Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
What we're talking about is technoscience and not science. We don't actually have the kind of theoretical framework that we need to be able to deal with really complex diseases.
Jonathan Basile:What we want is something that we're being told in about five years is going to be incredibly profitable. And so that's what the ideal of scientists becomes. It's someone who can tell you in five years, I'm going to change the world.
Cary Wolfe:People who've quote unquote seen the best doctors in the world with various kinds of autoimmune problems and conventional medicine can do nothing for them because of the lack of a theory of the organism and a good sound theoretical framework for the biology they're dealing with.
Giuseppe Longo:Puancare calls this result a negative result, and it opened the way of developing science as critical thinking. The relation between disciplines may certainly came from transferring techniques, but mostly by observing differences, stressing dualities.
Cary Wolfe:Hi, and welcome. My name's Cary Wolfe. I'm the editor of the Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press, and this is the Press' podcast network. We're here today to talk about two recent books in the series. In fact, two of the most recent, including the most recent volume 79, by Jonathan Bazille called Natural Election Cultures of Evolution.
Cary Wolfe:The other text we're gonna talk about, we have both of the, co conspirators on this project with us. The organism is a theory by Giuseppe Longo and, Adam Nocek. And the subtitle of that text is Giuseppe Longo in Biology, Mathematics, AI. To begin with, I'd like the, speakers who are with us today to introduce themselves. Adam, go ahead.
Adam Nocek:Yeah, hi. I'm Adam Nocek, and I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science and Technology and Founding Director of the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University. I've authored also for the posthumanities series Molecular Capture in 2021. Also this book, The Organism is a Theory, and have a forthcoming book also from posthumanities coming out sometime next year called Abstract Design, New Philosophy of Design Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Jonathan?
Jonathan Basile:Thank you. So I'm Jonathan Basile. I'm a faculty of arts and science postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto working with their, department of philosophy and institute for the history and philosophy of science and technology. And, in addition to my book with the posthumanity series, natural election, cultures of evolution, Last year, I published a book with SUNY Press called virality vitality, and so my work broadly deals with contemporary issues in, evolutionary theory and the life sciences. And I'm really excited to be in conversation with, everyone who's here today about it.
Giuseppe Longo:Hello. My name is Giuseppe Longo. I'm a emeritus research director in France at the Economy Superieux and the former full professor of computer science at the University of Pisa. And mathematician. I've been mostly working over taking a droughts in the mathematics of computing.
Giuseppe Longo:And then since about twenty five years, started interacting with physicists first for about ten years, and then for more than fifteen years with biologists in different kinds of projects. So I I mostly wrote papers as mathematicians do, but since the last few decades, a few books starting with theoretical physicist, Francis Baillie, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, the Physical Simularty of Life. And then a few more books, but they are Italian and French. And with the biologists, I wrote a book on New Approach to a Theory of Organism with Anna Sotto in particular and some colleagues. We wrote several papers in an approach to a view of the origin is in connection to Darwin's theory of revolution.
Giuseppe Longo:And and more recently, this book, which started from another idea by Adam, inspired, I believe, on some of my papers, and this allowed a dialogue which has been very stimulating for me. It had interfaces between mathematics and biology and also some aspect of artificial intelligence, largely grounded on my experience in mathematics and its correlations to natural sciences.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah. And Adam and I sort of cooked up this project, Giuseppe, in the wake of some of the work we did together in the Ontogenetics Process Group, which was largely based, but not totally based at Arizona State, and included our mutual friend, Coffin, which was a big motivation for me to get involved in that project. And, I had read some of your work, including, perspectives on organisms, and really wanted to do something with your work to introduce it and disseminate it more widely to a North American, largely English reading English speaking, audience, because that's a big project for the posthumanities series. And I hope we'll achieve that with the organism as a theory. The first thing I'd like you all to do, and we'll just begin Giuseppe with you and Adam is to try to sort of explain your title to the audience because both of these books have titles that are not immediately, you know, obvious in terms of, how they would invite a reader into knowing what the book is about.
Cary Wolfe:So tell us what your title means or its many, many names.
Giuseppe Longo:I let Adam do that.
Adam Nocek:I think, look, there's something slightly obvious and non obvious about the title. One of them is that the organism is a theory, and we're working mostly with theoretical biology and the construction of the way in which we're thinking about organismic processes. So yes, we're interested in experimental biology, but it's primarily theoretical biology. But also there's a much more radical thesis, which is that there is no organism that is not a theoretical construction. And a lot of this is also, you know, inherited from thinking about how it is that physicists generate theoretical objects, and they're actually incredibly inventive with the sort of theoretical objects that they invent to sort of deal with this sort of phenomenon that they're experiencing.
Adam Nocek:And unfortunately, the biological sciences have not been quite as inventive, if you like, in terms of their theoretical constructions, mostly because their theories are handed down or borrowed from other disciplines, be they physics or computer science, and the biological sciences really haven't been, like I said, as inventive. You know there's a sense in which the title The Organism is a Theory is supposed to capture this idea that yes, no, we're being bold and trying to theorize the organism in a way that's in the same genealogy or thinking alongside of physics, but at the same time is trying to carve out a theoretical space for the biosciences for them to invent their own theoretical space, which is the organism.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah, thanks, We're actually going to come back to another part of the story later around the question of disciplinarity and specifically the disconnect between, experimental molecular biology on the one hand and theoretical biology on the other. That's, you know, I think an important part of the story that we can discuss more later. But before we come back to that, Jonathan, you also have a a non obvious title. So maybe maybe you can tell us what the the the work that you're trying to have your title do in terms of inviting readers into what the book is about.
Jonathan Basile:Absolutely. So natural election, the first part of the title is elections, a somewhat antiquated word, referring to reading. And, of course, the title is meant to echo with the notion of natural selection and to do two things to, the concept of natural selection that is found in the Discourses of Evolution that the book is, most closely focused on. So at the level of the object of the life sciences, so the organism and processes that go on within it or through it, and then the subject of life science. So the life scientist is also doing a form of reading.
Jonathan Basile:I'm trying to bring up the sense of reading that the the project is very influenced by, Derrida and deconstruction. So the sense of reading in which, the way that Derrida would use that term, reading would be an absolute leap. So it's not just something that can be derived almost, deterministically or or programmatically from what's given. You can't just lean it off of a empirical glance at reality, but something creative or unanticipatable, that sort of leap has to take place when, the life scientist is trying to make sense of their object. And I'm trying to give a sense of this mirroring, that, scientific gesture, that scientific reading that makes a scientific interpretation possible, not, categorically distinct from what a living thing does when it's engaged with its environment.
Jonathan Basile:What a life scientist does therefore is a reading of a reading, and that's the the notion of natural election that this mirroring rather than making us closer to us complete or absolute understanding of life actually leaves some there's a aspect of creativity, but also of non closure to what is happening in the sciences that I'm trying to bring out with the readings of scientific texts that take place in the book. The second part of the title, cultures of evolution is meant to disrupt somewhat the, notion of cultural evolution. So a lot of discourses that I'm focused on in the book are ones where scientists either from the life sciences or adjacent disciplines like anthropology and psychology, sometimes even economics are looking towards evolutionary theory, we could say natural evolution, evolutionary theory of non human living things to provide a model for how they understand human culture. By pluralizing that notion, by speaking of cultures of evolution rather than cultural evolution, there's an aspiration to come up with one discourse to rule them all in this sense. So the the notion of science that they have, which again would not be this notion of science as reading as an absolute leap, but a scientific discourse that would be somehow more deterministic and absolute would step outside of its own culture and its own contingency and be able to govern the object that it's dealing with is actually itself, pluralistic.
