,’ the description of a world centered on us, of turtles made for our support…’ (60). Here is the rub: can ‘we’ (humans) think beyond ‘big like us’? Do we humans think alone, or are we forever enmeshed with our companion species in thinking itself? Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 226. See Cary Wolfe, ‘In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion,’ in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–58; Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. A. Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); J.F. Lyotard, The Inhuman, Trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); J.F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well” or the Calculation of the Subject,’ in Who Comes After the Subject? eds. E. Cadava, P. Connor and J.L. Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991); Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),’ in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, eds. M. Calarco and P. Atterton (New York: Continuum, 2004/1997); Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Report of “The Paradox of Morality”: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,’ in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, eds. R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (London: Routledge, 1988); Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,’ in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990/1975); Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Interview,’ in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, eds. M. Calarco and P. Atterton (New York: Continuum, 2004); John Llewelyn, ‘Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal),’ in Re-Reading Levinas, eds. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991); Karalyn Kendall, ‘The Face of a Dog: Levinasian Ethics and Human-Dog Co-evolution,’ in Queering the Non/Human, eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008), 185–204; Catherine Wilson, Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). Norman Pace writes ‘Microbial diversity is too broad, far too complex to be accommodated by species counts’. Norman Pace, ‘The Early Branches in the Tree of Life,’ 84. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 287; Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well” or the Calculation of the Subject,’ in Who Comes after the Subject? eds. E. Cadava, P. Connor and J.L. Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991). Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York: Penguin Press, 2007). Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 10. V.I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, ed. M. McMenamin (New York: Copernicus/ Springer-Verlag, 1926/1997), 104. Vernadsky points to a corollary of the autotroph-heterotroph distinction, which is that heterotrophs are restricted

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to regions where they can consume living matter. In other words, autotrophs enjoy a much more extensive habitat. The Biosphere’s annotator, Mark McMenamin notes that a single autotrophic cyanobacterium, with unrestricted growth, could oxygenate the earth’s atmosphere in 40 days. See V.I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, ed. M. McMenamin (New York: Copernicus/ Springer-Verlag, 1926/1997), 105, fn.206. Hern, in Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York: Penguin Press, 2007). Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York: Penguin Press, 2007). S. Sonea and L. Mathieu, Prokaryotology: A Coherent View (Les Presses de L’Universite de Montreal, 2000), 16. Mice reared by scientists in a microbefree environment must consume about 30 percent more calories to maintain the same body weight as mice kept in microbe-rich habitats. See Marlene Zuk, Riddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are. Lora Hooper, Melissa Wong, Anders Thelin, Lennart Hansson, Per Falk and Jeffrey Gordon, ‘Molecular Analysis of Commensal Host-Microbial Relationships in the Intestine,’ Science 291, no. 2 (2001): 881–4. See also: H. Wexler, ‘Bacteriodes: The Good, the Bad and the Nitty-Gritty,’ Clinical Microbiological Review 20 (2007): 593–621; P. Gerard, P. Lepercq, M. Leclerc, F. Gavini, P. Raibaud and C. Juste, ‘Bacteriodes sp. Strain D8, the First Cholesterol-Reducing Bacterium Isolated from Human Feces,’ Applied Environmental Microbiology 73 (2007): 5742–9; B. Corthesy, H. Gaskins and A. Mercenier, ‘Cross-Talk Between Probiotic Bacteria and the Host Immune System,’ Journal of Nutrition 137 (2007): 781S–790S; P. Eckburg, E. Bik, C. Bernstein, E. Purdom, L. Dethlefsen, M. Sargent, S. Gill, K. Nelson and D. Relman, ‘Diversity of the Human Intestinal Microbial Flora,’ Science 308 (2005): 1635–8; J. Xu and J. Gordon, ‘Inaugural Article: Honor Thy Symbionts,’ PNAS 100 (2003): 10452–9; V. Mai and J. Morris Jr., ‘Colonic Bacterial Flora: Changing Understandings in the Molecular Age,’ Journal of Nutrition 134 (2004): 459–64. ‘Probiotic’ drinks are based on the premise that the bacteria in these drinks will introduce ‘good’ bacteria into the human intestine, thereby ‘rebalancing’ the microflora. For a review of the lack of evidence that probiotic drinks actually work, see G. Tannock, ‘A Special Fondness for Lactobacilli,’ Applied Environmental Microbiology 70 (2004): 3189–94. Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century. Adam, in Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 67. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Rumenitis is good news for the bacillus Fusobacterium necrophorum, whose presence characterizes this disease; enterotoxemia is good news for the bacillus Clostridium perfringens, and coccidiosis is good news for the protozoan (single-celled eukaryote) coccidian. Zuk estimates that 75 percent of all new human emerging diseases are spread from animals to humans (Marlene Zuk, Riddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are). Recall the footnoted discussion in Chapter 4 about Nietzsche’s contention that true gifting involves forgetting. The only way, according to Nietzsche,

