Life, Time, and the Organism: Temporal Registers in the Construction of Life Forms

Abstract

In this paper we articulate how time and temporalities are involved in the making of living things. For these purposes, we draw on an instructive episode concerning Norfolk Horn sheep. We attend to historical debates over the nature of the breed, whether it is extinct or not, and whether presently living exemplars are faithful copies of those that came before. We argue that there are features to these debates that are important to understanding contemporary configurations of life, time, and the organism, especially as these are articulated within the field of synthetic biology. In particular, we highlight how organisms are configured within different material and semiotic assemblages that are always structured temporally. While we identify three distinct structures, namely the historical, phyletic, and molecular registers, we do not regard the list as exhaustive. We also highlight how these structures are related to the care and value invested in the organisms at issue. Finally, because we are interested ultimately in ways of producing time, our subject matter requires us to think about historiographical practice reflexively. This draws us into dialogue with other scholars interested in time, not just historians, but also philosophers and sociologists, and into conversations with them about time as always multiple and never an inert background.

Chronicle, Genealogy and Narrative: Understanding Synthetic Biology in the Image of Historiography

“…Having described them, I argue that the making of fields and subfields of history, and indeed the making of any given historian's identity as a historian, is achieved by the combining of different choices concerning the chronicles, genealogies and narratives that one adopts or rejects. This understanding is partially inspired by Gabrielle Spiegel, particularly her work on the 'social logic of the text ' (1990), and earlier work that I completed with Paolo Palladino on biological time (Berry and Palladino 2019). Some of these choices are aesthetic, others political, others correspond to competing epistemic goals and values.…”

“…Nor has synthetic biology entirely settled in one identity or another, with both biological engineering and design biology being alternatives sometimes adopted by practitioners and institutions. This chapter explains the emergence of synthetic biology not only as a direct result of the influence of key charismatic individuals (Campos 2013), nor only thanks to the availability of novel experimental commodities (Berry 2019), nor only by attachment to the aspirations of national and international patrons (Schyfter and Calvert 2015), nor only as a product of techno-futurist venture capital (Raimbault, Cointet and Joly 2016), alongside all the other candidate features of importance which scholars have already addressed, but also as the bringing together of a set of epistemic choices made relative to other subfields. The epistemic choices in question track the terrain of chronicle, genealogy and narrative.…”

Designing Cattle: The Social Practice of Constructing Breeds

“…It is worth noting here that, through this phrasing, the association avoids claiming that it wants to re-create the characteristics of the breed from before modern cattle breeding began in the nineteenth century. Thus, it is not a question of re-establishing historical genetic material or behavior (as in the case of Heck cattle analyzed by Lorimer & Driessen, 2013 or Norfolk Horn sheep discussed by Derry & Palladino, 2018).…”

Temporal logic circuits implementation using a dual cross-inhibition mechanism based on DNA strand displacement

“…34,35 However, they encounter signicant challenges when it comes to processing temporal information related to input order or historical inputs, which is ubiquitous in nature, spanning from the molecular level 36 to cellular, 37 tissue, 38 and organismal levels. 39 Temporal logic circuits, incorporating time as a factor in their operations, offer unique advantages compared to combinational logic circuits. 40,41 On the one hand, temporal logic circuits exhibit dynamic behavior and can respond to changes in inputs over time, which enables temporal circuits to model and simulate realworld systems that involve time-dependent behaviors, such as control systems, communication protocols, or signal processing algorithms.…”