The purpose of this chapter is to effect the mutual problematization of two concepts: technology and life. Most of the argument will involve an assessment of the characterization of living matter supplied by John Dupré and Maureen O'Malley in their article 'Varieties of Living Things: Life at the Intersection of Lineage and Metabolism'. In this text, the two authors use the tools provided by a processual philosophy of biology to argue that 'matter is living when lineages are involved - directly or indirectly - in metabolic processes.¹ Here I will draw attention to the many ways in which technological objects fulfil the two central criteria laid down by Dupré and O'Malley. My purpose is not to argue that technological objects should be considered as instances of living matter. Rather, my aim will be to direct our attention to the problematic intersection of human bodies and technological objects, and to suggest that any attempt to consider the biological and ecological relations of humans with their environment must pay special attention to the quasiautonomous living nature of technological processes.

In the second half of the chapter I will, in addition, point to some of the ways in which such an account of the living processes of technology could inform a novel mode of political ecology. By showing that technological processes exist within the biosphere, rather than acting on it, I suggest a method for thinking a truly ecological Marxism, one which would extend Marx and Engels's claim that labour is 'the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature' by showing that labour involves symbiotic relations between humans and technological processes.²

Lineage-formation, metabolism and a process philosophy of biology

Dupré and O'Malley are not directly interested in technology. Their field of study concerns living processes - their emergence, sustainability over time and interaction. While they are particularly interested in the question of what it means for an entity to be living, their perspective 'assumes no sharp distinction between life and non-life'.³ One way to understand this is to situate their analysis within Dupré's larger project of developing a processual philosophy of biology.

In his later work, especially, Dupré has argued for the necessity of adopting a process ontology in biology. His argument in 'A Manifesto for Processual Philosophy of Biology', co-authored with Daniel Nicholson, relies on three interconnected empirical motivations, namely the nature of metabolism, of life cycles and of ecological interdependence.⁴ First, Dupré and Nicholson draw attention to the fact that 'organisms are open systems that must constantly exchange energy and matter with their surroundings', so that 'from a metabolic perspective, it is simply a matter of fact that, in an organism, everything flows'.⁵ Second, the authors consider the development of individual organisms, and the fact that 'all organisms undergo a characteristic series of morphological and behavioural changes over the course of their lifetime'.⁶ This is true for multicellular life forms - their illustrative example comes from the development of the frog from a tadpole - but they note that 'cells have life cycles as well, which typically involve a growth phase that includes DNA replication followed by mitosis and cytokinesis.⁷ Taking life cycles into account as ubiquitous features of organisms shows that 'biological entities ... exist as temporally extended and temporally differentiated life cycles.⁸ Finally, Dupré and Nicholson draw attention to the general ecological interconnectedness of all living things, noting that organisms 'live in densely interconnected communities that provide many of the conditions of existence that enable the survival of their individual members', and that 'the environment in which each organism finds itself is partially constituted by the complex network of reciprocal interactions that the organism in question maintains with other organisms.⁹ Beyond the fact that organisms rely on one another as mutual members of ecosystems, which they co-constitute, Dupré and Nicholson also discuss the extent of symbiotic relations in the natural world, noting that 'it is becoming increasingly apparent that symbiosis is the rule rather than the exception in the biological realm.¹⁰

We will return to this focus on symbiosis later in the chapter, and it is something which Dupré and O'Malley also discuss at length in the paper where they offer their criteria for living matter. Symbiotic relations come in many different forms. At one end of the scale there are those species that live in close contact with one another and aid one another with specific biological functions. The most obvious example here concerns the co-evolution of flowering plants and pollinators.¹¹ Beyond this, 'a plethora of bacteria and other microbes live in intimate extracellular liaison with plants, animals and fungi'.¹² These relations can become so entrenched that neither the animal nor the bacteria can survive without the other. For example, there is a type of bacterium named Buchnera aphidicola 'which lives in tight association with its aphid hosts ... and produces essential amino acids for them'; the bacteria live inside a special sac that the aphid has evolved to host them and as a result 'aphids and Buchnera coevolve and codiversify, meaning the phylogenies of associated lineages map onto each other.¹³ At the furthest end of the scale is endosymbiosis, in which one of the symbiotic partners moves within the cell wall of the other. The most famous example here concerns the endosymbiotic evolution of eukaryotic cells, where 'mitochondria and plastids functioned first as intracellular symbionts until most of their DNA migrated to the nucleus of the host over a billion years ago.¹⁴ In effect, all of the living cells of plants, animals and fungi contain organelles that were once free-living bacteria.¹⁵

