Hosted by: Jess Metcalf

How human activities shape the evolution of animals and the dynamics of ecologies has been an enduring question, from Darwin’s writings on variation under domestication to questions of the selective pressures wrought by climate change.  Yet this long durée narrative of human influence may camouflage important biologically consequential shifts in social history.  The example I will use in this talk is the change in scale, simultaneity and velocity of biochemical flows that came with the introduction of continuous process manufacturing in the late nineteenth century, a factory system that increasingly incorporated metabolic elements such as enzymes, antioxidants, and microbial cells in the twentieth.  This talk explores the possibility of interdisciplinary empirical bridging in research on anthropogenic biology between very disparate methodologies in social history and life sciences.  Using examples drawn from wok on antimicrobial resistance and synthetic methionine, it shows how findings from the social history of industrial mass production pose new questions and challenges within the study of biological life.

This is part of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 522 Seminar Series.