Historical Contingency & Biological Entanglement

This project looks at the implications of endorsing an ecological perspective for microbiome research and interventions and the conflicts that this brings to the current “bugs-as-drugs” paradigm. It emerged from a year of reading and discussion with members of the Biology, Philosophy and Evolution Discussion (BiPED) group and it has greatly benefitted from internal funding from the Rotman Institute.

Researchers from all walks have claimed that microbiome research opens new frontiers in biology. Some go as far as claiming a revolution and promise that the inclusion of the microbiome in medical and agricultural domains has “the potential to transform many scientific disciplines, to impact scholars in the social sciences, and to benefit the lives of citizens around the globe” (Blaser et al., 2016). Much of the recent microbiomic research thus encompasses instrumentalist goals to manipulate and introduce new microbiota to resolve various medical, social, and environmental problems.

But there are at least two contrasting ways of approaching this revolution. On the one hand, some researchers seem interested in ‘harnessing’ the power of microbiota by endorsing a bugs-as-drugs perspective where microbes are conceived as mere metabolite producing machines equipped with a kill switch. This bugs-as-drugs perspective presumes that we can simply introduce microorganisms that possess the right set of genes and related effect traits in order to create healthy organisms and functional ecosystems. On the other hand, many insist on the importance of an ecological approach that extends beyond understanding microbiota as a mere collection of microbes with discrete and predictable functions. This project focuses on this latter ecological approach and asks what it implies both for research and regulation. Taking an ecological perspective goes beyond recognizing that organisms form entangled heterogeneous ecological mosaics. It also urges us to reflect on the various challenges, both in terms of effectiveness and safety, that must be surmounted as one pursues the interventionist goals introduced above. Many of these challenges result directly from historical contingency and biological entanglement.

The aim of this project is to examine how to better integrate historical contingency and socio-ecological entanglement in the environmental impact assessment of disruptive technologies. In a recent collaboration with one of Desjardins’ former postdocs, Justin Donhauser, they explore this question in the context of ecological robots designed for ecological remediation. Environmental Biomimicking Robots (EBRs), i.e., robots that are used as proxies for natural organisms playing key ecological roles, do exist and various prototypes are in development. For example, the Reuter’s solar-powered and autonomous weeding robot developed to roam the fields and selectively spray pesticide to get rid of weeds in agriculture, the lionfish zapper developed by Robots in Service of the Environment to help protect coral reefs in, and the Wyss Institute autonomous pollinator robot that could be used in crop pollination (and many other applications).

This type of technology is still in its infancy and no prototypes have proven to be truly effective and economically viable solutions to the problems they are designed to solve. Yet, efforts to create (and use) these EBRs introduce many new and unprecedented ethical, ecological, and sociopolitical concerns, and once again historical contingency and biological entanglement are at the heart of these concerns. Biological organisms are complex and deeply entangled in their environments. They have multiple roles and interactions, some of them well known, but other more subtle, yet ecologically significant. These roles are the product of extended and contingent evolutionary and ecological processes. Expanding efforts to create robots to serve as organism proxies, and play select ecological functions, have a tendency to isolate and mechanistically reduce the biological organism to a very limited set of traits and functions. They also tend to ignore the fact that the assembly history of ecological communities matter. As a result, many EBR projects make a number of vague and sometimes doubtful promises and assumptions with regard to their contribution to ecological systems.

Faculty:

Gillian Barker, Rotman Institute of Philosophy

John Beatty, University of British Columbia, Replaying Life’s Tape

Justin Donhauser, Bowling Green State University

Joachinm Kutz, University of Münster

Helene Richter, University of Münster

David Sepkoski, University of Illinois, Replaying Life’s Tape

Derek Turner, Connecticut College, Replaying Life’s Tape

Postdoctoral Fellow:

Alison K. McConwell, Stanford University, Replaying Life’s Tape

Graduate Students:

Nina Kranke, University of Münster

Ana Lindeza, University of Münster

Paul Istasy, Western University, Rotman Institute of Philosophy

Sid Rankadua, Western University, Rotman Institute of Philosophy

Patrick Persaud, Western University, Rotman Institute of Philosophy

To view project publications on historical contingency, biological entanglement, and related topics, please see the publications tab on Eric Desjardins’s profile.