The general picture painted by Dupré and O'Malley's examples is one in which living things form collaborative partnerships, which over time can become so developed that the partners merge into a single organism. All organisms hold various relationships with other living things, such that they are constantly caught up in processes by which they are merging or separating from one another. Dupré and Nicholson sum up this position by claiming that 'the living world is a hierarchy of processes', and that 'the processes in this hierarchy not only compose one another but also provide conditions for the persistence of other members, both larger and smaller.¹⁶

It is within this general framework that Dupré and O'Malley set out to answer the question, 'what does it mean for an entity to be living?' It is immediately clear that some of the usual criteria used to characterize the living are going to be insufficient. Most importantly any 'emphasis on autonomy is problematic ... because even paradigmatic biological individuals, such as large animals, are dependent on symbiotic associations with many other organisms.¹⁷ Another key issue facing any characterization of living things is a certain 'tension between reproduction and metabolism in discussions of life.¹⁸ Metabolism is commonly defined to be the composite of all those 'homeostatic mechanisms' in which 'nutritive material is built up into living matter, or protoplasm is broken down into simpler substances' and by which 'the organism's structural and functional status' is preserved.¹⁹ The tension to which Dupré and O'Malley are drawing our attention arises because, if we take an organism to be a functional whole that uses metabolic processes to regulate its internal structure, then the whole in question is almost always composed of various different genetic individuals working in unison. For example, while the human body certainly metabolizes in such a way that it regulates its own internal structure, only around 43 per cent of the cells in this body are genetically human, with the other 57 per cent made up of the body's microbiome.²⁰ This means that the organism considered from the point of view of its genetic replicability and the organism considered from the point of view of its metabolic integration do not coincide.

Dupré and O'Malley aim to overcome this tension by focusing less on the question of the individual and more on the question of matter. Furthermore, rather than choosing either the metabolic or the replication criteria as more important, they argue that matter should be considered as living when these two fundamental characteristics - namely 'the capacity to form lineages by replication and the capacity to exist as metabolically self-sustaining wholes' - intersect in it.²¹ This means that 'matter is living when lineages are involved - directly or indirectly - in metabolic processes' but that 'the entities that form such lineages are not always, or even usually, the same as those that form metabolic wholes'. The result of this is a characterization of living processes that captures all of the complicated and interconnected examples of living things, but one in which 'we cannot assume the identification of living things with organisms'.²² Interestingly, Dupré and O'Malley's characterization ends up including the notoriously contentious case of viruses among the living. Despite the fact that they do not form metabolic wholes, and that they cannot replicate by themselves, they do form lineages and they do play a role in the metabolic processes of the organisms with which they intersect, so they qualify as instances of living matter. Going one step further than the example of viruses, Dupré and O'Malley ultimately view life 'as a continuum of variably structured collaborative systems', and their approach therefore 'leaves open the possibility that a variety of forms of organized matter - from chemical systems to ecosystems - might be usefully understood as living entities.²³ The question I wish to consider is whether technological objects may be considered as living entities under Dupré and O'Malley's criteria.

Technology and lineage-formation

Technological objects - from stone tools to musical instruments and digital computers - do not arise at random, but develop along historical lines of adaptation. The internal combustion engine required the steam engine as a precursor, and the steam engine could never have come into being without the kettle. Each knapped flint tool was not created ex nihilo, but was made by replicating and developing the model provided by previous flint tools. In a very basic sense, then, technological objects form lineages of a kind. But do these lineages have characteristics sufficient to define technological objects as 'lineage-forming' in the sense required by Dupré and O'Malley's theory?

While Dupré and O'Malley do not further specify what they mean by 'lineage-formation', the biological concept of the lineage is relatively broad and can cover processes that occur at various taxonomic levels, from cell development within the ontogenesis of an individual to gene replication, to species survival. If the definition of a lineage is to function at all of these levels, and if it is to cover the great variety of evolutionary processes, from the lateral gene transfer of prokaryotes to the intermediary stages of multi-cellularity witnessed in complex structures such as slime moulds, then, as Makmiller Pedroso has shown, we must adopt a 'permissive account of lineage-generating entities'.²⁴ As Celso Neto explains in his article 'What is a Lineage?', 'the common feature among these lineages is that they are continuous lines of descent' which include both 'reproduction and trait transmission.²⁵ According to a criterion as broad as this, technological objects certainly seem to qualify.

