The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single celled Protist known for creating efficient protoplasmic networks connecting its food sources. The properties of Physarum networks have been subject to extensive examination and employed to solve mathematical problems as well as imitate, model and optimize human-made networks. This paper investigates the conceptual operations underpinning those modelling practices that allow for comparison between two incommensurate entities: the slime mold versus human transportation and communication systems. It analyzes selected Physarum experiments, describes the process of abstraction of the slime mold’s body into networks and identifies the strategies of comparison between humans and the slime mold. It defines the slime mold as a boundary object performing the work of translation between the fields of biology, network science and art and characterizes the methods of arriving at equivalence between human and slime networks as based on analogy, metaphor and equivocation.
In this article, I analyse what epistemic operations are involved in extending model organisms to a novel research field. To this end, I draw on the DEKI account of scientific representation, and augment it by introducing the notions of “interpretation-” and “key-sketches”. These refer to the incomplete and heuristically-justified mappings between models and targets that are initially constructed while the model is being developed for a particular use. I substantiate this proposal by analysing three case studies coming from the emerging research area of basal cognition, where stablished model organisms are adopted for novel uses in the context of neuroscientific research.
A burgeoning microbiology field, sociovirology is the study of how viruses interact with one another and the effects such interactions have on social evolution. Challenging dominant narratives that viruses are individualistic pathogens, sociovirologists explore the social interaction of viruses through the language of cooperation, altruism, and cheating, social concepts with biological definitions. Viruses cannot self-replicate—they must rely on living cells to reproduce—and thus are commonly believed to be biologically nonliving. By focusing on virus-virus interaction and evolution, sociovirologists are displacing reproduction as a chief engine of aliveness and queering biology and the concept of life. I contend that in sociovirological publications, the aliveness of viruses is indexed through sociovirologists’ use of language reserved for the interactions and social behaviors of life-forms alongside viruses’ ability to evolve. This paper illustrates that by attending to social behavior and evolution, sociovirologists are proffering novel approaches to both viruses and the concept of life that displaces individual organism reproduction and vertical inheritance as normative of life with species reproduction and species evolution as normative for viruses even if nonnormative for biological understandings of life. Viruses are alive because, as species, they evolve despite an individual viral particle’s fate.
The early decades of Soviet rule saw dramatic developments in medicine and public health. Many regions of the new state, particularly the so-called 'national peripheries', underwent extensive health reform. Vernacular medical practices, which were often embedded in religious doctrines, were to be eradicated. Paradoxically, a keen interest in alternative medical knowledge also emerged, resulting in institutionalised research in ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology and recruiting heterodox practitioners as research partners. This article discusses how Buryat Tibetan medicine of Transbaikal Buddhist monasteries became a lucrative source of ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological knowledge in Soviet natural science and medicine during the interbellum period. Mining this knowledge as an archive and a mapping tool to unlock the ‘productive forces’ of Eastern Siberia, Soviet scientists sought to fight ‘pharmaceutical hunger’ and to discover new items for state exports. The article draws on the documentation of scientific expeditions to Transbaikal Buddhist monasteries and natural habitats to reveal how attempts to adapt Tibetan knowledge for Soviet needs contributed to epistemological translations between heterodox and orthodox medicine, while also highlighting particular sites and environments and the people associated with them. Thus, it argues, the Soviet version of modern pharmacological science emerged as intrinsically local and heterogeneous.
Scientific legends are rarely born fully formed, and the story of Mendel’s mice is no exception. When the mice appear in the historical record, they do so through contradicting accounts on the most basic questions of what the animals looked like and what, if anything, was done with them. This story also reminds us that Mendel was not the isolated genius of popular imagination but a friar navigating a hostile bishop, considerable institutional pressures, and the deep suspicion with which the Church regarded the study of heredity in nineteenth-century Moravia. Whether or not he crossed those mice, the persistence of the story illustrates something broader about how scientific reputations are constructed and maintained. The various accounts converge on the same outcome, in which details that feel appropriate to a legend accumulate around it regardless of whether the evidence supports them. The mice of Mendel, plausible yet unverifiable and irresistible, are a particularly instructive example of these processes at work.
