The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

This is the heart of the species self-creation story: Species reproduction is self-contained, self-organized, and removed from history. To call this the “modern synthesis” is quite right in relation to the questions of modernity that I discussed in terms of scalability. Self-replicating things are models of the kind of nature that technical prowess can control: they are modern things. They are interchangeable with each other, because their variability is contained by their self-creation. Thus, they are also scalable. Inheritable traits are expressed at multiple scales: cells, organs, organisms, populations of interbreeding individuals, and, of course, the species itself. Each of these scales is another expression of self-enclosed genetic inheritance, and thus they are neatly nested and scalable. As long as they are all expressions of the same traits, research can move back and forth across these scales without friction. Some hint of coming problems appeared in this paradigm’s excesses: when researchers took scalability literally, they produced bizarre new stories of the gene in charge of everything. Genes for criminality and creativity were proposed, sliding freely across scales from chromosome to social world. “The selfish gene,” in charge of evolution, required no collaborators.