Of course, technological objects are not capable of reproducing - and thus of forming lineages - on their own, and always require human or other animal partners to construct them. But, once again, we find that autonomy in replication is too strict a criterion. It is not only contentious cases of life such as viruses that cannot reproduce on their own; a criterion for replication that included autonomy would also exclude a great number of things considered as paradigmatic cases of life, including most flowering plants which require pollinators for their fertilization. Samuel Butler makes this point evocatively in his novel Erewhon, in which he considers the reproduction of machines:

Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if their fertilization was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does any one say that the red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover.²⁶

While biological cases suggest to us that lineage-forming entities must also carry within their bodies the information necessary for their replication (most often in the form of DNA), there is no reason to take this as a criterion for lineage-formation. What matters for replication is only that some information is stored and then utilized for the process of replication, and not where that information is stored. In the case of flint tools, the information required for their reproduction is held within human bodies, or perhaps in written language, but it is never absent altogether. In this sense, flint tools form a continuous line of descent, in which individual instances of the hand axe, to take the most common example of such a tool, rely for their creation on the pre-existence of earlier models and on the passing down of the information required for later replications. In doing this, hand axes show both reproduction and trait transmission.

To claim that technological objects are lineage-forming is not to claim that they are organisms, but only that they fulfil the criterion of living matter. Cells form lineages, while the organisms composed of those cells also form lineages at another scale, so that different 'levels of the biological hierarchy' can be thought of as 'lineage-generating entities'.²⁷ What is more, the exact processes and results of the lineages created at each scale need not be homologous. For example, while at the level of the organism we expect lineage formation to include relatively stable parent-offspring phases, 'lineage formation in microbial aggregates is more dependent on ecological factors and does not produce well-defined parent-offspring relations.²⁸ Therefore, just because no single stone tool is the parent of any other, we should not resist the fact that processes of technological development include both reproduction and trait-transmission and can therefore be understood as a particular category of lineage-formation.

Technology and metabolism

It is clear that technological objects are not - or at least are very rarely - metabolic wholes and that they are therefore unlikely candidates for being organisms. Many examples, such as that of the stone hand axe, have no 'interior' to speak of, and so it is difficult to understand what would qualify for a homeostatic management of such an internal structure. While more complicated examples, such as the internal combustion engine, do have a dynamic interior structure, they lack their own mechanisms for maintenance, and are only activated by external actions. We might also note at this point one of Simondon's insights regarding the difference between the biological and the technical individual: 'the living being resolves problems, not just by adapting, i.e. by modifying its relation to the milieu (like a machine is capable of doing), but by modifying itself, by inventing new internal structures.²⁹ Such a comment seems to rule out a living consideration of technological processes, but in fact it only suggests that technological objects should not be understood as living individuals. The criterion laid out by Dupré and O'Malley, however, does not require living matter to constitute a metabolic whole or for it to be an individual being. On the contrary, their criterion only specifies that to be considered as an instance of living matter, an entity must be involved directly or indirectly in metabolic processes. On this criterion, technological objects fare much better. The involvement of technology in metabolic processes can be recognized in at least two different levels of metabolic activity, that of the human body and that of the social whole. I will turn to each of these two levels in turn.

Some technological objects, such as those put to use in either agriculture or the preparation of food, are clearly involved in the management of the metabolic processes of the human body. The embeddedness of the human body in its ecological context is managed by a series of technological scaffolds that determine which nutrients enter the body and in what form. As a mechanism for managing human body temperature, and therefore the speed of the chemical reactions happening within the body, both clothing and the built environment can also be understood as functioning as part of the metabolic unity required for the maintenance of human life. There is a deep sense in which the metabolic role played by technology in the survival of the human body is not accidental but structural. The role of technology in the speciation of the human has now been studied in great depth in the archaeological literature: Richard Wrangham has argued that the impact of fire as a method for preparing food was a key factor in allowing for the genetic separation of Homo sapiens from other hominids.³⁰ In a similar vein, Timothy Taylor has argued that the invention of the baby-carrying sling predated and made possible the great acceleration of human brain development - because it allowed for greater degrees of altriciality (birth at a stage of underdevelopment) - and thus that the human species has, from its inception, relied on technological prosthetics for both its development and its survival.³¹