Jonathan Basile:It's creating another discourse in another language rather than governing linguistic difference, and it is it is itself a culture. So the discourse of cultural evolution is a means of cultural transmission, and it derives from its own cultural context. And so again, there's a mirroring set up there that destabilizes the aspiration of absoluteness.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah. Thanks. Somebody who comes up in both books, the great Richard Lawton. I mean, we were talking about how organisms engage in their own kind of election. It reminded me of his distinction between the quote unquote external world and the environment, which is, I mean, to put it in your terms is an interpretation, right?
Cary Wolfe:Loantin says organ organisms don't adapt to their environments. They construct them. Right. And so there's a, I was re I heard a strong echo of Loantin shows up in your book a few times and, and Giuseppe, you and Adam discussed this as well. I wanted to come back to kind of use your title and your project, Jonathan, as a jumping off point to ask a question about the role and the concept of writing in both projects.
Cary Wolfe:And by writing, I mean, I mean that in kind of the broadest possible sense, not that, not the limited sense of, of, of a written language necessarily at all, but much more broadly in terms of, you know, kind of adjacent terms like, iteration and iterability, coding, proof notation, etcetera. I'm asking the question partly because in looking back over the two projects, it seems like the concept of writing functions and maybe is defined in almost opposite ways in the two book, which I think is really interesting. So whoever'd like to jump in on that first, I think that's a natural place to start given your title, Jonathan.
Giuseppe Longo:Well, going back to the title of our book, we focus on the organized because as for, the lack of a theory, the need for a theory test upon with the organism because I think there there is a theory of evolution with different practice, at least two, a broad discussion. One may stay on one side or another of the neo Darwinian approach of the alternative one, which we mostly follow, which goes back to many, like gold, West Sabra, Rewonten and so on. But then the the theoretical debate, which is lively and deep in evolution, is not reflected in what the organism is, you see. I mean, we had beautiful set theory, physiology in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century has been dominated by the role of chromosomes and then DNA, with the notion of genes driving ontogenesis. And with the notion of gene, very big one, and it changed five types according to William Fox carried during the twentieth century as a notion itself.
Giuseppe Longo:And within it, it's been a borrowing or wording from computing actually, you know, the notion of information or perhaps Shannon also elaboration of information or tooling elaboration of information versus transmission. And that borrowing is even not theoretical. It's just vague metaphors. Coding and alphabetic writing have to Jacob who claimed that we have been very lucky that the DNA is written with an alphabet, not in hydrographs. That's amazing.
Giuseppe Longo:I told this joke, but it was not meant to be a joke in Canima and we reached an agreement, their DNA is written in biographies, you know, just from from eyes. But that said, that's really a misleading approach that refers to a kind of a nucleus encoded within an organism that would explain everything like, you know, magic words that would motivate any phenomena including all pathologies with reference to what happens in DNA. Think DNA is very important, is the chemical physical trace of the entire evolution that you have in any cell. But more than for what it is, it matters for what it does and what the DNA does depends on the contents, the cell, the tissue, the organs, the ecosystem. That's the key issue.
Giuseppe Longo:And then the ability to bring in the unity of the harmonies within its peculiar role at the crossing of an historical and relational structure. I mean, an organ is the result of a history, it's a revolution and is there in a relational structure, the ecosystem that it co constructs. I mean, of course, it does construct its own niche and ecosystem, but conversely, it's the result of the relations existing historically and at the present in an ecosystem. So it's down the road. I'm not alone.
Giuseppe Longo:I mean, there are many people working in an approach like this. I'm very lucky to calibrate the same biologists of the organism since about many years and same philosophers as And by some specific director work has motivated them. We may discuss about that by current major issues like endocrine disruptors, carcinogenesis, and so on.
Adam Nocek:Yeah. I'll follow-up briefly just because I want to sort of because pick up on what Giuseppe's saying and also maybe anticipate what Jonathan may or may not talk about a little bit because, you know, writing as such is not necessarily humanized super explicitly in the book, although it's certainly in the background and I think you're sort of picking up Cary on something when you said that they're almost discussed in opposite ways, and it's not because there's necessarily a disagreement I think between the two books, it's just that we're emphasizing different aspects. You know, and the way we engage writing is really through Giuseppe's work also with collaborators like Jean LaSalle, on sort of the alphabetic writing being the origin of computing. And here we're thinking about writing framed as tokens devoid of meaning. And this is possible really through the invention of the Greek alphabet.
Adam Nocek:And this is something that Giuseppe can say much more about because he's actually co authored a book in French. Hopefully it will be translated into English soon, but this is of course, I mean, and this is something that is important for the book as well, this is of course not a sufficient theory of writing, and I think this is probably where Derrida's notion of writing becomes absolutely essential since iterability of computing does not exhaust in any way what writing can do and this kind of pure formalism of symbol manipulation is only part of the puzzle because this is why a more, I guess you could say, complex view of writing in biology and the merging discourse of deconstructive biology could potentially do a lot of work. When writing is reduced to a sort of formal manipulation of symbols, divorce from meaning, this is when we fall into the trap of algorithmic formalisms in biology, and this is devastating.
Cary Wolfe:Right. Yeah. No, I actually think that I was thinking about Giuseppe, the moment in your conversation with Adam where you talk about with regard to the, you know, the genome and d DNA and so on, the what you call the imposition of a linguistic ideology. And I think actually what you're saying about writing is exactly the same point. Jonathan, you may wanna talk about this that Derrida makes enough grammatology in his discussion of molecular biology, specifically folks like Mano and Yacob and so on, which is to say it's a, it's a logocentric as Derrida would put it.
Cary Wolfe:It's a logocentric notion of writing that's being imposed on a much more complex situation that involves, among other things, context, the historicity of the organism, and so on. Jonathan, you wanna say the kind of work that writing does and doesn't do in in your project?
Jonathan Basile:Absolutely. Yeah. And I, I definitely agree with, with everything that's been said and, and particularly with that sense in which, Derrida is identifying, like you were saying, a logocentrism that remains in this programmatic and cybernetic concept of writing that when DNA is described as a program or genetic program, and when one speaks about biological information, there's an attempt to eliminate reading as I'm trying to use the term to recapture the sense of a rupture with the given, of a leap beyond the given, That would require us to think beyond the formalism and the closure of a cybernetic or programmatic or informational system. And so I'll go back to the notion of natural as I'm using it, I think gives a sense of how it's operating, how this notion of of reading and writing is operating in my text. And and so like I was saying before, it's not a matter of leveling differences between non living and living or or non human and human, but it does trouble maybe it multiplies or makes more undecidable those distinctions.
Jonathan Basile:Whether we're thinking about an organism reacting to something in its environment, you know, an organism seeks this particular type of food and avoids other things that might be eaten by some other organism, or a genetic program in the context of some environmental factor is represented as being regulated and achieving some outcome of development or form function and behavior, or if we're thinking about natural law in a physical sense as a material body or a chemical substance, reacts in the presence of another substance. In all of those cases, it's necessary in order to describe thing as a law or as deterministic for it to repeat. This is the sense of irritability, Carrie that you were gesturing towards in your question. If it has to repeat, it never achieves a kind of closure. It's always open on its future.
Jonathan Basile:The next repetition can reveal to an external observer like a scientist observing one of these scenes or to the extent that living thing is learning in some sense from its environment. A living thing can also have something revealed to it by these future repetitions. So what we thought was the pattern may not be. The future may always reveal this to us. That iterability and and non closure is another way of describing that this process cannot be described as a law or a concept or a program in the the deterministic sense of of the closure.
Jonathan Basile:So a law or concept in its kind of classical sense and its most philosophical sense would be something that was external to any of its instantiations or inscriptions. It would be a pure ideality that repeated as the same every time no matter what context it was realized in. And that's precisely what, I'm trying to, mobilize this concept of lection and reading to try to disrupt. From the first, there is inscription and there is context, one never meets with a law or program outside of that and for that reason, there's always this, irreducible possibility of the unanticipated emerging whether we're talking about natural law in in the physical sciences or, as as the concept has tried to tried to be mobilized in the, biological sciences. And so, that in turn then has, I would say leaves its traces in the text of, life sciences.
