On the notion of Organism
A few tweets written by Bruno Latour, following the symposium Gaia and Earth System Science (24-25 March, Paris):
Tim Lenton keeps pursuing Lovelock's project which, he says, few people understand because of the confusion with the notion of organism.
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 28 mars 2016
It's important that Tim Lenton at the Paris meeting gave his imprimatur to the version of Margulis/Lovelock put forward in 'Facing Gaia'.
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 28 mars 2016
Lovelock has been so deeply misunderstood and trashed that BL was accused of inventing his Lovelock's Gaia from thin air: 'nope' Lenton says
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 28 mars 2016
Lenton's support is an encouragement to reopen the conversation between actor-network & biology to find alternatives to the idea of organism
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 28 mars 2016
Tim Lenton just published at OUP a small useful summary of 'Earth System Science' in the perspective opened by Lovelock' argument.
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 28 mars 2016
If an organism is made of parts, then you have a whole, then you take it as a machine, then you need an engineer, behind him never far a God
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 28 mars 2016
What made the Margulis/Lovelock question so new for socio- & biology is what if you do away with parts as well as wholes? Gaia is no machine
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 28 mars 2016
It is in that sense that Lovelock's Gaia is the most secular figure ever devised to think of the Earth. Funny for someone accused of New Age
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 28 mars 2016
God is just as bad a take on beings of [REL] as, say, 'scientific knowledge' as a take on beings of [REF]. Hence the need to shift on modes.
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 29 mars 2016
Organism -cell, body, earth or State- is using part/whole relations just as in a Fable of the Members & the Stomach. No progress since Rome!
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 29 mars 2016
Organicism or individualism are no different except in timing: the whole is first in the former & second in the later (optimum, market etc.)
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 29 mars 2016
Hence the decisive importance of Margulis/Lovelock in extricating biology from parts as well as wholes. Living beings are not made of parts.
— AIME (@AIMEproject) 29 mars 2016