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36 37

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to truly gift is to bludgeon the gifter such that s/he doesn’t remember giving, and to bludgeon the recipient so that s/he does not know who did the gifting. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 10–11, 68, 84. John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century, 169. Roszak in Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 13. Mike Michael, Constructing Identities (London: Sage, 1996), 135; H. Batty and T. Gray, ‘Environmental Rights and National Sovereignty,’ in National Rights, International Obligations, eds. S. Caney, D. George and P. Jones (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). I think this is to some degree what Latour envisions will be the work of the ‘Parliament of Things’. He writes: ‘Let us again take up the two representations and the double doubt about the faithfulness of the representatives, and we shall have defined the Parliament of Things… Natures are present, but with their representatives, scientists who speak in their name. Societies are present, but with the objects that have been serving as their ballast from time immemorial… The imbrolios and networks that had no place now have the whole place to themselves. They are the ones that have to be represented; it is around them that the Parliament of Things gathers henceforth’. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 144, my emphasis. In such a Parliament of Things, the nonhuman would have responsibilities of action, of response, and of ethics. Cary Wolfe, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, 3. J.F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, 28. Derrida notes that ‘the Word, logos, does violence to the heterogeneous multiplicity of the living world by reconstituting it under the sign of identity, the as such and in general – not “animals” but “the animal”, in Cary Wolfe, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, 23. Bauman in Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and the Posthumanist Theory, xvii. See Karalyn Kendall, ‘The Face of the Dog: Levinasian Ethics and Human/ Dog Coevolution,’ in Queering the NonHuman, eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird, 185–204. Of course, Bobby may not have wanted to relate to Levinas at all, which makes the ethical encounter all that much more challenging. As Latour writes, ‘It is not an easy task to transform the inarticulate mutterings of a multitude of entities that do not necessarily want to make themselves understood’. See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 168. Noting Daniel Dennett’s point that consciousness is not digital (i.e. it is not an all or nothing entity), Wolfe argues that it is of little help in thinking through the ethical differences between abusing a dog and abusing a scallop – ‘differences that would seem, to many people, to be the point, even if they are certainly not ethically the only point …’. See Cary Wolfe, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, 42. Contrast this with Rosi Braidotti’s critique of deep ecology, which pivots on a definitive separation between humans and animals. She writes, ‘Deep ecology consequently displays the moral arrogance that consists in granting to non-humans the same moral rights as to humans.’ See Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, 117.

196 Notes 39 Joost Van Loon, ‘Parasite Politics: On the Significance of Symbiosis and Assemblage in Theorizing Community Formations,’ 251–2. 40 Barbara Smuts, ‘Between Species: Science and Subjectivity,’ Configurations 14, nos. 1–2 (2006): 115–26. 41 Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well” or the Calculation of the Subject,’ 115, 109. 42 Jamie Lorimer, ‘Nonhuman Charisma,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 911–32. I thank Rebecca Scott for drawing my attention to this article. Biomimicry refers to human imitation of bacterial behaviors in the service of technological development. Biomimicry includes the use of bacteria (patented in the United States in 1972) that eat oil spills, cyanide in water systems, and the production of bacteriophages used in genetic engineering. See Joseph Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (Berkeley: University of California Press), 14; Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (HarperCollins, 2002). 43 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 39.

