Abstract
In this paper we articulate how time and temporalities are involved in the making of living things. For these purposes, we draw on an instructive episode concerning Norfolk Horn sheep. We attend to historical debates over the nature of the breed, whether it is extinct or not, and whether presently living exemplars are faithful copies of those that came before. We argue that there are features to these debates that are important to understanding contemporary configurations of life, time, and the organism, especially as these are articulated within the field of synthetic biology. In particular, we highlight how organisms are configured within different material and semiotic assemblages that are always structured temporally. While we identify three distinct structures, namely the historical, phyletic, and molecular registers, we do not regard the list as exhaustive. We also highlight how these structures are related to the care and value invested in the organisms at issue. Finally, because we are interested ultimately in ways of producing time, our subject matter requires us to think about historiographical practice reflexively. This draws us into dialogue with other scholars interested in time, not just historians, but also philosophers and sociologists, and into conversations with them about time as always multiple and never an inert background.
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Acknowledgements
Palladino was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (657750). Berry was funded by the European Research Council through a Consolidator Grant (616510-ENLIFE). We are grateful to Jane Calvert, Annalisa Colombino, Pablo Schyfter, Deborah Scott, and Rob Smith for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper, and to the organisers of the Research Colloquium on History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen for their own, equally thoughtful, response. We also wish to acknowledge the excellent feedback and comments we received from our anonymous reviewers, both here at the Journal of the History of Biology and on an earlier draft submitted to BioSocieties.
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Berry, D.J., Palladino, P. Life, Time, and the Organism: Temporal Registers in the Construction of Life Forms. J Hist Biol 52, 223–243 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-018-9513-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-018-9513-3