Biological existence and its theoretical complexities.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin argued that organisms do not adapt to their environments, but rather that organisms and environments co-evolve and construct one another. Two new books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series take up this decree in bold, imaginative ways: The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI by Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek; and Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution by Jonathan Basile. Here, series editor Cary Wolfe brings all three authors together into a vastly fascinating conversation about experimental biology and theoretical biology; construction and deconstruction; language and interpretation; life sciences and living systems; technoscience and philosophy; and their real-world entanglements.

Cary Wolfe is founding director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory and Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor Emeritus of English at Rice University and fellow at the Berggruen Institute. He is editor of the Posthumanities series at University of Minnesota Press and author of several books, including Jagged Ontologies; Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations; and What Is Posthumanism?

Jonathan Basile is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto. He is author of Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution; Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality and Virality Vitality.

Giuseppe Longo is Research Director Emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research in France and the author or coauthor of five books and more than one hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles.

Adam Nocek is associate professor of the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies at Arizona State University. He is coauthor of The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI, coeditor of The Lure of Whitehead, and author of Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Richard Levins

Richard Lewontin

Jean Lassègue

Jacques Derrida

Charles Darwin

Alan Turing

Erwin Schrödinger

Conrad Hal Waddington

James Watson and Francis Crick

Evelyn Fox Keller

Kurt Gödel 

François Jacob

William C. Wimsatt

Mary Jane West-Eberhard

Henri Poincaré

Jennifer Doudna

Charles Darwin

Watson and Crick

Galileo Galilei

Friedrich Nietzsche

Carlos Sonnenschein
Ana Soto

Alfred North Whitenead

Ernst Cassirer

Melinda E. Cooper / Life as Surplus

Philip Mirowski

J. Craig Venter

Stuart Kauffman

Natural Lection and The Organism Is a Theory are available in the Posthumanities series from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.