Index Note: Page numbers followed by n refer to notes. abstract sex, 113 Acrasia, 97–8 Actinoastrum, 98–9 actor network theory (ANT), 15–16 agential cut, 35, 59, 71, 82 alarmones, 41 Altmann, Richard, 61 Amsterdam Declaration, 122–3 Analytical Theory of Heat (Fourier), 146n.20 Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 68 archaea bacteria and, 26 ancient hyperthermophiles and thermophilic green nonsulfurs, 27–8 cyanobacteria, 32–3 gram-positive bacteria, 31–2 green sulfur bacteria, 28 proteobacteria, 28–31 spirochetes, 33–4 halophiles, 34 hyperthermophiles, 34 methanogens, 34 Armstrong, Neil, 122 autogamy, 108 autopoiesis, 86–8 autotrophic organisms, 136, 137 Axelrod, R., 69 Bacon, Francis, 5 bacteria, 93, 127–8 ancient hyperthermophiles and thermophilic green nonsulfurs, 27–8 archaea and, 26 halophiles, 34 hyperthermophiles, 34 methanogens, 34 ‘big like us’ approach, 21–6

community, 46–52 cyanobacteria, 32–3 eating well with, 137–40 forms of life, 35–41 gram-positive bacteria, 31–2 green sulfur bacteria, 28 meetings with, 52 difference which makes a difference, 53–4 nature-culture-social schema, 54–7 microbes perception, 41 communication and self-engineering, 42–6 immunity and, 83 as parasites, 66 proteobacteria, 28–31 sex and gender in, 102–3 social intelligence, 52 spirochetes, 33–4 Bacteroides, 30 Barad, Karen, 1, 11, 12, 35, 53, 54, 147n.23 Barlow, Connie, 123 barnacle sex, 91–3 Bauman, Zygmunt, 141 bdelloid rotifers, 109 Bear, Greg, 52 Becerra, Arturo, 41 Ben-Jacob, Eshel, 42, 47, 49, 52, 53 Berkeley, George, 4 ‘big like us’ approach, 21–6, 87 Bingham, Nick, 90 biological self autopoiesis, 86–8 co-evolved microbiota, 83 corporeal gifting, 86 immunity, 81 selfhood, 85 symbiotic relationships, 84 197

198 Index biosphere, 119–20 birth control, in animals, 104 Bloor, David, 14 Bohr, Niels, 7, 9, 10–12 Boyle, Robert, 6 Brahe, Tycho, 5–6 Braidotti, Rosi, 25 Braun, Bruce, 86, 89 Bricmont, J., 3 Buchnera, 30 Burnet, Frank, 81–2 Callon, Michael, 16–17 Campbell, Norman, 7 Campbell, Timothy, 89–90 Caputo, John, 90 Carosella, Edgardo, 83 cattle lives in beef production, 139 causality, 10 Cavalier-Smith, Thomas, 69 Cavell, Stanley, 4 chemolithotrophy, 27 Chlorochromatium, 28 ‘choreography of ontogeny’, 97 chromosome structures, 101 Clark, Nigel, 80, 81 Clarke, Arthur C., 25 Cleveland, L.R., 110 Cohen, Ferdinand, 93 Coleman, David, 24 Collins, H.M., 14 Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, The (Lingis), 131 Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO), 139, 140 Copeland, Herbert F., 36 Copernican system of planets, 5–6 corporeal generosity, 77, 80, 89 corporeal gifting, 78, 80, 86, 89 Cracraft, Joel, 38 Crist, Eileen, 82 Curtis, Thomas P., 36 cyanobacteria, 32–3 Cyanoderma, 33 cytosine methylation, 109–10 Daisyworld, 124 Darwin, Charles, 38, 91, 94 De Bary, Anton, 61

