History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences最新文献

How to make sense of the struggle of scientists in their efforts to answer demands to contribute simultaneously to the advancement of science and the economy? The life sciences are understood to be particularly affected by the increased institutional and political expectations to engender scientific innovations and value creation Fochler et al., (Minerva, 54:175-200, 2016). The expectations are often closely linked to the tools that life scientists work with, such as new sequencing technologies or model organisms that are invested with hopes of novelty. The experimental life of the Atlantic cod, which is our object of study, serves here as an entry point for understanding this significant feature of contemporary life sciences. The paper shows how equipping a species to do experimental work is not necessarily about having it perform only one type of job Clarke & Fujimura (1992) or performing in one, and exclusively one, site. On the contrary, an experimental organism may be promising and interesting due to how it can be put to work to perform both in and for science, and in and for the economy, simultaneously. In analyzing the double entendre of experimental work, this paper draws upon the analytical concepts co-modification and choreography that have been carefully crafted in close empirical studies. The notion co-modification is put to work together with the notion of choreography to delineate both the material and semiotic work that go into the drawing together of the inside and outside of the lab and the material arrangements that shape the rhythm of a disciplined and controlled lab site. Together we refer to this as choreographies of co-modification.

What happens to a life science when its subject spans the globe yet appears fated to extinction? Such is the predicament that the field of international coral reef studies confronts under the strains of ocean stress. This article asks why this predicament becomes the basis for authorizing new powers of human intervention into the nature of biology. Through a genealogy and commentary of a theory and experiment known as "human-assisted evolution" and its quest for "super corals," I examine the conceptual trouble that issues from calls to use corals to change global ocean change. I claim that the push to engineer marine life and worlds in response to ocean stress is as much an experiment in evaluating nature as it is in theorizing evolution. First, I offer the genre of "Big Coral" as a way of understanding a description of coral reefs as biological exemplars of global environmental change. Second, I offer a genealogical reading of human-assisted evolution as a whole Earth salvage operation grounded in a fantasy of geological time travel. Third, I locate the figure of the "super coral" and the trouble it raises not only in playing with the nature of corals but the nature of the human. I conclude with some reflections on ontological ambiguity that results from intervening in the nature of biology.

Millions of people have now taken DNA ancestry tests, with many of them looking for information about their origins or even their ethnic identity. However, what these tests can only do is allow for a probabilistic estimate of a person's similarity to a reference group. This is often based on research in population genetics that study human genetic variation by identifying ancestry informative markers, that is, DNA markers that are found more often in one population rather than others. Whereas these markers are not the criteria for membership in a group, they can serve as indicia for it. However, a confusion of indicia for criteria can emerge supported by a particular form of intuitive thinking, psychological essentialism. It consists of a set of interrelated beliefs: (a) Particular categories distinguish between fundamentally different kinds of people; (b) The boundaries that separate these categories are strict and absolute; (c) These categories have internal homogeneity and differ fundamentally from one another; (d) All this is due to internal essences that make the members of each category what they are. When our genome or DNA are perceived to be these essences and when this kind of thinking is applied to social categories such as race and ethnicity, a view that we call "sociogenetic essentialism", it can be highly problematic as it can form the basis for discrimination and exclusion. We argue that the use and reference to ancestry informative markers, unless clearly explained, may be misinterpreted due to a sociogenetic essentialist bias as confirming the genetic basis of social groups.

This article argues for a formalist approach to biological individuality, bridging formalist ways of reading in cultural and literary studies with contemporary debates in the philosophy of biology. Central to this discussion is the idea that the question of what constitutes an individual, spanning across domains such as biology, politics, law, and literature, is essentially a question of form: the conditions by which we individualise enforce a specific pattern through which we interpret the world, whether it is the natural world, the social world, or the fictional world of a literary text. Taking this as a starting point, the article adopts a strategic formalist method as articulated by Caroline Levine, employing a close-reading method that asks how forms of individuality, whether they are phenomenal, theoretical, or cultural, operate as they move beyond their designated system of discourse; what they afford when they travel across dissimilar materials; and what occurs when they intersect with other forms, be they sociopolitical, poetic, or aesthetic. Considering literary and sociopolitical forms on the same plane of existence as theoretical forms of individuality enables a needed conversation on the affordances of forms in both the production of knowledge and in the cultural imagination.

In the past twenty years, conceptual and technological shifts in the life sciences have unseated the causal primacy of the gene. The picture emerging from 'postgenomic' science is one that emphasises multifactorial dependencies between the environment, development, and the genome, and blurs boundaries between biological individuals, and between the body and the environment. Despite the rejection of genetic determinism within postgenomics, forms of determinism nevertheless persist. The environment is often conceptualised in postgenomic research in a narrow and constrained way, affording an outsized causal role to certain environmental factors while neglecting the influence of others. This carries ethical and social implications, including for understandings of race and motherhood. This topical collection interrogates the environmental determinisms developing within postgenomic science, through investigation of their conceptual foundations, histories, and social contexts across a range of postgenomic fields.

