Abstract
This chapter steps back from the technological realm and takes a look at how the humanist dualist paradigm is also being challenged in current biological research, particularly in molecular biomedicine and evolutionary biology. A possible shift in these disciplines attests to this, from a “molar” formulation of the body or organism, understood as a self-contained, unified organic whole, distinct from its environment, to a “molecular” body or organism, understood as a fragmented assemblage made up of transferable and translatable parts that depends much more on interactions with its surroundings. This biological form of originary prostheticity complements its anthropological counterpart that was articulated in Chap. 4.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter is inspired by the article “The Missing Link. How Biology can Help Philosophy of Technology Complete its Ontological Shift” (2013). Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 75(1), 121–145.
- 2.
For a detailed discussion of such metaphors, namely in the context of cancer, see Susan Sontag (1977) and Richard Gwyn (2002). Sontag comments on the fact that the same vocabulary is used in reference to cancer, aerial warfare and science fiction. Cancer cells invade the body, patients are bombarded with toxic rays and chemotherapy is construed as chemical warfare.
- 3.
The new generation of “targeted therapies” in cancer research, for example, bind to signaling molecules on tumors in order to disrupt cell growth signals (Genentech’s Herceptin for breast cancer, Pfizer’s Sutent for kidney cancer), or to hit specific molecular components of the immune system (Medarex’s Ipilimumab).
- 4.
This type of thought on the body also develops from extracting the notion of the body from its purely human and even biological setting. The body as assemblage holds not only for animal bodies, but for all bodies, be they chemical, political, biological or social: “a body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity” (Deleuze 1988: 127).
- 5.
What has been called a “turn to affect” occurred in critical and cultural theory in the mid-1990s, following the work of Deleuze and Guattari. This was often a response to the limitations of poststructuralist thought and deconstruction, namely, the problems associated with writing the body out of theory and the insistence on social structures rather than interpersonal relationships as formative of the subject. Contributions to this approach include Brian Massumi (1996, 2002), Eve Sedgwick (2003) and Patricia T. Clough, who edited The Affective Turn in Social Theory (2007). In this approach, affect is usually conceptualized as pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act.
- 6.
This is one of the ethological relationships Deleuze and Guattari mention. They also argue that children often think of bodies in terms of affect (making them Spinozists by nature). Thus, Freud’s Little Hans thinks of the horse in terms of affects such as “having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker [and] pulling heavy loads” (1987: 257).
- 7.
In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari are naturally indebted to Nietzsche, for whom the body is a composition of forces and should be understood in terms of quantities and qualities of forces.
- 8.
See for example, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of anorexia (1987). Following Spinoza, they understand appetite or hunger not as a primary, inbuilt instinct, but as the product of a relation with food. The anorexic body is thus seen as incapable of realizing this productive relation with food, and anorexia is interpreted as an attempt to liberate the body from the insupportable burden of automatic relations. In this sense, anorexia is not a clinical condition but a practice of self, an attempt to produce a body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition to traditional medical interpretations of anorexia is also related to its psychologist aspect, that explains anorexia as a body-image disorder. This kind of reading sees the body as subordinate to the mind – a view they reject entirely).
- 9.
These models need to be understood as an attempt to go beyond the alleged genetic reductionism and determinism of neo-Darwinism rather than as an opposition to classical Darwinism. Though, if neo-Darwinism views genes rather than organisms as the irreducible and basic elements of biological reality, this gene-centrism is in fact derived from Darwin’s organism-centrism. I will return to a discussion on genetic reductionism in much greater detail in Chap. 8.
- 10.
For Kant, this emphasis on self-organization serves as both an opposition to argument from design and as a damper on the fascination with the very lifelike automata of his time.
- 11.
These techniques did indeed lead to the unexpected discovery of an important new branch on the tree of life. Before this time it was generally believed that the world of living things could be divided into two separate groups depending on cell-structure: bacteria, or prokaryotes (organisms composed of cells with no nucleus) and eukaryotes (organisms composed of cells that contain a nucleus, such as animals, plants, fungi and many unicellular life-forms). In the late 1970s, thanks to the new genome sequencing techniques, a new group made up of unicellular archaea – prokaryotes previously believed to be bacteria but found to have a radically different molecular structure – was revealed, leading to a new three-domain view of life. The archaea came to be seen as an intermediate domain of life between bacteria and eukaryotes.