Delaye, Luis, 41 Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 113 Dennett, Daniel, 75–6 depth perception, 119, 131 Derrida, Jacques, 80, 90, 143 Descartes, René, 6 Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex, The (Darwin), 94 Dexter Dyer, Betsey, 24 Dialogues (Plato), 3 Dictyostelium discoideum, 65–6 Diprose, Rosalyn, 1, 77, 80, 82, 89 Donoghue, Michael, 38 Doolittle, F.W., 38, 40, 70 Douglas, Mary, 78 Duerr, Hans Peter, 119 Dupré, John, 78, 81, 85 Durkheim, Emile, 94 ecology of strength and weakness, 119, 130–2 Edwards, Peter, 36 Einstein, Albert, 10 embodied generosity, 77 endemic parasitism, 85–6 entangled material agencies, 11, 12 environment, microontologies bacteria, 127–8 ecology of weakness, 130–2 Gaia theory, 116 proposals of, 119–22 scientific criticism, 122–6 global warming, 117–18 humans and, 128–30 symbiosis and, 118 Environmental Microbiology and International Microbiology, 68 epidemic space, 57 epigenetics, 72–3 Erwinia, 30 Escherichia coli, 30 Esposito, Roberto, 89 eukaryotes, meiotic sex in, 107–8 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 110–11 fission fungi, 93 flagella, 27 Fox, George, 36 Fox Keller, Evelyn, 3

Index 199 free will, 12 Freese, 121 Fuller, Steve, 7 Gaia theory, 116, 118, 119 challenges, 136 Lovelock approach to, 120–1 proposal of, 121–2 scientific criticism, 122–6 Galileo, 3–4, 6 Gallionella, 29 gender definition, 100 difference, 94 as epiphenomenon, 101 gender-changing species, 101–2 Geosiphon pyriforme, 105 gifting, 78–81, 88 Gilbert, Scott, 81, 83 global warming, 117–18 glomales (mycorrhizal fungi), 108–9 gods and earth giants, 3–4, 5 Goldenfeld, N., 67, 68 Goldman, Steven L., 4, 6 gonochoristic fish, 101 Gorelick, Root, 107, 109–10 Gould, S.J., 24, 38, 64 gram-positive bacteria, 31–2 green sulfur bacteria, 28 Griffiths, Paul, 108 Grosz, Elizabeth, 1, 76, 111–12 Guattari, Felix, 1, 113 Hacking, Ian, 7, 19 Haeckel, Ernest, 38 halophiles, 34 Hamilton, W., 69, 129 Haraway, Donna, 1, 86, 100, 119, 133, 134, 135, 136 Harding, Stephan, 122 Harman, Graham, 15, 18–19, 55 Hayden, Deborah, 33 Hayles, Katherine, 87–8 Heisenberg, Werner, 9 Henderson, L.J., 122 Hennig, Willi, 38 Hitchcock, Dian, 120 Hobbes, Thomas, 6

Hoffmeyer, Jesper, 53 Homeostatic Gaia, 123 homosexual behavior, 104 Hooke, Robert, 6 Hooker, Cliff, 10 Hooper, Lora, 138 Hume, David, 4, 5 Hutchinson, Evelyn G., 128 hypersex, 107, 113 hyperthermophilic archaea, 28, 29, 34 immunity, 81, 83 individual entities, 12 individualism, 12 inductive communication, 42 informative communication, 42 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (2007), 117 International Biodiversity Programme, 123 International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, 123 International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, 123 intuition, 4 Jablonka, Eva, 72–3 Joy, Morna, 79–80 Kandler, O., 36 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 13 Kendall, Kara, 80–1 Kepler’s theory, 6 Kinsman, Sharon, 92 Kirby, Vicki, 1, 111 Kirchner, James W., 123 Kitano, Hiroaki, 84 Kozo-Polyansky, B.M., 61 Krizek, George, 105 Lafferty, R.A., 24 Lake, James, 38 Lamb, Marion, 72–3 Lane, Nick, 98, 115 Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), 38, 41

