Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution (Posthumanities)

A radical deconstructive approach to evolutionary theory

For as long as there has been evolutionary science, thinkers in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities have battled over whether evolutionary theory can or should provide insights into human nature and culture. Yet even the dissenters tend to agree that there is, somewhere, a natural foundation of instinctual or genetic inheritance; the debate is only whether and how human culture is an exception from it. Natural Lection complicates this fundamental boundary as it exposes how our scientific knowledge of nature rests on a faulty foundation that must be supplemented by humanist thought.

Jonathan Basile, as part of the emerging movement of biodeconstruction, extends the work of Jacques Derrida into the life sciences as he parses writing on cultural evolution to reveal the contradictions within our opposing notions of genealogically governed nature and networked or viral human culture. Holding this opposition in suspense, Basile proposes a new framework: natural lection, the view of nature not as original material but as the result of a shifting, always provisional act of reading. By paying careful attention to what biologists describe as a superficial layer of metaphor and rhetoric in their writing―but which he sees as an ineluctable textuality shaping the core of their work―Basile traces the political implications of scientific thought to its theoretical fragility, which calls for philosophical and literary modes of reading.

Showing how contemporary approaches to cultural evolution continue to repeat incoherent patterns of thought at least as old as Darwin―if not Aristotle―Natural Lection dismantles assumptions shared by evolutionary biology, cultural studies, and new materialism. By critically analyzing these foundations, Basile pushes back against the neoliberal and far-right weaponization of evolutionary theory, opening a novel terrain of scientific and political possibility.

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Jonathan Basile is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto. He is author of Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality and Virality Vitality.