The+Artificial+Natural

The Artificial Natural

In her book Hannah Landecker talks about the history of the cell and its importance in the evolution of biology. Using puzzling words like life, non life, artificial, human made, nature she tries to explore the changes in scientific practice and language. I cannot say with certainty what life is, since a definition for this word and what it includes is very complicated. I don’t even know if there is any clear definition. Life forms are changing from the cell that was considered life within a body to a cell that is considered life in a laboratory. I don’t even know if all that separation maters any more. The relationship between natural and artificial, life and non-life lost its power. There is nothing standard to compare the things, and find the differences that they are going to make clear in which category each thing belong. “What is the difference between a partly man-made organism and a naturally occurring one? Is the nature of life set from birth, inherent to matter, or could it be changed by human intention?” (Landecker, 2007, p.9)

“Living things may be radically altered in the way they live in space and time and thus may be harnessed to human intention” (Landecker, 2007, p.2) According to Darwin’s theory living things are radically alter in order to survive. New environmental conditions will either force a species to change and adapt to the new conditions-survive, or force a species to extinct because of inability to change. “Darwin offers an account of the genesis of the new from the play of repetition and difference within the old, the generation of history, movement, and the dynamism of evolutionary change from the impetus and mobility of existing species.”(Grosz, 2005, p.19) Living things are characterized by plasticity. “Biological plasticity has three qualities: 1) the ability of living things to go on living, synthesizing proteins, moving reproducing and so on despite catastrophic interference in their constitution, environment, or form. 2) although living things can be radically manipulated, part of the particularity of biological matter may change or react to intervention in totally unexpected ways. 3) plasticity describes not just the inherent ability of living matter to adapt flexibly and to live through shock and rearrangement, but also its capacity to be changed by humans.” (Landecker, 2007,p.10)

All those characteristics of the “living things” give nature and human the ability to play with life in many different ways. Now, who manipulates the game, who is in charge, I am not sure we know. If it is nature the one in charge, then all the changes occurring are natural. If it’s human then the changes occurring are artificial. Ok and here is my question: aren’t humans part of the nature? As a part of the nature aren’t all humans’ actions natural? So, do we really need a definition of artificial?

The game of “life” is being playing years now. Biotechnology and all the other bio-sciences have been in the center of the interest. Creation in those sciences is in the hand of human, and by saying that I will try to avoid the world artificial or human made. The point I want to make is a different one. Hybrids: “Various fragments – cytoplasm alone, a single chromosome bounded by a membrane, an isolated nucleus-were recombined with whole cells or other “viable” fragments to put a functioning cell back together again. There was no question of such entities ever occurring in nature; these were entirely artificial constructs that opened up the inside of the cell as a space of juxtaposition and experimentation.” (Landecker, 2007, p.20)

And there is my objection: how can we say that there is no question that an entity such as a hybrid can ever occur in nature? First of all, it is not clear what is artificial and what is natural, at least the definition of those words changes over the time. Second of all, even if we agree that an entity is artificial today, who guaranties us that it won’t be natural in the future. Who can be certain that nature will not be able to create it someday? Hannah Landecker repeats many times in her book that living things may be radically altered in the way they live in space and time and that living things are characterized by plasticity. Darwin’s theory leads as well to the fact that we can not be sure what the living entities will be in the future “In Darwin’s writings, life becomes definitively linked to the movement of time and the force of the unpredictable, even random, future.”(Grosz, 2005, p.37) According to that how can we be sure what living entities will be in the future and what nature will be able to create?