200 Index lateral gene transfer (LGT), 38, 40, 170n.78 Latour, Bruno, 1, 12, 13, 15–19, 35, 41, 55, 93, 127, 152n.73 Lazcano, Antonio, 41 Lederberg, Josh, 93 Leedale, Gordon F., 36 Lenton, Timothy M., 124–5 Leptothrix, 29 Levinas, Emmanuel, 80–1, 90, 141 lichen, 32, 59 Lingis, Alphonso, 1, 56, 80, 119, 131 Linné, Carl von, 36, 94 Locke, John, 4 Loon, Van, 85–6 Lorimer, Jamie, 143 Lovelock, James, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123–5, 127, 129, 131 Lowman, Paul, 122 Mackay, J.L., 94–5 Mackenzie, Adrian, 19 macrocosmos, 118 Margulis, Lynn, 21, 24, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37–8, 59, 62, 64, 68, 69, 86, 95, 97, 101, 105–11, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 122, 129 Mastotermes darwiniensis, 61 Mathieu, Leo, 128 Maturana, Humberto, 86, 87 Mauss, Marcel, 77, 78–9 Mayr, Ernst, 62, 70, 94 McFall-Ngai, Margaret, 71 meiosis, 99 Mereschkowski, K.S., 61 Meselson, Matthew, 109 methanogen metabolism, 27 methanogens, 27, 34, 191n.58 microbial ethics, 133 eating well with bacteria, 137–40 enmeshing of species, 135 forgetting human connections with environment, 140–2 species-meeting, 134, 136 surviving humanism, 142–4 microcosmos, 118, 133 mitochondria, 29 mitochondrial DNA, 113, 114–15

mitosis definition, 98–9 phases, 106 structures, 107 mixis, 99–100, 105, 109 Mixotricha paradoxa, 59–60 molecular sexes, 113 Mollenhaur, Dieter, 105 Monera, 93 Murphie, Andrew, 19 myxobacteria, 30, 46, 49 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 90 natural selection, organisms, 70 co-evolution, 71–2 epigenetics, 72–3 in evolution, 64–5 mutations in bacteria, 73–4 Neisseria, 29 neoDarwinism, 62–70, 95, 129 bacteria as pathogens, 66 natural selection, in evolution, 64–5 propositions, 62–3 New Organon, The (Bacon), 5 Newton, Isaac, 4, 6 nonhuman charisma, 143 nonmodern microontology, 19–20 Nostoc (cyanobacterium), 33, 105 objectivity, 11 Oda, Kanae, 84 O’Malley, Maureen, 78, 81, 85 Ophryotrocha, 101 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 91 oxygen Holocaust, 127 Oyama, S., 66, 97 Paenibacillus dendritiformis, 42, 46 Papilio phorcas, 102 Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, 31 parasite politics, 56 Parisi, L., 67, 113 Park, Robert, 54 particle–wave duality, 7, 8, 9 parsimonious relation to the world, 80, 82 Pearson, Keith Ansell, 1, 66, 118 Peirce, C.S., 53

