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conclusion The Different Domains of Life A s d a v i d s t a r r j o r d a n l i s t e n e d t o h u g o d e Vries that July night in 1904, Burbank existed as a conceptual bridge between two biologists whose spatial practices had honed two different logics for explaining the complexity of life. On the one hand, Burbank appealed to De Vries because he applied the scale of industrial enterprises to produce new botanical novelties. By working at this scale Burbank created an event horizon rarely seen before. On the other hand, Burbank appealed to Jordan because he interpreted findings using the techniques of the panoramic mode. In so doing, Burbank upheld a specific conception of the relationship between the individual rooted on the “real earth” where time was subsumed to the active exploration of territorial space. The time had arrived where even dynamic individuals like Luther Burbank could not hold together this conceptual rift. In fact, what was eventually needed was a thorough exploration of genetics, first as a science of the manipulation of time in the laboratory and test plot and then the application of this detailed understanding to field organisms.1 It is common today to hear claims of the primacy of one view of life over the other. Those who have participated in the “new synthesis ” have claimed that an evolutionary understanding is the “unifying” com3 0 6 ponent of biological studies, while those who have participated in the development of molecular biology claim that it is the understanding of the informational character of the gene that unifies the biological studies. In the discussions offered in the present volume, I have offered a glimpse of the relationship of these two views of life from a third perspective: that of the information-processing systems used to record and navigate the world. From this perspective, the rift between the two scientific disciplines is not a debate on the one best way to study organisms or what is the most “unifying” conception of biology.2 Rather, it is a portrait of two sets of logics developed from mutually supporting but distinctly different spatial and temporal practices. Both Jordan (the naturalist) and De Vries (the experimenter) had important insights into evolution; they were just measuring different dimensions of biological existence at the beginning of the twentieth century. The lesson that this insight offers us is profound. Our ability as a society to process genetic information relies on our ability to recognize the interrelatedness of these two scientific traditions. Naturalism, laboratory genetics, or, for that matter , bioinformatics will not go away; they will change and inform each other while remaining bound within the phenomenological domains that each are best at describing. The disciplines are structurally tied together as a highly differentiated set of scientific practices charged with describing the dynamics of living entities. Appealing to a unified conception of life is exactly the wrong maneuver for understanding the complexity of the conceptions of life we currently have at our disposal . The rift itself is productive. Each new form of spatial practice animates a new conception of life. The value in this pluralist conception of life is that it allows us to understand and appreciate how each science can inform the others without reducing complexity. In the terms presented in this book, we should encourage a view of the world that can appreciate the experiences within the file folders as well as the exquisite organization of the folders themselves. Most importantly, this is a view of science as a culturally productive discipline where each view of life cannot be dissociated from the means by which a specific phenomenological domain is accessed. When we access information, we do not just process data, we animate the limits of what it is possible to imagine. We use our information-processing capabilities to breed true new conceptions of life as well as new ways that life will be conceived. We currently face a future that will present us with challenging new configurations of information and bodies. In order successfully to navigate this future, we need to breed more creative and fair dispositions to all forms of life. C O N C L U S I O N : T H E D I F F E R E N T D O M A I N S O F L I F E...

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