THE EPIMEDIAL LANDSCAPE

Abstract

This article develops a media philosophical framework for addressing the intersection of epigenetics and complex dynamical systems in theoretical biology. In particular, it argues that the theoretical humanities (and especially media philosophy) need to think critically about the computability of epigenomic regulation (proposed by the complexity sciences), as well as speculatively about the possibility of an epigenomics beyond complexity. The fact that such a conceptual framework does not exist suggests not only a failure to engage with the mathematics of complexity, but also a failure to engage with its history. Both epigenetics and the application of complex dynamical systems to biology originate in the mid-twentieth-century work of Conrad Hal Waddington. The article demonstrates how this genealogy of epigenetic complexity (which passes through Waddington’s epigenetic landscape, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, molecular epigenetics, and the limitations of nonlinear differential equations for biological modeling) reveals the need for a speculative conception of epigenomic mediation beyond mathematical complexity. Using Whitehead’s philosophy as a conceptual anchor, the “epimedial landscape” serves as a first pass at a media philosophical revision of the complex dynamical systems view of the epigenetic landscape.

Keywords:

• epigenetic landscape
• media philosophy
• complex systems
• Waddington
• Whitehead

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This is not to diminish the contribution of analytical approaches to process philosophy. Increasingly, this work merges with the questions and concerns of theorists trained in the continental tradition. The overlaps have become most explicit in shared research on Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism.”

2 There are several conceptual genealogies that link biology, philosophy, and media that closely intersect what I am proposing with the “epimedial landscape.” Epimedia is a neologism that brings together the science of epigenetics and media theory. By adding landscape to epimedia, I am also deliberately invoking the biological philosophy (or biophilosophy) implied by Waddington’s epigenetic landscape. For this reason, and not unintentionally, the epimedial landscape is a notion that fits into a lineage of biophilosophy. Of course, biophilosophy itself has contested histories and meanings. On the one hand, it combines philosophy and biology, which gives it a natural affinity with the philosophy of biology in the analytical tradition (see Koutroufinis, Life and Process). On the other hand, biophilosophy is also thought to range over a much broader conceptual genealogy of living systems that “deal[s] with questions that arise out of biology but which biology cannot answer [ … ]” (Koutroufinis, Life and Process 3). If the philosophy of biology is a subset of biophilosophy, which Koutroufinis and others maintain, then biophilosophical thought is an umbrella term with diverse discourses and methods, indebted to a wide range of intellectual and disciplinary frameworks. Yet, epimediality is also related to notions of media and mediation that directly engage biological systems: namely, “biomedia” and “vital media,” as well as related media theoretical constructions. These notions are both theoretical and practical responses to difficult questions (and anxieties) posed by the rapid development of biotechnology, bioinformatics, and BioArt/Design in the last several decades: what conceptions of life and media are adequate when biological organisms are media for technological, economic, and artistic intervention (Thacker; Mitchell)? The concept of epimediality shares many of these concerns (especially insofar as it fabricates a concept of media adequate to non-computable modes of organismic development and evolution), although it eventually draws on a different genealogy of media for its formation.

3 In my forthcoming monograph, Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology (U of Minnesota P, 2021), I examine how experimental biologists were hostile toward mathematical formalism and systems theoretical analysis for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are of course exceptions to this rule: Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s work on systems biology was incredibly influential, and the musings of the Theoretical Biology Club also helped shape the intellectual trajectory of systems theoretical analysis in biology (Peterson, The Life Organic). In the main, however, it would take decades – after sequencing the human genome – for the methods and practices of systems biology to become relevant to working biologists.

4 Peter T. Saunders’ chapter, “The Organism as Dynamical System,” in Wilfred Stein and Francisco J. Varela’s collection, Thinking About Biology, is one of the most systematic examinations of the relation between Waddington’s epigenetic landscape and the mathematics of dynamical systems theory.

5 Saunders goes on to note that it is not entirely accurate to say that the epigenetic landscape is a dynamical system, since the landscape merely illustrates some general features of developing systems. Rather, “[t]he epigenetic landscape represents a class of dynamical systems which share a number of important properties which are typically found in developmental systems. The mathematical problem,” Saunders continues, “is to determine the properties of this class” (46).

6 Here I follow Saunders’ discussion of nonlinear differential equations, mainly because the connections to Waddington’s work come into full view.

7 For a thorough examination of nonlinear differential equations in biology, see J.D. Murray’s Lectures on Nonlinear Differential Equation Models in Biology; and Guy-Bart Stan’s course at Imperial College London, Modelling in Biology: <http://www.bg.ic.ac.uk/research/g.stan/2010_Course_MiB_article.pdf>.

8 As Saunders insists, “Waddington was aware that one should think of development in dynamical terms and he even wrote down some equations as an indication of how this might be done” (46).

9 As evidence for the usefulness of Waddington’s conception of a dynamical system today, see NetLand: <http://netland-ntu.github.io/NetLand/>.

10 According to Saunders, Waddington’s model is ultimately insufficient because

each valley has only two neighbours, but in higher dimensions a path can have many neighbours: imagine a multi-core electric cable. This means, for instance, that there can be a very large number of dead ends and still a few viable pathways, which is not obvious from the picture. (49)

11 Spyridon Koutroufinis has an exceptional discussion of parameters and variables in complex dynamical systems modeling in his chapter, “Teleodynamics: A Neo-naturalistic Conception of Organismic Teleology.”

12 For instance, using Lewis, Slack, and Wolpert’s (1977) model of tissue development based on the concentration of a specific gene product, Saunders demonstrates that given a transition between states, one direction is more probable than another. What’s more, the model even shows that phenocopying will only occur in one direction (Saunders 55, 62).

13 Here’s Saunders: “[i]t is not simply a matter of the slowly varying quantities acting as parameters for the fast processes, of evolution setting the framework for development [ … ] fast process can profoundly affect the nature of a slow one” (61).

14 See James Williams’ chapter, “Deleuze and Whitehead: The Concept of Reciprocal Determination,” for an extended discussion of potentiality in Deleuze and Whitehead.