Jonathan Basile:So if we're looking at writing in in the sense of, you know, the, biological discourse, the biological science is something written, again, I would wanna push that towards this strong sense which means that there's, some something irreducible to that inscription. It it cannot be so in other words, if we're looking spent a lot of time with Darwin in this book, and, of course, that's a a biological text, that, a lot has been said about and you can find countless summaries of it, in countless other texts and it's been, you know, sort of formalized, formalized to the point where it can be instantiated as an algorithm or any number of algorithms and also, you know, described in textbooks in a paragraph summary. But the point of saying that it's inscribed is that it's not reducible to any of those things and every one of those inscriptions and context will change it in some way. And so reading, whether reading and writing, whether it's the sort of thing that, someone whose background is in the humanities like me or a scientist like Darwin or like a contemporary scientist is doing, it, is necessarily creative by inscribing and reinscribing, reiterating and finding you know, grafting into a new context what seemed like a law or principle or concept, it necessarily changes.
Jonathan Basile:The task of a deconstructive reading is to look for that irreducible singularity. And I'm trying to do that in the, in the scientific text that I'm working with.
Cary Wolfe:That's really interesting. It reminds me of the discussion, Giuseppe, in your work, and also with Adam in your conversations about Turing, Alan Turing specifically. I think the book is worth having just for that part of the research. In a way Turing, the appropriation of Turing, going back to Jonathan, your point about lecture and, and reading and interpretation and appropriation and so on, you know, the Turing is often taken then, you know, kind of trotted out as, as the, the historical figure and the theoretical figure who's underneath the computationalist going back to writing the computationalist way of thinking about, life and thinking about the genome, etcetera. And what's fascinating Adam and Giuseppe in, in your book is a of Turing's work and a completely different identification of his historical significance.
Cary Wolfe:I'm thinking your discussion of his work on morphogenesis, for example. Could you say a little bit more about that?
Giuseppe Longo:Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Turing, of course, is one of the founders of theory of computing in the '30s. By the way, he proposed the notion of computation as the good few years before at church, also in the thirties, in order to answer in a negative way to Hilbert's problem about decidability of any proposition, the computability of any fraction.
Giuseppe Longo:In order these two guys, Goode at Church and Turing, in order to answer in a negative way to Hilbert's claim, they had to define exactly what algorithm means, what computing means, so that they could show that there is an undecidable proposition, that there is a non computable function unless you have the exact definition. And by this they gave us fundamental tools for inventing that computing in general. Even programming styles because Church's Lambda calculus is the paradigm for functional declarative languages, Turing's machines are a paradigm for imperative languages, then some more have been added like computer generated languages where I also worked in their mathematics. But essentially so it was a negative answer at setting limits to computation that allowed to produce a tier of algorithms and then programming languages and all but for. So that's very important.
Giuseppe Longo:Actually, even though it praises the machine, the computing systems he invented, in particular, he realized which phenomena after World War II. He knows that they are very important. Yet, he came for these limited results and when looking at life in his 1952 paper Morphogenesis, takes a completely different perspective. Equations in continuum, nonlinear interactions, notion that outside computing like situations and so on. And he says very clearly where is the difference in the interplay between the two papers of 1950 and '52.
Giuseppe Longo:He shows that with sensitivity to initial conditions there are there is the role of notions that could be later formalized as bifurcations, homogeneity trajectories, major novelties that only makes sense in his model of morphogenesis e. CONTIMA where there is no reference in 1952 for example to Schrodinger's book which was very well known, the first idea of coding, coding a code script in chromosomes of ontogenesis, It totally disrupts these. Turing quotes on the child, Badidon Darcy Thompson, the three biologies of morphogenesis as a continuous deformation related to evolutionary processes. So there's a totally different perspective that shows appreciation of the limits of computing, which was also the origin of its working compatibility. And this, independently of the fact that he knows this is a very important tool, that by imitating human condition, human cognition, not modeling, which is very different.
Giuseppe Longo:I mean, morphogenesis is a model that tries to understand the causal structure of a dynamic. In the imitation game, it is a cheaty. I mean, set up a frame where there is a woman and a computer and the computer has to pretend to be a woman. So it's cheating. The observer is very different from doing modeling, mathematics and so on.
Giuseppe Longo:That's the reading of Turing, but comes out from a careful reading of his papers. I mean, has wrote many papers, but three major papers. I've been the object of a love letter I wrote to him congratulating from the diverse
Cary Wolfe:Which is in the book.
Giuseppe Longo:Yeah. Of his work. This was a fiction that turned out to be pleasant because I I felt passionately, which I respect it. Also because Turing writes in a very readable way. I mean, he's he tries to make things understandable to to everybody, almost everybody.
Giuseppe Longo:It's quite fantastic.
Adam Nocek:I'll just say that there's also this interesting point with the morphogenesis paper. Of course he's trying to develop a mathematical theory of morphogenesis and this is something that Carl Howe Waddington, C. H. Waddington points out, is that biologists generally aren't schooled in mathematics. So it's a mathematically sophisticated theory of morphogenesis that Waddington himself was actually deeply appreciative of.
Adam Nocek:He disagreed with certain points, but Waddington, like Turing, was very skeptical of sort of genocentric approaches that sort of had this imposition, if you like, or Prometheanism that sort of Giuseppe refers to in other contexts of information programming languages. You know, Turing was also very skeptical and so was Waddington of this, but this comes at a very unfortunate historical moment, which is in 1952 and then a year later, you know, Watson and Crick published their paper and this is something that Evelyn Fox Keller points out and I think really importantly that this was put on the shelf for decades before it was sort of returned to and people don't really understand that Turing had generated actually a theory. You know you might disagree with the mathematics or as Wattington himself did with the mathematics of morphogenesis, but the point about the limitation of computing and it being formulated in the wake of a negative result is incredibly important. I kind of think about it as a kind of refrain that keeps on popping up throughout our book, you know, the importance of the negative results with respect to computing and how this is actually the backbone of the sort of work we're doing in contemporary theoretical biology.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah. Yeah. And that's super interesting for all kinds of reasons. I mean, I was thinking as you were mentioning, Waddington in particular, who's taken to be, you know, one of the quote unquote inventors of epigenetics as a field. The way that I think about this in relation to your work, Jonathan, as I've put it sometimes is that if you think about Derrida, he's not a philosopher of language for starters.
Cary Wolfe:He's a philosopher of the relationship between meaning and technicity. And so the way that I've put it with, with Derrida many times is, you know, what he gives us is the dynamic relationship between the genetic and epigenetic components of any particular utterance, you know? So the genetic is that, when you're talking about iterability or any semiotic code, there is a systematicity to it that if it's not to be a private language, has to operate so that it can serve as a medium for communication of some kind. Right? So there is that side to iterability, what you might call the genetic component of it.
Cary Wolfe:But there's also the epigenetic component of any particular utterance, which is how and why that code is gonna operate in particular situations with all their contingencies, all their contexts, which are inexhaustible in principle, all their historicity and so on. And so there's a, I mean, the reason I'm bringing this up is that I think there's a part of the story, Adam, that you were telling about when Turing's paper comes out, you know, and then '19 what happens in 1952. Part of that story is important to tell because it points to a larger, not finished, still on the table and maybe more relevant than ever kind of interdisciplinary project in which we can we can see now in a way that we couldn't thirty or forty years ago. The relationship between what seemed like very, very disparate fields and very, very disparate disciplines, you know, the birth of epigenetics, the mania over DNA and the genome, and then what's going on over here in seemingly a completely unrelated field called continental philosophy. Right?