One way of considering technological objects is thus as prostheses which are involved in managing and making possible human life, at least partially by being involved in the metabolic processes of the human body. This perspective fits closely with Bernard Stiegler's account of technics, in which, to take two central examples, fire is considered as a prosthetic stomach and writing as a prosthetic memory device.³² Stiegler's approach borrows heavily from Georges Canguilhem's 'organology'. In his essay 'Machine and Organism', Canguilhem argued that 'machines can be considered organs of the human species' and that 'a tool or a machine is an organ, and organs are tools or machines.³³ While such an approach recognizes the intimate relationship between technology and the living matter of our bodies, it also tends to treat technological objects according to the scale of the individual. Unlike our internal organs, technological objects also form their own developmental lineages, and their connections with any individual human are often contingent and ephemeral. For these reasons, we can also consider technological objects not in relation to the metabolic whole of the individual human body, but in relation to the metabolic functions of social wholes. Two theoretical approaches that may help us to consider this point are the theory of 'industrial metabolism' proposed by the economist Robert Ayres, on the one hand, and the nascent field of 'gene-culture co-evolution', on the other.

Ayres' approach draws on what he calls 'a compelling analogy between biological organisms and industrial activities' and defines 'the metabolism of industry' as 'the whole integrated collection of physical processes that convert raw materials and energy, plus labour, into finished products and wastes in a, more or less, steady-state condition.³⁴ If we take seriously the idea that technological objects fulfil the criterion for living matter given by Dupré and O'Malley, then we need not only think of this as an analogy. Technological objects are lineage-forming entities that contribute to the metabolic management of social wholes. This view connects us back to the careful consideration that Dupré and O'Malley give to the various scales of living matter. Much of their article is given over to the microscopic processes that operate within living organisms. They consider the nature not only of proteins and viruses, but of prions, plasmids and organelles. Many of these entities are not considered to be living things under more traditional definitions of life, because unlike cells they are not easily characterized as metabolic units. However, for Dupré and O'Malley, they are instances of living matter because of the metabolic processes that they help to compose at the scale of the human body. Following Dupré and O'Malley's approach suggests that technological objects may also be considered as living for the role they play in the metabolism of social wholes.

Outside of this essentially economic context, a new field of study concerning human-technology relations has been taking place in that of genomics, where the feedback loops between cultural development and species adaptation have been considered under the title of 'gene-culture co-evolution'. Such an approach considers culture to be 'a system of descent with modification', which develops alongside and in concert with the evolution of the human genome.³⁵ While the standard approach in this literature is to consider culture to be a system of information, some of the key examples taken of cultural inheritance and adaptation concern material technological objects, such as tools, clothing and modes of transport.³⁶ Combining this approach with the concept of an industrial metabolism provides a new picture of technology and the way in which it is involved in metabolic processes. If we consider the speciation of the human to involve a certain symbiotic relation with technological objects that act as metabolic supports to the processes of the human body, then technological objects can be considered as living matters with their own lineages, which allow for the emergence of a new living process, namely the processes of social development that are most often studied in the fields of political economy, and not in biology.

Technology and the biosphere

So far, we have seen that a careful consideration of technological processes could place them within the category of living matter as it is defined by Dupré and O'Malley. We have also seen that, by taking a processual philosophy of biology perspective, we have been directed to consider technological objects not as external organs of human bodies, or as organisms on their own, but as portions of living matter that are engaged in living processes that exist at scales above that of the human individual. Before turning to my final comments, I wish to consider the largest possible scale at which we can consider the living processes of technological development, namely at the scale of the biosphere. By placing technology within its biospheric context, I also hope to point towards a novel conception of political economy, one that affirms Marx's contention that social forms are determined by their modes of production, but that also considers each of these modes of production as a specific way in which the relations between human life and the living processes of technology are symbiotically intertwined.