- 12.
Tal Dagan (2008) and colleagues at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf found that more than 80 % of genes in genomes from some 181 prokaryotes were involved in horizontal gene transfer.
- 13.
The idea that the eukaryotic cell is actually a colony of microbes was first suggested in the 1920s by the American biologist Ivan Wallin (Fausto-Sterling 1993). Margulis is the originator of the modern version of endosymbiosis. See also her Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (1981) and, in collaboration with Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution (1986).
- 14.
Though Darwin himself concluded in The Origin of Species that all life arose from “a few forms or… one”.
- 15.
In 2009, for example, many lay-readers and biologists were quick to denounce an article in the New Scientist entitled “Uprooting Darwin’s Tree” (Lawton 2009), and its sensationalist cover, which read “Darwin was Wrong”. This included a letter that appeared in the February 18 issue by Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins and Paul Myers entitled “Darwin was right”. Such criticisms usually made the point that these processes are only typical of single-cell organisms, and that in light of the fact that Darwin knew nothing of microorganisms or molecular genetics, his tree is quite accurate. But what’s more, they often expressed outrage at the claim that “Darwin was wrong”, which they believed would play into the hands of creationists. As they feared, shortly after its publication members of the board of education of the state of Texas were already citing the article as an indication that creationist-inspired theories should be used in schools. Not that the staff at New Scientist did not anticipate this: as the editor wrote in the issue’s editorial,
None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that “New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong”. Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse.
The controversy surrounding the article is a telling indication of how intense the clash between evolutionary biologists and creationists today really is. Nonetheless – granted the article, and especially the cover, were sensationalist – it would be very unfortunate if a fear of legitimizing creationism were to become the source of a Darwinian orthodoxy.
- 16.
Many theorists have drawn a parallel between Margulis’ theorization of endosymbiosis and Deleuze and Guattari. See especially Keith Ansell Pearson’s Viroid Life (1997) and Germinal Life (1999), Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002) and A New Philosophy of Society (2006). See also Rosi Braidotti (2002, 2006a), Jon Protevi (2006) and Mark Hansen (2000).
- 17.
Some of these examples include the cow genome, which was found to contain a piece of snake DNA that transferred horizontally some 50 million years ago, the genome of a fruit fly, which contains the entire integrated genome of the bacterium Wolbachia, and a gene crucial to the function of stinging cells in jellyfish and sea anemones found to be transferred from bacteria.
- 18.
Margulis has been accused of over-emphasizing these cooperative aspects of evolution over competition, and of inferring more general normative conclusions from here. See, for example, the comments made by leading scientists about her in The Third Culture (Brockman 1995: 140–141, 145), such as Daniel Dennett: “I think she’s trying to take a wonderful idea and harness it as a political idea”, George C. Williams: “Margulis is very much afflicted with a kind of ‘God-is-good’ syndrome”, and Francisco Varela: “It’s unfortunate that she has veered into some weird second stage”. This has to do mostly with Margulis’ collaboration with James Lovelock in the development of the “Gaia hypothesis”. On this see Doolittle’s article “Is Nature Really Motherly?” (1981), in which he argues that there is nothing in the genome of individual organisms that can provide the feedback mechanisms the Gaia theory proposes, and Dawkins’ The Extended Phenotype (1999), where he argues that the type of working in concert necessitated by the Gaia hypothesis requires of organisms a foresight that they do not have.
- 19.
Sagan cites the streptococcus bacteria and Candida albicans fungi. This approach is also becoming widespread in cancer immunobiology. Here the idea is that cancer cells are present in all bodies, but that the immune system usually manages to keep these early cancers and pin-headed tumors in check. See “The Immunobiology of Cancer Immunosurveillance and Immunoediting” by Dunn et al. (2004)), and “Cancer without Disease” by Judah Folkman and Raghu Kalluri (2004). Folkman and Kalluri cite autopsy studies which have revealed that more than a third of women aged 40–50 have small in situ breast carcinomas, whereas only 1 % are diagnosed with clinical breast cancer, analogous findings that hold for prostate cancer in men, and autopsies that show that virtually all people aged 50–70 have small in situ thyroid tumors, yet well below 1 % are diagnosed with clinical thyroid cancer.
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Sharon, T. (2014). From Molar to Molecular Bodies: Posthumanist Frameworks in Contemporary Biology. In: Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7554-1_5
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