Jonathan Basile:There's a lot to discuss there. And I'll say that, Adam and Giuseppe, in in your book, the description of Godel and and of the whole history and context in which you're embedding this work, I found it incredibly lucid and illuminating and, a little apprehensive to try to venture into that terrain myself in this expert company. But one thing that really came out to me from that reading was actually what the significance of Godel for Derrida's reading, especially in the Life Desk seminars where where Derrida's reading Francois Jacob's Logic of Life, where Godel does come up. So as I understand it, one of the interventions that Godel is making is to demonstrate that meta theoretical concepts or statements cannot be encoded within a theory, or a kind of, constitutive non closures or non coherence introduced when that, attempt is made. This is something that comes up in Francois Jacob's, Logic of Life and that Derrida, picks up on when he's reading that text in his seminar Life Death.
Jonathan Basile:Jacob translates this into the language of sex, which is not what Gerdl is talking about, but the way that Jacob puts it is that a set cannot be defined in terms of its own elements and he attributes this to Godel, which is not exactly right, but I think he's thinking of this, relationship of metatheory and theory when he does. So one of the things that Derrida picks up on when he's reading this is that this statement really conflicts with what Jacob is trying to demonstrate about what he calls the genetic program and what he's borrowing concepts from cybernetic notions of language and information to try to define. So the, closure of that genetic form of memory and inheritance, the notion which it does not include it's outside, it does not include any inheritance of acquired traits. It's not influenced by its outside or milieu in any way except as a trigger of its program. The way that Jacob will describe that is that DNA reads and writes itself.
Jonathan Basile:The things that, transcribe and translate DNA are products of its own transcription and translation, RNA and proteins. At one in the same time, Jacob is somewhat mis attributing this notion from GERDEL about the impossibility of a single language containing both its its theory and its metaphyry and describing DNA as something this sort of closed system that can read and write itself. And what Derrida is pointing out in in reading this text carefully is precisely that everything Jacob is trying to posit as external to, Jacob will even use the language of, supplement to describe things like, sex and death, which he says are originally life is originally without, life is originally immortal and sexless as an asexual bacterium that then, then in the course of its evolution these supplements, befall it or, things like viral relations which themselves have a certain analogy with sexuality as processes that lead to the exchange of genes among organisms. These things that are posited as outside of the program nonetheless come to shape and indeterminate and Carrie this is precisely what you were describing as the relationship between genetics and epigenetics and so the project that I'm doing that's building on this text of Derridaes from the 1970s, which is reading this work from the heyday, let's say, of the genetic paradigm, is to recognize that these emerging challenges to the modern synthesis, so emerging challenges to that genetic paradigm coming from evolutionary biology themselves are very continuous with the gaps or the constitutive non closure that Derrida was recognizing in one of the most eminent formulators of that discourse of the genetic paradigm.
Jonathan Basile:In other words, Derrida he certainly was not doing his own independent research in epigenetics or in any of the other, domains of biology where where these critiques were inchoate or emerging at the time, but he was just recognizing by looking at the writings of one particular geneticist that there was a philosophical and metaphysical incoherence in the text itself or that philosophy being the philosophy of the scientist. The scientist is imposing this kind of metaphysics on his material, a metaphysics that involves this notion of an absolute origin, again a program and a law that would be immune to context essentially and that would repeat itself absolutely. What I'm doing in my work then is to look at some of these emerging tendencies in contemporary science and contemporary evolutionary theory, including epigenetics and also some of the challenges to the modern synthesis emerging from developmental biology. I look at William Winsat's work on generative entrenchment and Mary Jane West Eberhard's work on developmental plasticity in evolution. One of the ways of thinking of why development has been such a transformative domain and evolutionary theory in the twenty first century and previously is what Derrida was pointing to about the sort of conceptual aurias in Jacob's presentation of the genetic paradigm, the notion of a genetic, form of memory and inheritance that would be immune to its environment, immune to any inheritance of acquired traits, anything coming from its context, and would just sort of have the law of itself within itself.
Jonathan Basile:That notion fails on its own terms. So everything that it defines outside of itself and as contextual will be the determinant of the what appears as the principle and the origin and the law and the program. And that's what we're seeing in the study of development, that everything we define as outside the genome and the nucleus, the internal environment of the cell, and everything we just find as even outside the organism, everything we decide as external environment, is playing an irreducible role in the process of development and of evolution. That notion of irreducible contextuality I would say is, on the one hand it's, on display in challenges to the modern synthesis including from epigenetics and these discourses of developmental biology that I was mentioning. But one thing I want to emphasize about this, this sort of notion of progress is that we're not moving from sort of the the false reductionistic picture to the true holistic one, but in every case a sort of new model and a new reduction necessarily is imposed.
Jonathan Basile:Really we receive the substance of the new paradigm from the old one. So the notion that I'm describing of for instance epigenetic factors aspects of the internal cellular environment that, determine the functioning of genes and what is defined as external as environment. All of this depends to some extent on how internal and external have been defined by the previous discourse and those boundaries can be displaced, but only by positing another boundary. That, artificiality and provisionality, that openness on the unanticipated that I was describing before, remains in these emerging discourses.
Cary Wolfe:This is an important point of contact between the two books. And I wanna go back to what we were talking about a minute ago, and Adam just invoked it briefly, but it plays a major role, Giuseppe, in your work, the importance of negative results. It seems to me that the emphasis on negative results as being the very, in a way, the very essence of what scientific practice means in a certain, at least in, in one sense is playing the same kind of opening role. And by that, I mean, opening to the provisionality and historicity of disciplinary practices that you're invoking here. And what's interesting, Jonathan, I think about this is that I think going back to our discussion of writing earlier and the kind of work that that term is doing in both projects, I think the term science means almost opposite things in the two books.
Cary Wolfe:Because I think, Jonathan, in your book, the word science is often operating as a kind of placeholder for the imposition of an overreaching closure and completeness that for Giuseppe, the essence of scientific practice is precisely to question. Going back to our discussion of Turing, negative results is actually kind of job one in what makes science science, not the story, Adam, that you were telling earlier about the early fifties of what of what came to be taken as science. Quite the opposite. Adam, go ahead.
Adam Nocek:Yeah. I I think that one of the things that is really important for what we're trying to do is think about science in the construction of a theoretical discourse that can essentially deal with how to theorize new invariant preserving properties. The question becomes how do we generate the theoretical conditions under which invariants that show up in a variety of contexts can actually be articulated and discussed. So one of the things that happens, think, especially within the sort of continental traditions of philosophy, and this is obviously I come at questions in biology and in science from the tradition of continental philosophy, is always trying to sniff out or trying to find those places of fracture or difference or rupture and so on. And I think what's interesting about what I've learned from hanging out with theoretical biologists and people who are really thinking through questions of ontogenesis is that one of the things, it's not to say that invariants are already given and that they're there to explain, it's that we have to come up with conditions under which we can explain the production of invariants.
Adam Nocek:In other words, how do we generate from all of the incredible complexity and non iteratability, I mean well, non repetition if you like, or repetition with a difference, how is it that we can explain the organization of the living, how can we generate a theory that gives an account of the organization of the living in spite of all of this randomness, if you like, that's inherent to that organization. And so how do, and you have to be miraculously inventive to be able to come up with a kind of theory that can account for all of the variables that generates a kind of stability that gives us enough traction, so it's a very pragmatic question in this sense, it gives us enough traction to actually articulate what holds together and what coheres. And for our project, think it's kind of approaching it from the other side, where there's sort of a traditional continental philosophy stemming back from, especially with the sort of Heideggerian critique of instrumental understanding of science and technology and so on, is to, as I said, of sniff out all the totalizing practices of science, we're sort of approaching it from the other way, but also part of the thing is, and I think this is what I've really understood from Giuseppe's work and spending time with him, is this is a sort of misunderstanding of what makes science science, because also what's happening right now is we're talking about is techno science and not science.
