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The discussion about how to define and delineate the environment also involves questions of scale. Following Niewöhner’s concept of the embedded body (Niewöhner 2011), Lock points out that an epigenetic world (as perceived from an anthropological perspective) is one where ‘recognition of intergenerational continuities other than by the transmission of DNA brings about a crucial ontological shift; an embedded body is not the product of interactions of nature and nurture but, by definition, is situated in an entanglement of nature–nurture that transcends generations, raising profound questions about concepts of self and body as clearly bounded entities’ (Lock 2013, 303). Such permeability of bodies, which had previously been seen as bounded entities, contributes further to undermining the traditional ‘division of labour’ between anthropology and biology. Opening disciplinary boundaries allows us to move beyond the problem of bounded environments to a discussion of scale as a central question of analysis – a need that has appeared in other debates as well, for example, in the context of globalising dynamics (for instance, Collier and Ong 2005; Tsing 2015) and in global health (Adams 2016).

In the context of the present volume, this move can be seen as requiring an extension of anthropology to include reflections on the social life of the bacterial cells living in or on the human body seen as a holobiont (Young, this volume). Young uses the study of the human biome to move us beyond the positions of determinism versus free will as he discusses how bacteria take decisions to create (or not) biofilm, or to send out (or not) into the universe themselves as they are transformed into spores (sporulation) that may eventually mature into biofilm elsewhere. While it is still little understood how gut bacteria communicate bi-directionally with the brain, and what effects this may have on human decision-making processes, moods and behaviours – if, indeed, these should not just be seen as integral – Young points out that bacterial decision making is itself not predetermined. Rather, we should understand quorum-sensing of bacteria as a capacity for stochastic intelligence: ‘During periods of collective stress, such as exposure to antibiotics, a small fraction of individuals become “competent”, able to take up DNA from the environment. Competence is a stochastic function (the result of randomness in transcription) that enables the leader to exploit noise (random variation) generated during quorum-sensing’ (Young, this volume). Scale works at two levels here. One is the qualitative shift incurred by the sheer number of micro organisms, leading to increasing differentiation among them and involving individual decision making; and the other is the shift of analytical scale, relating the behaviour of people accessible to standard ethnographic methods to the behaviour of bacteria in the gut, seen through the lens of (an anthropological reading of) microbiology.

Scale is also important in the analysis of development of multi drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB) by Seeberg (this volume). He compares the stress experienced by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. TB) when exposed to anti-tuberculosis medicines to that resulting from attacks by mycobacteriophages, viruses that target tuberculosis (TB) bacteria. The outcome of both kinds of engagement is unpredictable and may be either beneficial or detrimental for the TB bacteria, depending on events at other scales of reality. These include, for example, the life conditions of the host and his or her interaction with family and healthcare providers; the constitution of the healthcare system providing treatment; and decisions of global actors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund technological solutions to be rolled out in contexts that favour budget cuts in government-funded healthcare in low-income countries where TB is rampant. In theory, the combination therapy that has been used for decades should make the development of drug resistance impossible. However, the configuration of actors at very different scales seems to create a situation where M. TB is able to engage with anti-TB drugs in ways similar to its engagements with mycobacteriophages.

The many glitches in drug delivery and global policy priorities create ample opportunity for TB bacteria to make use of their stochastic intelligence. Indeed, even if the intention is to kill them, drug-resistant bacteria may de facto be considered to be domesticated versions of treatable TB, created as they are by human intervention. Hence, one could apply Napier’s phrase: ‘… human selection for tameness is not “natural selection”; it is “human selection” – a social process about creating social environments in which certain genetic traits emerge. As such, it has quite a bit to do with evolution, but as much, or more, with the effects of social environments – including experimental settings – on genetics’ (Napier, this volume). Only, Napier is talking about multi-species interaction at a different scale, namely of domestication through selective breeding of foxes that become dog-like after only a few generations, and subsequently remain ‘dogs’. Napier shows here that social exposure is the key variable that allows genes to function or be shut off. He goes on to discuss another ‘social disease’, namely that of diabetes, where such biosocial dynamics have been largely ignored, globally leading to an over-reliance on biomedical and technical explanations and interventions that are too expensive to access for most people in most countries, while largely ignoring the social dynamics that drive diabetes in individual bodies on a global scale.

The critique of neo-Darwinian evolution that informs many of the contributions in this volume points to the centrality of the discussion of temporal scales with its embedded issues of ontogenesis and phylogenesis. Even if nature–nurture can now be de-separated, and bacteria and brain inform each other’s decisions through biosocial processes, scales of time become further complicated by the attempts to bridge such different scales of sociality. The return of epigenetics may imply an ‘evolution on speed’ in the sense that genetic changes may take effect much faster than previously assumed. If a conducive health environment exists, such change happens at the speed of generational turnover for a given kind of organism. In humans, it seems to happen at a pace (accentuated by the size of the population) that increasingly translates so-called non-communicable conditions and ‘lifestyle diseases’ into epidemics (Seeberg and Meinert 2015).

At the level of bacteria, change in the form of mutation happens at the speed of cell division, and decision making as described by Young may take place in the course of hours. Temporality is complicated by the interaction of organisms with different timescales, as in the case of M. TB. TB cases with drug-resistant strains constituted a negligible population a few decades ago, whereas the impact of the current failure to control TB may result in children and grandchildren of today’s TB patients attracting incurable strains of TB in coming decades. The temporal scales of different organisms are out of sync, so to speak, and the natural limitations of humans to act outside the scope of their own temporal horizon poses challenges to interdisciplinary ambitions.

Petryna (this volume) addresses this issue in her discussion of the human capacity, including that of scientists, to understand ecosystemic transformation in the context of global climate change. Here, both spatial and temporal scales are maximised, and yet the human capacity to predict – with whatever degree of uncertainty – the future impact of current man-made emissions into the global ecosystem is, by and large subject to arbitrary timeframes – and is furthermore characterised by the inability to understand sudden non-linear changes that may be either catastrophic tipping points or trigger points for remedial action. While such sudden changes may be observed relatively easily (thanks to technological intermediaries) at the microscopic level (because they happen rapidly when perceived through a human scale of time), the reverse is true for the perceived slow development of global change.

Behind folds of the changing horizon loom landscapes hidden by ‘blindsidedness’, Petryna points out, as she invokes Fabian’s classic work on coevalness. However, where Fabian criticised evolutionism in the social sciences for placing contemporary populations at different temporal levels (Fabian 1983), Petryna points us to a parallel temporal-teleological displacement in the relationship between science and nature, most clearly exemplified by Darwinism with its teleological assumption that adaptation necessarily prevails.