The concept of the biosphere was popularized by the great mineralogist and geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, who used it to name that energetic and material region between the Earth's crust and its outer atmosphere which contains all life. Importantly, Vernadsky considered this living envelope, which surrounds the globe, to be a significant geological force that has shaped the chemical composition of the Earth. In his view, the aggregate of all ecosystems on the Earth can be considered as one enormous system which takes in solar energy and processes it into a great variety of energetic, physical and chemical systems. As he writes, 'the biosphere may be regarded as a region of transformers that convert cosmic radiations into active energy in electrical, chemical, mechanical, thermal, and other forms.³⁷ According to Vernadsky's own analysis, not all of the matter in the biosphere is living, but it is all caught up in living processes. Beginning with the transformation of solar energy into potential energy in photosynthesis, all living things create a web of processes that fill the seas and carpet the land: 'living matter creates innumerable new chemical compounds by photosynthesis, and extends the biosphere at incredible speed as a thick layer of new molecular systems.³⁸

Vernadsky's account of the biosphere does not use the concept of either metabolism or genetic lineage-formation.³⁹ In this respect, it is not clear how his analysis will fit with Dupré and O'Malley's processual characterization of living matter. Technological processes are also left unconsidered by Vernadsky as forces within the broader set of mechanisms that compose the biosphere. Despite these omissions, Vernadsky's holistic picture of the interconnectedness of all living processes in one global system for the processing of solar energy gives us a new perspective from which to view the ways in which technological processes may be considered as living matter. Technological processes emerge out of other living processes - most notably the evolution and adaptation of the human species - and they initially extend the chain of mechanisms that process and repurpose the solar energy converted by photosynthesis.⁴⁰ It is certainly the case that technological processes operate in the region of the biosphere, and that they use free energy to alter the chemical composition of the surface of the Earth.

Once again, the most obvious examples concern agricultural technology, or any of the modes of technology that directly manage the metabolic relation between humans and their ecosystems. When humans build irrigations systems, and use ploughs, harvesting machines and threshers to work the land, the chemical systems of that location are altered considerably. Industrial agriculture is an even more obvious candidate for a biospheric process: the nutrient cycles that naturally occur in any given ecosystem have been greatly altered by the invention of synthetic fertilizers. When the Haber-Bosch method for the production of ammonia - a nitrogen-rich fertilizer - was invented in the early twentieth century, the feedback loops by which nitrogen is returned to the soil by the breakdown of living matter were short-circuited. We now pour so much nitrogen into the soil during industrial agricultural processes that around 50 per cent of the nitrogen in our bodies was fixed in a fertilizer factory.⁴¹

This example is a useful one for combining the insights of Vernadsky and of Dupré and O'Malley, because it allows us to naturalize technology as part of the broader web of living matter: technological processes emerge as new lineages within the interconnected machinery of the biosphere; they also directly affect the metabolic whole composed of humans and their ecosystems. Such a perspective sees technological processes not as artificial additions to the biosphere, but as new lineages that emerge within the biosphere and form a living part of it. There was a time in the history of the biosphere before viruses had emerged, or before multicellular life, or before the endosymbiotic relation between bacteria had created the eukaryotic cells out of which we are composed. Each of these new organizations of matter extended the processing activities of the biosphere and created new physical and chemical systems on the surface of the Earth. The emergence of technology can be seen as just another such development.⁴²

A processual philosophy of political ecology

The purpose of this chapter has been to complicate the relation between the concepts of life and technology, and to show how technological processes operate within that broader set of processes that we name as 'the living'. If technological entities form lineages and do metabolic work, then they are much closer to other living processes than they might first appear. At the close of this chapter, I want to make some final remarks about how such a characterization of the place of technology within living matter might affect the perspective of political ecology.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Marx has a well-developed conception of the place of technology in the formation of social life. Marx's materialism immediately directs our attention to the physical processes of production that maintain any human society, and this includes the technological mechanisms of production. In his critique of Proudhon, Marx highlights both this materialism and the central role of technology:

In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.⁴³

Here Marx is responding to what he sees as Proudhon's implicit idealism by pointing not only to the fact that the material and technological processes of production in any society give rise to the social structures that it expresses, but also that, because of this, all social forms are only 'theoretical expressions' best understood as transient 'abstractions' of a dynamic material process.⁴⁴ Interestingly, however, in this quotation and elsewhere, Marx characterizes technology as a set of 'productive forces' that are essentially directed by the hands of humanity. Rather than recognizing the developmental processes of technology as constituting their own, living, world-historical force, technological objects are conceived as simple mediators of the true worldhistorical force, namely human labour. As Marx writes, labour 'is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature', and technology is only a human mechanism for managing this interaction by directing or controlling the transhistorical force of labour power.⁴⁵

