Chimeras And Consciousness

Scientists elucidate the astounding collective sensory capacity of Earth and its evolution through time. Chimeras and Consciousness begins the inquiry into the evolution of the collective sensitivities of life. Scientist-scholars from a range of fields—including biochemistry, cell biology, history of science, family therapy, genetics, microbial ecology, and primatology—trace the emergence and evolution of consciousness. Complex behaviors and the social imperatives of bacteria and other life forms during 3,000 million years of Earth history gave rise to mammalian cognition. Awareness and sensation led to astounding activities; millions of species incessantly interacted to form our planet's complex conscious system. Our planetmates, all of them conscious to some degree, were joined only recently by us, the aggressive modern humans. From social bacteria to urban citizens, all living beings participate in community life. Nested inside families within communities inside ecosystems, each metabolizes, takes in matter, expends energy, and excretes. Each of the members of our own and other species, in groups with incessantly shifting alliances, receives and processes information. Mergers of radically different life forms with myriad purposes—the "chimeras" of the title—underlie dramatic metamorphosis and other positive evolutionary change. Since early bacteria avoided, produced, and eventually used oxygen, Earth's sensory systems have expanded and complexified. The provocative essays in this book, going far beyond science but undergirded by the finest science, serve to put sensitive, sensible life in its cosmic context.

Scientists elucidate the astounding collective sensory capacity of Earth and its evolution through time.

It is not okay to call something a miracle without even trying to understand it. This is human developmental biology (human embryology, in terms of cells and molecules) for everyone curious enough to see it through, from the perspective of the business of becoming human as individuals and as species; making new humans; how it happens (cells do it, ALL of it); and common variations of the process. It cannot be made quite simple and be kept quite true, but we will move as far toward simple as we can without losing touch with sound evidence. Variations from the normal version of the process, particularly malformations and twinning and chimerism, figure prominently in the story because there is no better way to learn about the usual than to study the unusual and see what differences in the endings these observable differences at the beginnings can make. In this book, when technical terminology is the only way, or the best way, to say what needs to be said, it is defined and explained making the words a worthwhile part of what is here to be learned. This book defines its own new field. We cannot claim to understand how anything human] works as human], with no effort at understanding the emergence of its form and functions. Old and new unanswered questions are waiting to be dug out from under old unquestioned answers about how becoming human unfolds. We will also address some popular and weighty, but deeply empty assertions about the circumstances and mechanisms of our beginnings and our ceaseless becoming. We will find fundamental questions from the humanities' unanswerable except from biology. Human developmental biology is a foundational discipline within the humanities.

This volume elucidates the pivotal ethical and legal issues arising from the use of brain organoids for research, therapeutic and enhancement purposes. The function of the human brain is still a mystery. Until recently, only post-mortem tissue was available for a structural examination of the brain. Consequently, the examination results could only reflect the state at the end of life. However, in order to better understand the development and function of the human brain, dynamic and functional investigations of different human brain cells are necessary. This is where brain organoids, artificially grown in vitro miniature brains, provide the opportunity for more flexible research scenarios. At the same time, however, the use of brain organoids in research and therapy raises the question of how these new entities are to be treated from an ethical and legal point of view. Against this background, this volume aims at clarifying the normative implications of the use of brain organoids in research and therapy. The ethical reflections on the status of brain organoids, informed consent, human-to-animal chimeras and neuro-enhancement are mirrored by corresponding legal analyses. The ethical and legal assessments are preceded by an introduction to the scientific and medical background of the brain organoid technology. A final chapter will be devoted to the issue of whether international harmonization of normative standards for brain organoid research and therapy is feasible and advisable.

What is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how contemporary scientists—biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers—are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual. Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"—as investigating, fathoming, listening—to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis. Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.

In the years following World War I, the “international” emerged as a distinct scale of political and cultural focus. Internationalisms proliferated in kind as writers and thinkers sought to imagine modes of cooperation that would balance transnational solidarities with national sovereignty. While so-called political realists across the twentieth century have regarded such attempts as wishful thinking, Aarthi Vadde argues that the negotiation of wishing and thinking is at the very heart of internationalism. In Chimeras of Form, she shows why modernist literary form is essential to understanding the aspirational and analytical force of internationalism in and beyond Europe. Major writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith use modernist strategies to reshape how readers think about the cohesion and interrelation of political communities in the wake of empire. Vadde lucidly explains how their formal experiments with the novel, short story, poetry, and political essay contribute to and sometimes even anticipate debates in postcolonial theory and cosmopolitanism. She reads Joyce’s use of asymmetrical narratives as a way to ask questions about international camaraderie, and demonstrates how the “plotless” works of McKay and Lamming upturn ideas of citizenship and diasporic alienation. Her analysis of twenty-first-century writers Smith and Shailja Patel shows how ongoing conflicts around migration, displacement, and global economic inequality link modernist, postcolonial, and contemporary traditions of literature. Vadde brings these traditions together to reveal the dual nature of internationalism as an ambition, possibly a chimeric one, and an actual political discourse vital to understanding our present moment.

National, European and international concepts and strategies concerning the legal and ethical framework of chimera and hybrid research are still largely missing, even though they are absolutely necessary in order to use the potential of chimera and hybrid research effectively and efficiently for the benefit of science and society. The outcome of the CHIMBRIDS-Project successfully sheds light on the chances and risks of this research and provides legal solutions to existing problems in order to help decision-makers fulfil their tasks in an informed and efficient manner. This comprehensive volume details the complete results, contributed by 40 scholars from 10 member states of the European Union, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and the US, with descriptive reports of the legal situation in specific countries and in-depth analysis of all scientific, medical, ethical and legal implications of chimera and hybrid research.

The theory of Co-Corporeality is based on a conception of the built environment as a biological entity that opens up a space for coexistence and interaction between humans and microbial life. Based on design-led research, this book explores how we can develop environments for a multispecies world. It focuses on the agency of both human and nonhuman actors. New sensor tools enable observation of and interaction between these different actors. Co-Corporeality links microbiology to material science, artificial intelligence, and architecture. The focus is on how microbial activity can create new protoarchitectural materials, how living systems can be integrated into architecture and cooperate along different time scales.