Adam Nocek:And you know, one of the things that I kind of leave the book with, I guess you could say, is that there's really not much science left in technoscience and that's one of the troubles. And so we really need to start grappling with the real creativity of the scientific practice.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah. This is where disciplinarity is very, I think very, very important to deal with. Giuseppe, you're insistent on this in your work and the fact that negative results that take place within a particular discipline that can do certain things and not do other things is not a bad thing, but it actually opens on to a whole domain of creativity to address the kinds of questions, Adam, you were just raising.
Giuseppe Longo:Yes. I mean, I would put it more broadly. Science is critical thinking. Namely, you should make your principle explicit and take a step aside and open by this to new ways in particular by setting the limits. The limits historically always open to new ways and also reinforce the area.
Giuseppe Longo:Think of the first major negative result in our size, the irrationality of the diagonal of the square. I mean, this was a major blow in the Pythagorean school, but it opened to Euclid's geometry where there are very little numbers, a couple of terms. There are there are rotations and and translations. I mean, there are symmetries of the plane. There is the line with no thickness.
Giuseppe Longo:It's a it's a really different size that came after this negative result about numbers and their ratio, integer numbers and their ratios being able to explain everything. So this happened all the time. I did technical work and I insist on a Poincare's three body theorem against Laplace approach. Well, even the equational determination, a very simple system may allow unpredictable events to pop out. I mean, there are bifurcations, are indecitability and predictability and this well before Godel but along the same line.
Giuseppe Longo:Poincare calls this result a negative result and it opened the way to the geometry of dynamical system, reinforced the area of differential equations. That's really a way of developed science as a critical thinking. That's exactly what's missing to techno science. They claim they have no limit. We can totally reproduce cognition and go beyond that.
Giuseppe Longo:We can cure all diseases. We can control evolution. This is Doudna's book, Nobel Award were deserved for the techniques but really with a miserable vision about about size. And again disciplinarity is one side established by setting these limits on the other the relation between disciplines may certainly came from transferring techniques, but mostly by observing differences, stressing dualities. You know for us Darwin has been fundamental by his first principle which is many chapters in the beginning of his book namely descent with modification, reproduction with variation and motility.
Giuseppe Longo:He observes allopathic speciation which is motility. So this principle, reproduction with variation and motility is the opposite of the principles that started with modern physics, Galileo's inertia. Galileo's inertia is a conservation principle and while Darwin is a non conservation principle, organisms and phenotypes are not conserved, they change always a little. Then, then chemstance scientific analysis at a level of evolution selection as exclusion of the incompatible. It sets restriction, constraints to the development of an ecosystem by excluding the incompatible and then when we transfer as we did to the organism all the organismal constraints that stabilize an organism.
Giuseppe Longo:So if you in physics you first assume conservation principles and then you see what make movement and other things change. In biology you first assume changement, reproduction rate variation and then you try to understand what stabilizes the process both at the level of evolution selection and at organismal level. The many constraints that came out with the tissue structure, the organ structure, hormones control of cell reproduction, blah, all what stabilizes and normalize. Of course the invariance is historical, is contingent. It goes changing within development and in evolution.
Giuseppe Longo:And Wessebera, who was quoted, makes a beautiful connection between development and evolution. I mean, evolution is mostly the result of developmental plasticity. Genes follow, as as she says very clearly. They are very important, but they are not the primary motor of evolution. Again, change and analyze constraints.
Giuseppe Longo:The opposite of physics, assume consideration, and then analyze the forces that modify movement or whatever.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah. And and, Giuseppe, you and Adam discuss in the book along these lines the concept of negentropy versus anti entropy, precisely in this context. Jonathan, is this I mean, what we're opening onto here is a very different Darwin than we get from the neo Darwinian.
Jonathan Basile:Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Giuseppe Longo:Darwinian is politics, let's be Yeah. The selection Yes. To current politics, you know, the best in power.
Jonathan Basile:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. When I'm recognizing in some of the scientists, that I'm talking about, this drive towards a kind of absoluteness, a a sort of metaphysical conception of knowing the origin as such and and being able to come up with a once and for all system, defining it, you certainly find, gestures like that in these works. But one of the things that I want to demonstrate in my work, it's certainly not to say that, oh, science just does this one thing and it's wrong and there's something else that we should be doing.
Jonathan Basile:It's not that we should stop doing science and do something else that I would call philosophy or deconstruction or the humanities or anything like that. It's that the processes are found within scientific text and within the process of science, not just not just text in the traditional sense, but everything that is part of a process of experimentation and and all of the more social and institutional and infrastructural and economic and political aspects of scientific work. I think the notion of negative result, really gets to the heart of what I would want to bring out of deconstruction, a sense that I think it has that by demonstrating that there's some impossibility within the aspirations of an existing paradigm or telos of research, by demonstrating that the we're just moving in a linear progress towards this goal, By demonstrating that our goal is, illusory, that it, sort of defeats itself, it cannot possibly be where this field is heading, you open a new terrain of possibilities. And it's that sense of opening and then like I was saying before, a sense of creativity that I really want to emphasize within anything we could call science itself. And that I think is has always been a part of what Derrida was describing as deconstruction.
Jonathan Basile:Derrida often referred to himself as an affirmative thinker. And in that sense I think he was, thinking of what Nietzsche sometimes referred to as his, affirmative nihilism. So the bad pessimistic nihilism that he was trying to distance himself from was the one that would say, so, you know, you start with this philosophical gesture with Plato of thinking that, you know, everything that changes everything in the here below these finite things are to some extent worthless. What really matters are timeless, eternal forms. And you have a very similar thing in Christian thinking that, you know, what really matters is the life to come in which we are immortal souls and nothing ever changes and everything here below is sort of a pale imitation, devalued relative to that.
Jonathan Basile:What pessimistic nihilism says is that that, world that should be does not exist and the world that does exist should not be. So they've, you know, denied that that transcendence is possible, but they haven't revalorized the world below. They've kept the evaluation of this world here as worthless, even though they say that we can't get beyond it. And so the equivalent in that for a scientific discourse would be if someone were to hear something like what I was saying or something like what Giuseppe and Adam are saying and say, well, okay, you're saying that we can't reach this goal. We can't reach a sort of timeless truth.
Jonathan Basile:We can't transcend context absolutely. Therefore, what we're doing, you must think it's worthless. You must be some kind of nihilist or relativist. And that's only true if you think that the only kind of valid, thing to do is to come up with timeless truths. So if, if we just, you know, not just stop treating that as the the fundamental and unique telos of the work we're doing, but revalorize, what actually happens as this process that sort of proceeds falteringly and in a you know, there's there's a negative way of describing it there, but also in a way that's much more inventive, much more unanticipated in terms of what emerges from it, than anything that would be the case if we were just following a program, absolutely.
Jonathan Basile:That is, what I what I see and try to bring out again, try to bring that up by reading, texts from scientists themselves and whether those scientists see themselves as preservers of a tradition and more conservative in a certain sense, adhering to things like the genetic paradigm and these methods and frameworks or paradigms that have existed for a long time now, or whether they see themselves more as innovators and critical thinkers and transforming those traditions, it's necessary no matter what kind of science you take yourself to be doing to to be very rigorous about the terms you're using and and how you operationalize them to make those something that are, let's say, iterable, reproducible. It's necessary and impossible to try to define that, essence even though actually getting there is impossible. And that's where the interesting thing happens. You know, we have to do that, but we can't. And so something other than just this kind of pure conceptual architecture takes place.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah. I think the common object of scrutiny in both projects is what Adam and Giuseppe call the presumption of completeness, which is not to say, as Giuseppe points out, I think beautifully, talking about Dowd and his work among others, that limited results within a particular domain can be rigorous and beautiful, but also wrong in their overreaching theoretical claims and framework at the same time. And that's okay. And what the science of science is, is to identify the limitations and the overextensions, which are of course ramping in what we today take as science, Adam, as you put it, technoscience. That's the, the scientificity of science as it were.