Index 201 Pelochromatium, 28 perception, of bacteria, 41 Pfiesteria piscicida, 35 Philippe, Hervé, 40 photoautotrophs, 27 Photobacter, 30 photosynthetic metabolism, 27 Plato, 3 Podolsky, B., 10 Policansky, David, 101 Pollan, Michael, 136, 138 Pradeu, Thomas, 83 proteobacteria, 28–31 Pseudomonas, 30 Ptolemy’s system, 5, 6 purple nonsulfur bacteria, 27 purple sulfur bacteria, 27 quantum theory, 9, 10, 12 quorum sensing, 44 realism, 3, 12, 16 reality, 10, 11, 14 rejuvenesence theory, 110 reproduction, definition, 97 Revenge of Gaia, The (Lovelock), 116 Rivera, Marla, 38 Roof, Judith, 25 Roos, U.P., 109 Rose, Nikolas, 86 Rosen, N., 10 rotifers, 109 Runciman, G., 54 Saccharomyces cerevisiae, 101 Sagan, Dorion, 83, 84–5, 95, 97, 101, 106, 107, 110, 111 Sapp, Jan, 38, 170n.78 Scannell, J.W., 36 Schiebinger, Londa, 102 Schimper, Andreas, 61 Schizomycetes, 93 Schizophyllum commune, 100–1 Schneider, Eric, 84–5 Schneider, Stephen, 125 Schrader, Astrid, 35, 126 Schrödinger, Erwin, 9, 147n.24 Schwarzmann, David, 122 Scientific American, 128

Sebeok, Thomas A., 53–4 self, microontologies biological self, 81–8 corporeal gifting, 78–81 self/nonself relation, 77 symbiotic generosity, 88–90 Selfish Gene, The (Dawkins), 69 selfish gene theory, 114–15, 129 self/nonself model, 81–2 sex, microontologies barnacle sex, 91–3 glossary of terms, 96–103 post-mature discoveries and evolutionary theory’s problem, 93–6 revolutions, 109–15 sexual diversity, 103–5 sexual reproduction and evolution, 100, 105–9 sexual unions, levels of, 98 Shapiro, James, 74 Sharov, Alexei, 53 Sloan, William T., 36 Smith, John Maynard, 70, 94, 95 social constructivism, 3 social intelligence, 52 Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), 13–15 Sokal, Alan, 3–7 Sonea, S., 128 Sphaerotilus, 29 spirochetes, 33–4 Stanier, Roger, 36 Stentor polymorphous, 101 Sterelny, Kim, 108 Streptomyces, 31 Suess, Eduard, 119 symbiogenesis theory, 107, 183n.56 definition, 58 evolution of, 59–62 neoDarwinism and, 62–70 bacteria as pathogens, 66 natural selection, in evolution, 64–5 propositions, 62–3 sexual reproduction and, 95–6, 108

202 Index symbiosis definition, 58 natural selection, 65 research on, 68–9 from space, 119–22 species mergence, 83 symbiotic generosity, 88–90 Systema Naturae (Linné), 94 Tauber, A.I., 82 Theriot, Julie, 86 Thiobacillus, 29 Thomas, L., 67, 83 Thompson, William I., 13 transvestism, 102, 180n.36 ‘trap of differentition’, 107 Tree of Life (TOL), 38, 39 Treponema pallidum, 33, 34, 56 Trichonympha, 96–7 Trichophilus, 33 Tsing, Anna, 55, 56 Uncertainty Principle, 9 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 117 Urry, John, 116, 141 Van Loon, Joost, 56–7, 85–6, 142 van Niel, C.B., 36

van Wyck, Peter C., 119, 130, 131 Varela, Francisco, 86, 87 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 120, 128 Vibrio, 30 volition, 12 Volk, Tyler, 122 wave–particle duality, 7, 8, 9 Weismann, August, 73, 81 Wheelis, M.L., 36 When Species Meet, 136 Whitman, William, 24 Whittaker, Robert H., 36 Wiebe, William, 24 Wilson, E.O., 103, 129 Wilson, Elizabeth, 1, 91–2 Wilson, Robert, 81 Woese, C., 36, 37, 67, 68 Wolfe, Cary, 84 Woolgar, Steve, 16 World Climate Research Programme, 123 Yearley, Steven, 14 Zuckerman, Harriet, 93 zygomycete fungus, 105