The Non Human, Systems and New Materialism

Rick Dolphijn — Michel Serres, The Incandescent, 40. With the early end of a deciphering we thought ought to have lasted longer, some people were amazed at the brevity of our genome. What, so few base pairs! Around five times fewer than a small tropical fresh water fish, the dipnoi Protopterus aethiopicus! Since we dominate living things through research and technology, we ought to win out over all of them in richness, and here we are, reduced to poverty. Fortunately, we have known, since about 1970, that there is no correlation between the complexity of genomes and the complexity of individuals. The fact remains that we find ourselves poor here. The quote above, from Michel Serres, nicely captures one of those moments in science and technology, which made us realize that the presumed dominance of mankind over all other living species is questionable. Over the past half a century, there have...