This characterization of technology as something existing in the hands of humanity, rather than as a living force of its own, also affects Marx's famous analysis of the 'metabolic rift' produced by capitalist modes of food production. In brief, Marx argued that, because the products of agriculture are transferred to urban centres, the nutrient cycles that replenish the soil of agricultural land are broken, leading to a crisis in soil fertility and a general alienation of people from the land.⁴⁶ In Marx's response to Proudhon and in his analysis of metabolic rift, both the forces and the effects of technology are only figured at a human scale. Technology is seen as something operating in human hands, giving rise to human social forms and causing crises of human survival and alienation.⁴⁷

If, rather than starting with human social life, we begin at the scale of the biosphere and with the kind of characterization of living matter provided by Dupré and O'Malley, then we begin to see technology from a different angle. Technological processes have their own developmental logic and their own driving forces. They form lineages and they affect the metabolic relations of ecosystems. As two different elements of the biosphere, the development of human life and the development of technological processes live symbiotically alongside and intertwined with one another. To see technological processes as instances of living matter is to see each human society as a particular form of technology-human symbiosis. Be it the human-hand-mill symbiosis of feudalism or the human-steam-mill symbiosis of capitalism, each stage in the historical development of society appears as a moment in the development of the biosphere.

Dupré and O'Malley's account of living processes is not designed to provide a strict definition of life, which would give necessary and sufficient conditions for qualifying as living matter. In fact, their approach 'assumes no sharp distinction between life and non-life' and speaks of 'a spectrum of biological entities.⁴⁸ Their approach, based as it is on a processual philosophy of biology, is designed to provide a fresh perspective on living processes, and one which allows us to sidestep some of the anthropocentric biases that lead us to assume that living things must resemble medium-sized mammals. What I have tried to show here is that, by taking up Dupré and O'Malley's challenge, we gain new perspectives on technological processes, on the strange symbioses of humans and technology and on the place of technology in the biosphere. Ultimately, my hope is that such a perspective will allow for novel insights in political ecology, which can treat technological processes as more than inert objects activated by human hands, and see them as forces with their own lineages, which we live alongside, and with which we form social-ecological, symbiotic wholes.

Notes

Footnotes

1. 1. John Dupré and Maureen A. O'Malley, 'Varieties of Living Things: Life at the Intersection of Lineage and Metabolism', Philosophy and Theory in Biology, 1 (201306), 2009, pp. 1-25, p. 2. ↩

2. 2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin, New York, 1990, p. 290. ↩

3. 3. Dupré and O'Malley, 'Varieties of Living Things', p. 1. ↩

4. 4. John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson, 'A Manifesto for Processual Philosophy of Biology', in Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, ed. John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson, Oxford Academic, Oxford, 2018, pp. 3-46. ↩

5. 5. Dupré and Nicholson, 'A Manifesto for Processual Philosophy of Biology', p. 17. ↩

6. 6. Ibid., p. 18. ↩

7. 7. Ibid., p. 19. ↩

8. 8. Ibid., p. 20. ↩

9. 9. Ibid. ↩

10. 10. Ibid. See also Lynn Margulis, The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1998; and S.F. Gilbert and D. Epel, Ecological Developmental Biology: The Environmental Regulation of Development, Health, and Evolution, 2nd edn, Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, 2015. ↩

11. 11. For the most insightful account of how far even this level of co-evolution can upset common notions of the individual, see Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the relation between the wasp and the orchid: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Continuum, London, 2004, pp. 314-15. While they are not mentioned any further in this chapter, the argument presented here leads to some conclusions that fit particularly well with Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the 'mechanosphere' and of Guattari's concept of the 'machinic phylum' and of 'machinic heterogenesis'. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Continuum, London, 2004, pp. 77-9; and Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Indiana University Press, Indianapolis IN, 1995, pp. 33-57. ↩

12. 12. Dupré and O'Malley, 'Varieties of Living Things', p. 9. ↩

13. 13. Ibid. ↩

14. 14. Ibid., p. 5. ↩

15. 15. For reference, see, Lynn Sagan, 'On the Origin of Mitosing Cells', Journal of Theoretical Biology, 14(225-74), p. 1967. ↩

16. 16. Dupré and Nicholson, 'A Manifesto for Processual Philosophy of Biology', p. 3. ↩

17. 17. Dupré and O'Malley, 'Varieties of Living Things', p. 1. ↩

18. 18. Ibid. ↩

19. 19. Ann Boyce and C. Mary Jenking, Metabolism Movement and Control, Macmillan Education, London, 1980, p. 1. ↩

