The advanced tools used to sequence, model, and analyze biological data provide unprecedented insight into the intricacies of life, yet they also reveal the boundaries of mechanistic certainty. As more aspects of the biological world become “datafiable,” vast amounts of information resist neat conclusions. Knowledge spills beyond singular narratives, challenging the models meant to contain it. Within these gaps—where data resists synthesis and certainty appears layered—it becomes necessary to ask what it means to know, and how human understanding fits into a universe that may never fully reveal itself.
The human stomach was said to be one of God’s greatest inventions, an oven for his earthly chemistry lab. The human ability to understand and manipulate individual chemical elements would always pale in comparison to the alchemy of digestion, which was designed with celestial complexity. In this model, digestion takes on expansive metaphysical dimensions that appear far removed from how we might conceive of digestion today. But digestion theories are fundamental representations of how one conceives of the threshold where the body meets the world. As such, any understanding of how the body digests is always in some way metaphysical, a product of models for how the body is more broadly situated in the world within a given cosmology.
While scientists search the human genome for DNA sequences that set us apart from other species, evidence suggests that we share much of our genetic identity with viruses. Rhizomorphic connections with other creatures, mediated by our viruses, may be happening all the time, along thousands of lines of flight. Infectious agents link humanity with other creatures who live with us in shared multispecies worlds. We are kin with our viral relations.