Cary Wolfe:Right. That is the job is, is to open onto Jonathan, the, the domain that you could call creativity. You could call experimentation. There's lots of different names for it. So I think there's a common I think even though how the term science functions in the two projects is quite different, I think underneath that actually is a common, a common commitment to questioning the presumption and the overextension of completeness out of multiple different theoretical frameworks.
Adam Nocek:You know, part of this has to do with an ecology, if you like, of knowledge practices, where disciplines sort of need to be aware of their own histories, how these histories shape and so on, take shape in understanding the possibilities and limitations of, say for example, in our work, the biosciences and computer science. But, and I think this is what you're getting to, the problem of completeness is about the overestimation of success. This is something that I talk about and we talk about in relationship to it, somebody like Alfred North Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which is basically overestimating the power of certain kinds of abstractions. Know Ernst Kacira has a similar way of formalizing this in relationship to the normative function of techno scientific symbolism and so on. But this overestimation, I think Jonathan was getting at this point, this overestimation is connected to technologies of power and capital, or what we might call the shifting geopolitical landscape of innovation.
Adam Nocek:The knowledge economy demands that this overestimation of this kind of success, this paradigm, and the failure to recognize the internal limitations of different kinds of disciplines and practices, that's the only way that science becomes fundable.
Cary Wolfe:Right. And so it's, I mean, this, this opens onto a much more complicated discussion that I know we all have a lot to say about, but it kind of leads me to a related question. Both of these books are very, very theoretical, very philosophical, in different ways, But I'm interested also, and I, and this question comes up for me all the time. Like, well, okay, great. So what?
Cary Wolfe:That's wonderful. It's great that, you know, we're having these internecine conversations about theory and philosophy, but what would shifting the perspective in the way that both of these books suggest on what science is and how we think about what living systems are? How does that cash out in terms of, you know, real world questions in medicine, in clinical context, so on and so forth? It's kind of a knee jerk reaction that many readers have, especially, Jonathan, when it comes to they just hear the word deconstruction, you know, is that, well, this is this abstruse, you know, philosophical conversation that doesn't have anything to do if we were to actually adopt it as a practice with actual scientific results, clinical results, so on in the real world.
Giuseppe Longo:Coming from mathematics, computability, and the long time I got to meet a few physicists, I got to biology exactly from the point of view of actual applications in the sense that I met Anna Sotto and Carlos Sonnichsen and other people later. But basically, these two colleagues working in Boston, have since long a very important laboratory focusing mostly on endocrine disruptors and carcinogens. And they tried already to frame their work in a theoretical frame and our work has been exactly to develop a consistent broad way for understanding what's happening in these areas. The role of endocrine disruptors, they had the merit to discover some very important ones in nineties like bisphenol A, which was in all transparent plastic and has been forbidden by their work. So the idea how does it work and how can we frame this in an organismal context and that's exactly the perspective we have been developing based on their concrete work and also on some theoretical ideas they had namely bring Darwin's approach into the organism.
Giuseppe Longo:So give cells the full state of reproduction with variation and motility first under constraints, massive constraints that go with the cell to cell dialogue, the tissue structure, the hormone controls of cell reproduction. So by taking the full state, the opposite of Galileo as I said before, as change first, reproduce with variation, then one analyzes the constraints that stabilize the tissue, organisce and that in a different way also dynamically the ecosystem. And so our motivations were really related to this fundamental application and by this they've been proposing since long an approach to cancer as the lack of control of cell reproduction by one of these many constraints including DNA control, of course, of cell reproduction but assuming that the full state of the remaining default state of cell reproduction first also within an organ under massive constraints. So the applications has been fundamental for me. And also, there is another area where I have a very lively dialogue with colleagues in the European network called European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility, where they do a lot of practical work on bio agriculture and so on.
Giuseppe Longo:And they have also a counseling role at European level concerning GMOs and pesticides and so on. Typically GMOs are the direct children of the so called central dogma of molecular biology, which is known to be false. And many of my colleagues keep writing them as Evelyn Foxkeller and Phoebe Bull write in in several places, keep telling them knowing that they're false. And when you ask them, they say, oh, yes. I know it's not right that it is more complicated.
Giuseppe Longo:This is terrible. In science when you just dismiss an issue by saying, I know it is more complicated. It's the opposite of the critical thinking I was saying before to be at the core of scientific construction of knowledge. Specific principles, step aside and being critical about them, just eliminating the debate by saying, oh, we know it is more complicated. It opens the way to abuses where what wins is the incredible amount of money, which goes in GMOs, which goes in producing pest icides and so forth.
Giuseppe Longo:So there is no more scientific justification by just some of these structures are too big to fail. And so they would support forever technosciences with very little scientific content.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah. Giuseppe, in your in your conversation with Adam, I was thinking about this example. Toward the end of the conversation, you're talking about the AlphaGo program and Watson, a cousin of the AlphaGo program that, went to a cancer center in Houston in 2016, which, you know, many people point to as the state of the art way of treating cancer. It's entire teams. You're treating the whole body.
Cary Wolfe:As you point out, you know, in 2016, I think they spent like $50,000,000 and ended up just sending it back and saying, you know, we can't really do anything with this. Like you say, just the sheer amount of money involved in thinking about the war on cancer, the history of the war on cancer more broadly. And yet here we sit, you know, the spectacular doubling of rates of cancer every twenty or thirty years or whatever the number is. But it seems to me that the pushback, this goes back to what you're saying about scientists saying, yes, well, I know, I know very well and it's more complicated and so on and so forth. But the pushback in the transformation, it seems to me, if there is one, is not really coming from inside the scientific establishment.
Cary Wolfe:It's coming from the world. It's coming from the clinical side. I mean, I think, Adam, as you know, my favorite example of this is is the explosion of autoimmune disorders and other, you know, other, you know, related kinds of allergies and so on. It's coming from the world. It's not coming from inside the disciplines of of technoscientific practice that we've been talking about here.
Cary Wolfe:Right?
Giuseppe Longo:Absolutely. I mean, well, it may come from science as long as people with different views and there is a plurality of approaches that epidemiologists are allowed to survive, which is not easy, but you know you're cutting funds on all sides in particular in any form of critical science which is not techno scientific. The Watson example was concerned more about AI, but again, this was a program of replacing analysis with big data and other tools coming from AI. But as for the war on cancer, which was Nixon's major enterprise in '71, they promised him to have a genetic therapy by '76. Then they said, oh no, it's more complicated, we must have money.
Giuseppe Longo:And I I we quote, I think, in the book Eisbach paper. Van Eisbach in 2,003 was the head of the National Cancer Institute and they said now that we have the decoding of DNA, which was sequencing, which is different, we will have cancer disappear from HERD by 2015. And also they all said within two or three years we have diagnosis and prognosis of cancer by looking at the DNA of cells. Till now the analysis is made by the histologists, anatomopathologists at the like microscope looking at cells and tissue, at the tissue structure, and then saying this is primary, this is metastatic, this is benign, this is malignant, at the optic. Then there are some correlations with DNA in leukemias, which is particular kind as blood cancer, so it's different situation.
Giuseppe Longo:Solid cancer, are eighty, eighty five percent of cancers, really a far away from any role of this DNA investigation, even in diagnosis and prognosis. So, that's a major defeat, I would say. And we need to open new ways. Doctors may help. They do their best.
Giuseppe Longo:Also in those centers that you mentioned, I think that doctors are really doing beautifully for what they have as tools coming from an organismal biology, which has no theory in the dominating frame. Then there are plenty of dissidents, different proposals, but it's very hard to survive, to have grants and postdocs and so on. Yeah, Adam?