20. 20. R. Sender, S. Fuchs and R. Milo, 'Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body', PLoS Biol, 19 August 2016, 14(8): e1002533. ↩

21. 21. Dupré and O'Malley, 'Varieties of Living Things', p. 2. ↩

22. 22. Ibid. ↩

23. 23. Ibid., p. 1. ↩

24. 24. Makmiller Pedroso, 'Forming Lineages by Sticking Together', Philos Theor Pract Biol, 11(16) 2019, pp. 1-15, p. 2. ↩

25. 25. C. Neto, 'What Is a Lineage?', Philosophy of Science, 86(5), 2019, pp. 1099-110, p. 1100. ↩

26. 26. Samuel Butler, Erewhon; or, Over the Range, Trübner, London, 1872, p. 206. ↩

27. 27. M. Haber, 'Multilevel Lineages and Multidimensional Trees: The Levels of Lineage and Phylogeny Reconstruction', Philosophy of Science, 79(5), 2012, pp. 609-23, p. 612. ↩

28. 28. Pedroso, 'Forming Lineages by Sticking Together', p. 2. ↩

29. 29. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, vol. 1, trans. Taylor Adkins, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, 2020, p. 7. ↩

30. 30. Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Profile Books, London, 2010. ↩

31. 31. Timothy Taylor, The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010. ↩

32. 32. Bernard Stiegler, Time and Technics 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1998. See especially the section 'Who? What? The Invention of the Human', pp. 134, 180. ↩

33. 33. Georges Canguilhem, 'Machine and Organism', trans. Mark Cohen and Randall Cherry, in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Zone, New York, 1992, pp. 44-69, p. 87. ↩

34. 34. R.U. Ayres, 'Industrial Metabolism: Work in Progress', in J.C.J.M. van den Bergh and M.W. Hofkes, eds, Theory and Implementation of Economic Models for Sustainable Development: Economy & Environment, 15, Springer, Dordrecht, 1998, p. 196. ↩

35. 35. P.J. Richerson, R. Boyd and J. Henrich, 'Gene-Culture Coevolution in the Age of Genomics', Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107, 2010, pp. 8985-92, p. 8986. ↩

36. 36. Ibid., p. 8985. ↩

37. 37. Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere, trans. David B. Langmuir, Copernicus, New York, 1998, p. 47. ↩

38. 38. Ibid., p. 50. ↩

39. 39. Interestingly, Vernadsky does use the concept of metabolism once in The Biosphere (see p. 72). The editors of the English edition of Vernadsky's book suggest this shows the influence of an essay by Julius Mayer titled 'The Motions of Organisms and their Relation to Metabolism', in Julius Robert Mayer: Prophet of Energy, ed. R.B. Lindsay, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1973. ↩

40. 40. I say 'initially' here because the age of automation, and especially the burning of fossil fuels, creates a strange temporality in the biosphere, in which technological processes open up ancient stores of photosynthetic energy. ↩

41. 41. J. Erisman, M. Sutton, J. Galloway et al., 'How a Century of Ammonia Synthesis Changed the World', Nature Geosci 1, 2008, pp. 636-9. ↩

42. 42. It is worth adding here a serious note of caution: while this conception of technology makes it a 'natural' part of the biosphere, this does not mean that it falls outside of ethical or political consideration, and it certainly does not mean that it is no longer a threat to human life. In fact, this position is congruent with the idea that the advent of technology, and the enormous shift that occurs in the biosphere when fossil fuels begin to significantly change the chemical makeup of the surface of the Earth, are leading to a global mass extinction. My hope is that this conception of the problem will aid rather than undermine the kind of environmental politics that is required to respond to this problem. ↩

43. 43. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1963, p. 122. ↩

44. 44. Ibid. ↩

45. 45. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 290. ↩

46. 46. See Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Vintage Books, New York, 1981, p. 949. See also John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2000. ↩

47. 47. This characterization of Marx's conception of technology is admittedly very brief. For a much more detailed account of Marx's evolutionary theory of technology as 'the productive organs of man' and the important role played by Engels's focus on ecology, see John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology, especially the section titled 'Marx and Engels: Labour and Human Evolution', pp. 196-207. Here we see both Marx's great insight into the role of technology and his tendency to reduce it to something outside of nature, lacking its own living force. ↩

48. 48. Dupré and O'Malley, 'Varieties of Living Things', p. 1. ↩