At the crossroads between food studies and science and technology studies, this paper analyzes the role of laboratories located within traditional cheese territories in the ecologization of cheese microbiology in France at the turn of the twentieth century. The paper argues that their connectedness with Protected Designation of Origin raw-milk cheese organizations advocating for a strong understanding of terroir played a key role in challenging the modern strain-by-strain approach and fostering a shift towards a new research object: microbial communities in their ecologies. Modernization and standardization in cheese production from the 1950s onwards laid indeed on the improvement of hygiene to get "cleaner" milks, and on lab research on microbial strains to develop selected starter cultures. This led to a dramatic loss of microbial abundance within raw milks, which progressively provoked milk processing issues, as well as a loss of cheese typicality, an issue for place-based cheeses. To face it, the modernist approach promoted more laboratorial research on microbial strains to develop new starter cultures and the diversification of microbial collections, within an ex-situ conservation framework. In contrast, microbiologists conducting applied research for raw-milk terroir cheeses investigated environmental microbial reservoirs, microbial fluxes, as well as farming practices that favor "natural seeding" and enrich milk native microflora. A new approach emerged, namely "practice-driven microbial ecology" (écologie microbienne dirigée), which enacts the dynamic and ubiquitous properties of microbial life. The paper offers a situated account on the "microbial (ecology) turn" described by other authors, highlighting the ecological approach developed in the 1990s-2000s by French microbiologists in search of "the microbial path to terroir".

This article presents an extension of an article previously featured in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences by Schweda and Jongsma (History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2022), who aptly (1) critiqued the "Zombification" of people living with dementia by reviewing the historic and philosophic origins of this damaging metaphor and (2) offered a life course perspective to highlight the ethical implications related to biomedicine and the life sciences. Herein, we aim to build upon and constructively critique the important discourse offered by Schweda and Jongsma by (1) presenting a transdisciplinary perspective highlighting many important remaining social and cognitive abilities of people living with dementia that (2) further informs philosophical discussion and (3) provides ways of helping people diagnosed as well as formal and informal caregivers to live with dementia rather than enduring the damaging and incorrect "living death" notion, and its ramifications, of the syndrome. In the process, we will explore many inherent harms associated with the "zombie-like" construction of the syndrome: harms that entail dysfunctional treatment of people living with dementia. Specifically, we will draw upon evidence from psychology, sociology, philosophy, neurology, and neuroscience, to provide an integrated, whole-person perspective that adds specific dimensions to the life-course perspective and support the necessary multifaceted interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and clinical collaborations for this complex issue.

The current research environment in psychiatry is marked by the discredit of the main psychiatric classifications. The common narrative about the DSM holds that the current diagnostic categories lack diagnostic validity. This claim is supported by the high degrees of diagnostic heterogeneity and comorbidity among diagnosed patients. Current attempts to overcome these problems emphasize the need to develop alternative ways of investigating psychopathology that no longer rely on the DSM categories. In this line, transdiagnostic research initiatives such as RDoC promote the abandonment of the DSM categories while still relying on traditional psychiatric symptoms. This reliance assumes that symptoms do not pose similar problems to the ones commonly ascribed to the DSM categories. In this article, I challenge what I call the "received view of symptoms" and argue that a closer look at symptom measurement reveals that different measurements of purportedly the same symptom differ from each other in ways that have an impact on both psychiatric research and clinical practice. Furthermore, I show that psychiatric symptoms are not "neutral" vis-à-vis the DSM categories. To illustrate my points, I use a case study from the history of the measurement of anhedonia. Based on this case study, I argue that in addition to diagnostic heterogeneity, there is also symptom measurement heterogeneity. Finally, I suggest a reassessment of the common narrative about the DSM's lack of diagnostic validity in light of my case study and argue that closer attention should be given to symptoms.

For mid-twentieth century scientists, industrialists, politicians, and lawyers, manganese (polymetallic) nodules were singular and valuable condensations of complex and little-understood biogeochemical processes. This paper examines how those processes were made tractable objects of interdisciplinary scientific inquiry in the mid-twentieth century, and how the study of those processes required the importation of biological and ecological concepts into the research of geochemistry at sea. Though largely falling away by the 1980s, the study of eukaryotic life on and in nodules was a lively area of research after the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958) and especially during the 1970s, when the US National Science Foundation funded a large, inter-university program on the study of manganese nodules to answer basic questions about ore formation and origin. Sorting out how deep-sea rocks generated and grew into valuable deposits required parsing life's patterns-rhythmic growth, cycles of metabolism, evolution, death and organic decay-from geological processes. I story how scientists came to interpret nodules as created and maintained amid hybrid biological-geological agencies. Building on work in multispecies and animal history, I articulate a multispecies methodology for taking mid-century nodule science as shot through with interspecies encounter, producing an archive co-authored with invertebrates. Both enabled and frustrated by organisms, abyssal resources and environments emerged into legibility together, within frames of oceanic resource extraction. Given renewed contemporary exigencies of deep-sea mining, this article reaches further across literary criticism, more-than-human history, and science & technology studies to expand the methodological terrain on which marine multispecies histories might draw.