Adam Nocek:Yeah, well I think this testifies in some ways to the need for theory, because it's actually not coming in some ways, and we're primarily talking about the sort of theoretical sciences, is that the need for theory actually is coming from the domains of practice. These sort of promises, or you know, the war on cancer and so on, you know, are fundamentally oversold precisely because we have a theory of the organism that's basically handed down from computer science or physics or whatever that aren't actually dealing with material specificity of living systems, right, and so we don't actually have the kind of theoretical framework that we need to be able to deal with really complex diseases like this. So just to go back to your question, like you know we have these really really abstract theories, abstruse in the air and whatever, actually part of this is coming from a very pragmatic question that the domains of practice are requiring us, but we're not paying attention to it, and this is largely a political and economic problem, we're not paying attention to why we need to be re theorizing these things. But of course this is not allowed, this is completely within the university context, of course it's the mobilization of the disciplines, of the applied disciplines to solve these kinds of problems within existing frameworks and what's more unpopular today than English and history majors, it's pure mathematics and theoretical sciences, and this is a huge problem.
Cary Wolfe:Jonathan?
Jonathan Basile:Yeah. You were mentioning in the beginning, Carrie, the influence of Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin and dialectical biology for my work. One of the things that they point to is, as, Giuseppe and Adam are saying, these massive investments looking for essentially reductionistic causes of diseases like cancer. If we're looking for a particular gene that is associated with, correlated with an increased incidence of cancer, we're treating cancer as if we can find causes of it inside the individual. And one of the things that in my work jumps off from Derrida's recognition of the entanglement of any kind of internality with its context and what in, Levin's and Lewontin's more Marxist inspired work, is looking towards, historical and environmental and cultural and social context to as existing in a necessary and and they would say dialectical relationship with anything defined as internal.
Jonathan Basile:That focus in this narrow reductionist extent on things that, appear inside the individual, it ignores all of these social and contextual causes like these environmental pollutions that would be much more effective points of intervention to actually reduce incidence of a disease like cancer. And again, of course, there's obviously economic or a reason within the context in which research is taking place that those particular interventions are emphasized because there are much more obvious pathways to, marketing and capitalizing on an intervention that takes the form of a pill you can sell to patients or even perhaps a gene therapy. All the while, of course, the same companies and the same governments funding this work and the same economic system that is churning out this research is pouring these pollutants into the environment, but that we are not looking for ways to change that and attack that as a as a point of intervention because it would require, disrupting capitalism in its current form rather than providing a new vehicle profit for it. That economic history and how it influences the sciences and how it influences this particular paradigm that that all of our work is in some way responding to and and critiquing or deconstructing.
Jonathan Basile:There's a continuous story you could tell from the early twentieth century where the genetic paradigm is, this sort of outgrowth of capitalist economic systems in which the research was was being done. So in the first half of the twentieth century, we could look at agricultural context. So environmental factors are tightly controlled. You can treat a gene as a decisive factor for bringing about as if on its own some, developmental, outcome or some phenotypic outcome. You can ignore all of the developmental context that in nature, for example, is is playing a decisive role in, shaping and changing those phenotypic outcomes no matter what the genetic makeup is.
Jonathan Basile:That particular form and legacy has given rise to a certain understanding of life itself. So the way that in the twentieth century we came to an understanding of the gene and of living things and their evolution and development in a certain sense is a a product of that, capitalist and agricultural context. In the second half of the twentieth century into the twenty first century, neoliberal economics has taken over in in shaping the way that genetics is discussed and what motivates the science to be done in a certain way. This is beginning to be recognized in Levins and Lewontin's work in 1985 essay in their book, The Dialectical Biologist called The Commoditization of Science. One of my favorite texts on it is Melinda Cooper's Life is Surplus, and then Philip Murawski's work is also quite good on how neoliberal economics have shaped scientific work and and institutions.
Jonathan Basile:Essentially, I think a key concept here is financialization about what, what the scientist is creating, certainly not facts or truths about the world or something like that. And, it's not even really a product or a techno scientific, a particular pill or even intellectual property or even their own startup, But more so it's going to be the the investment vehicle. All of those things as a potential vehicle in which financial capital can invest and try to extract returns. And this is something that, again, Melinda Cooper's work is quite good on why the economic framework from, roughly the 1970s to the present has been particularly conducive to this being the ideal form for capital in the present. Craig Venter is a perfect example, someone who sort of rose to prominence during the Human Genome Project and had been working in, synthetic biology on things like trying to get algae to produce biofuels, also to produce pharmaceutical precursors.
Jonathan Basile:What you see in sort of the ideal, and again, the ideal of the scientist in this period, it's not someone who's producing truths, although that was very much part of the image and persona he wanted to present for himself, but it's the salesman. It's someone who's a salesperson and a kind of pitch artist and even a kind of con artist for their work who can make extravagant promises about what their work is going to achieve. What we want is something that we're being told in in about five years is gonna be incredibly profitable. And so that's what the ideal of scientists becomes. It's someone who can tell you in five years, I'm gonna change the world.
Jonathan Basile:That's what a venture capitalist is looking for and that's what's driving an incredible amount of the scientific research. And one of the things again that already in the eighties, Levins and Lewontin were keen to was how that is reshaping the work of academic scientists. That is reformulating the university as what's often described as a hedge fund with a nominal teaching wing attached to it. But what we're very familiar with as academics, the metrics that are imposed on us to guide our research come from this system. If people are not trusting that they may be very accurately perceiving that their health is a secondary goal, and its primary goal is profit and maintaining its control over profits.
Jonathan Basile:And often that is pursued at the expense of our health. That's a structural condition that can lead to a distrust in those institutions that no amount of public communication is going to overcome.
Cary Wolfe:Thanks, Jonathan. Just one final question, and we'll wrap things up here. Giuseppe, I wanna start with you partly because you've worked in so many different contexts, both disciplinary context and national and international contexts. Do you see any signs of the scenario that Jonathan just described changing fundamentally or not?
Giuseppe Longo:Well, on one side, think there is a hardening of the core perspective in techno sciences. I'm thinking of the two major techno sciences that are prevailing now. There's artificial intelligence and one side on the other, genocentric biology. On one side they're hardening in the sense, for example in AI, the prevailing funding goes now to control and war. This of course changes the techniques as well.
Giuseppe Longo:In a sense they are also talking less about, you know, the myth of replacing, replacing human cognition and those things. They care a little less, I mean, they can they can reach highest control of human activities and possibly replacing humans in war or helping better in war. So this makes the the the projects harder with people who are perhaps more aggressive because so far I could always discuss with AI colleagues. I mean, they do have many of them a mathematical background. They they probably have what they consider miserable vision of human cognition, but they do technical work with mathematical basis, so a dialogue is possible.
Giuseppe Longo:It's much harder in molecular biology because there there is really this rejection of theory in the sense that in physics since always theoretical physics has been considered prominent part of the discipline at least since one century or more. But in biology, theoretical biology is often considered as an insult. I mean, what do you do? Theoretical work? I mean, biology is done at the bench as if experimental work didn't require the choice of observables, the measurement, and also the theoretical hypothesis that when it is implicit, is usually wrong.
Giuseppe Longo:I mean or it cannot be analyzed critically. So I see that on one side, these things get harder in the case, as we were saying before, of genocentric biology, the immense relevance of GMO and pesticides and so on has a major economic impact. On the other, there is an increasing need for a change. We are finding it, at least some of my friends who try to make an interface with industry and before from the group trying to find support for our colleagues in working in laboratories on this matter. In pharmaceutical industry, they have major problems now with finding novelties.
Giuseppe Longo:So there there are some people there who want to look for alternatives. I mean, on these problems, get out of the usual paradigm of the magic ballots, you know, that would act exactly in stereospecific way as it was stereotyped in molecular biology. Micromolecular interactions being as, you know, the key in the lock or the hand in the glove, so touching cell receptors exactly, which is totally false. They act on probabilities, which may be very high for the intended molecule and the intended receptor, but on lower probabilities, they act on many other cell receptors and then organis. So there is now an increasing need for alternatives, and at least we are hopeful that there there are chances for alternative ways.
