200 Years of Life Part II

Instructor: Ben Woodard Date & Time: November 17, 24, December 8, 15 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar tracks the history, politics, and philosophy of biology over the last 200 years, since it cohered as a scientific discipline in the early 1800s. It breaks out of two critical dead-ends in interpreting biology: the political and historical limitations of analytic treatments of biology, and the disregard for biological history and scientific detail in continental philosophical discourses around the life sciences.

By focusing on the latter half of the twentieth century, part II of this Seminar will emphasize how technical expertise and experimental praxis are marshaled both for and against a value-neutral articulation of biology. This false neutrality, especially pervasive following the end of the Cold War, has allowed the political center to shift to the right, resuscitating historically naive discussions of eugenics, race, IQ, and human experimentation. As we will see, this strain of thought is opposed, at times at the cost of over-simplification, to both post-genomic understandings of evolutionary history and a too-eager valorization of organismic agency or teleology.

Session 1: Soviet Symbiotics and Organicisms (1940-1960): Group selection, non-genetic biology, micro and macro cooperation, biopolitics and cybernetics.

Session 2: Molecular Revolutions and Sociobiology (1960-1980): Gould and Lewontin versus Dawkins and Wilson, environment and development, multi-level selection, the persistence of eugenics.

Session 3: Genomics and Gene-centrisms (1980-2000): GWAS studies, heredity and heritability, behavioral genetics, not-so-junky-junk DNA.

Session 4: Post-Genomics and Epigenetics (2000-): Developmental Programming, intergenerational trauma, genetic marks, health risk, and epigenetic medicine.

IMAGE: Bridget Riley, Royal Liverpool University Hospital, 1983.

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