Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere (review)

Bringing together discourses of rhetoric, information science, and the life sciences, the final text in Richard Doyle’s “Transhuman Trilogy” is nothing short of a radical rethinking of our most enduring evolutionary narrative: survival of the fittest. Contra popular (mis)readings of Charles Darwin’s work, Darwin’s Pharmacy argues that survival is not so much determined by an organism’s toughness or propensity for battle, but by its ability to meaningfully manipulate information, whether this be in speech, bird song, dance, or writing. Building on his work in the first and second books of this trilogy, On Beyond Living (1997) and Wetwares (2003), Doyle uses the concept “rhetorical software” to describe how fluctuations in patterned behavior incite attention and sexuality. This conceptual pairing is particularly useful, because it greatly revises our notion of the import of rhetoric in the life sciences. Seeing rhetorical efficacy as being determined by an organism’s ability to manipulate information, Doyle emphasizes the already rhetorical nature of the life sciences, while providing researchers and theorists a methodology for following similar connections in literary and new media studies.

The chapters of Darwin’s Pharmacy function as standalone essays, but add up to a carefully woven argument when read together. In chapter 1, “The Flowers of Perception,” Doyle takes up Henri Michaux’s and Aldous Huxley’s mid-twentieth-century writings on mescaline in an effort to explain how the concept of rhetorical software might (re)orient our thinking about “trip reports,” a genre devoted largely to user accounts of their experience with psychedelic substances. Despite contrasts in writing style, Michaux’s The Miserable Miracle and Huxley’s The Doors of Perception both function algorithmically, providing protocols for the dissemination of psychedelics (pp. 52–53). These complex rhetorical and programmatic responses do not report on psychedelic experience; rather, Doyle argues, they transmit psychedelic experience through their use of rhetorical devices. For example, Huxley’s troping of “flowers” in The Doors shows us how trip reports tune and amplify our interconnection with the environment (p. 71); here, Doyle proposes a way of reading that emphasizes what trip reports “do,” as opposed to what they “say” (p. 91).

Building on this premise, chapter 2, “Rhetorical Mycelium,” unpacks a networked theory of rhetorical ecologies wherein utterances and writings operate like feedback loops, enabling the replication of psychedelic experience (p. 115). For Doyle, the side effects of ingesting plants are profoundly rhetorical. Borrowing from Louis Althusser’s concept of “interpellation,” he argues that trip reports “hail” the reader, turning us to the experience of ecodelic interconnection. Doyle uses the term “ecodelic” to describe the human experience of “radical interconnection” with an ecosystem; a relationship that renders information we can mime and investigate (p. 33). In chapter 3, “Rhetorical Adjuncts and the Evolution of Rhetoric,” Doyle shows us that Darwin’s writings foreground the role and importance of similar “attention-management devices” in sexual selection. Although battle is a key component of this economy, so is charm: Darwin’s corpus is interesting, because it “introduces the possibility that survival comes not to the fittest but the sexiest, those who are adepts of attention gathering” (p. 139). Drawing on influential work in cybernetics and information science, Doyle notes that attention is maintained through rhetorical invention—deviations in patterns of song or movement that sustain the interest of potential mates. Like blips in code, organisms select their partners based on their ability to manipulate information.

Truly an interdisciplinary gesture, Doyle’s most telling work comes in his pairing of three examples: birdsong, Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac, and the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). The GCP studies the direct effects of consciousness on “physical systems” by calculating fluctuations in over fifty EGG (electrogaiagram) devices that have been distributed around the planet. Experiments show that human consciousness can make the string of numbers that the EGG produces shift (p. 157). As Doyle points out...