Giuseppe Longo:But as I said, the hardcore technologies are becoming harder and even more aggressive. In Europe, for example, the Guardian and Le Monde in September 25, I would say, discovered and presented in two parallel papers a list of 500 biologists critical of the issues I just mentioned, namely GMOs and and the use of pesticides and the related assumed new genetic technologies, not to be financed. And when your financing goes, even when it is public by a partnership with the private industry, being in the that blacklist of 500 people not to be financed is not very easy to keep going. And many colleagues of mine in this European network I mentioned before were in this list of 500 people not to be financed by the agro industry and biochemical industry and so on. So these people are getting more aggressive and harder, but perhaps exactly because there is increasing need by some areas of finding alternative paradigms.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah. Giuseppe, I was a related conversation I've had with Stu Kaufman a few times about this, going back to the example of this kind of explosion in the globalized, the rich North Atlantic bourgeois democracies as Richard Rooney put it of autoimmune disorders. And I went through a version of this myself, but people who've quote unquote seen the best doctors in the world with various kinds of autoimmune problems and conventional medicine can do nothing for them. Partly exactly because of the lack of a theory of the organism and a good sound theoretical framework for the biology they're dealing with. What's happened is with autoimmune disorders, you have now communities of millions of people who talk to each other online because they all have the same story to tell.
Cary Wolfe:I went to see the quote unquote best doctors in the world. They couldn't do anything for me. And so what are these people doing online? Back to our idea of what makes science science, Giuseppe, in your view, what are they doing? They're experimenting on themselves and with each other and simply saying, I tried this, I tried this, I tried this, I tried this.
Cary Wolfe:Wow. This worked. Maybe you should try it too, because they have nowhere else to go. Part of where I see maybe an Adam, I'm interested in your thoughts on this too. Maybe one hopeful sign is that the pushback that is saying, look, this is just bad science.
Cary Wolfe:The pushback is coming from the world. You know? It's not coming from with inside the ruling paradigms. Adam, what's your are you detecting places where a shift or a change might happen?
Adam Nocek:Yeah, possibly. But I'm also concerned about the increased, I mean, the discourse right now around sort of personalized medicine is also terrifying to me as well. This is where you have on the one hand, one size doesn't fit all. And so you have this sort of new, I mean it's not new, I mean it's been around for a while, but personalized medicine, but this sort of personalized medicine is also retreating into artificial intelligence. And my bot understands me better than the clinician and I mean this has actually been published on, that I actually trust my chatty PT or Claude or whatever platform you're using better than I do my clinician.
Adam Nocek:Of course this taps into exactly what Jonathan is talking about in terms of the sort of financialization of the biomolecular sciences or biomedical sciences and so on. And of course, you can only spend fifteen minutes with a patient. You know, my bot is incredibly attentive to my needs and compliments me and thanks me for all of these things and flatters me. This of course has to do with the kind of illusion that we're under that somehow, and this is stuff that I talk about in other work of mine, but also Giuseppe and I are working on another project together about computing and meaning and the loss of meaning in the sciences, but it's based on this idea that my AI can basically approximate the function that I am a particular kind of function that through better questions that it asks and I prompt it and it responds back, but it's also sort of narrowing down what it thinks I, as a patient, am, right? As if somehow it can best approximate what it is, approximate a diagnosis.
Adam Nocek:And this is a fundamental illusion and this is what's happening in personalized medicine right now. So I worry about, and I guess this is a bit skeptical, you know, that on the one hand we have skepticism over what's happening at this sort of institutional context and so on, and that we can't trust these big scientific institutions, or we can't trust the medical field and the medical establishment, so we sort of retreat into personalized medicine. And the tools that we have available to us right now are artificial intelligence. That's the way personalization is looking, and we also get this in medical schools now as well, sort of integrating AI models increasingly into not only diagnostics, but also just into medical education itself. I guess this comes back down to that we need to be re theorizing what we mean by this because it can't be an either or sort of paradigm.
Adam Nocek:We need to actually be thinking about in more complex ways, where we don't just have the big establishment versus personalization and these sort of tools are going to help me personalize medicine. So it's not going to come from there. Mean, there's a history of patient advocacy for sort of rare diseases that are unfundable, doing research on this, and maybe this is what you're talking about with the autoimmune disorders, Carrie, where patients are basically just talking to each other and experimenting and thinking about what works and what doesn't. Of course, that's incredibly dangerous. In terms of hope, have a number of colleagues who are mostly junior colleagues who are struggling to imagine how do you fund a laboratory in the university setting if you're actually doing experimental research.
Adam Nocek:You know, some of them are actually going to liberal arts colleges to do that because liberal arts colleges are the spaces where you're going to do it and it's not necessarily the big name research institutions that formerly you thought that this is where it was going to happen. It's going happen in alternative contexts and so on. Things are shifting and it's hard to know in advance what exactly it's going to be.
Jonathan Basile:I'll just say that there's a recognition of the extent to which not just other ways of seeing life are possible, but ways that precisely would take into account this role of context of the environment, irreducibility of that to all living things including ourselves and that has all those implications for for health that I was saying before. What we're seeing in in academia right now, that period was what Levins and Lewontin, they were calling dialectical biology, which was explicitly influenced by Marx and the period of, science for the people. There was this period in which scientists themselves were recognizing that their work was irreducibly political and that extended to everything from the theories that were emerging from it to its embeddedness in, systems of capital and things defense work, all of these things that scientists themselves were challenging at that time. And I think it's fair to say there was a kind of hiatus between that period of the seventies and eighties into around the twenty tens, new organizing picks up. And that, more or less tracks with the fall of the labor movement in The US.
Jonathan Basile:What Levins and Lewontin and other scientists at that time were doing was explicitly understanding, how they could organize as, not just a scientist, but as laborers within the scientific institutions and scientific industries to use their power as workers to change the work that was taking place. And there's a new found energy in that today, a recognition of the importance of not just labor organizing, but all forms of organizing.
Adam Nocek:I would say one of the most inspiring places I've been recently where I've seen some hope and a sort of outside, if you like, is actually working with Giuseppe and his group and really just sort of observing in some ways because really what you have there is a pan generational system of organization. Giuseppe has a generation of people who have worked under him, They themselves are full professors and they have their own students now. This is happening in Paris and also not with an incredible amount of money. You know, this is a very tight knit group of post docs, PhD students, professors, and then emeritus professors and so on, who are all sort of working on these hard foundational theoretical problems that kind of found themselves outside of mainstream biology. They're doing biology, they're theorizing, I was recently there and I gave a talk on Kangiem, and I couldn't believe how many medical practitioners, theorists, etc.
Adam Nocek:Were just deeply versed in Kangyam more than I was, as a philosopher. And these are medical practitioners. So, you know, to me, this is hopeful, this is unbelievable. And they're not hanging out with big fancy laboratories and huge budgets traveling around the world, they're funding it largely on their own dime, but it's because of the passion of the theoretical problems they're engaged in, and to me, that's huge, that's hopeful.
Cary Wolfe:Yeah, and I just want to say by way of closing that I think it's also really a testament to Giuseppe, the importance of your work and the kind of example of what interdisciplinary research and scholarship can be that was important to me, and I know important to Adam as well, to try to disseminate that more broadly to an American and North American, largely English speaking, English reading, audience with through, the Posthumanities series. So I wanna thank you all again for being with me. Two projects, again, volumes seventy seven and seventy nine in the Posthumanity series. The Organism is a Theory, which is Epilongo in biology, mathematics, AI, which is Epilongo and Adam Nocek, and Jonathan Baziel's Cultures of Evolution, Volume 79 in the series. I want to thank you all for this wide ranging conversation for being here with us today.