The Future of Post-Human Microbiology
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is the evolution of life really so vertical that “microbiologists (led by Carl Woese) have introduced the term domain for the three main branches of this tree….These three domains of life represent the main evolutionary lineages of early cellular life and currently include Bacteria, Archaea…, and Eukarya”? (WK 2016) This vertical view on the evolution of life can be contrasted with an opposing (horizontal) observation by W. Ford Doolittle and others, who argued instead that “any lateral [horizontal] gene transfer…means that…gene trees will differ (although many will have regions of similar topology) and there would never have been a single cell that could be called the last universal common ancestor….” (WK 2016)

Contrary to these opposing views about the tree of life in evolution (and other views as will be discussed in the book), microbiology (in relation to horizontalness and verticalness) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe of course, this challenge to the conventional wisdom in microbiology does not mean that microbiology is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to microbiology)—like epidemiology, microbial ecology, evolutionary microbiology, astro microbiology, cloning, genetic engineering, agricultural microbiology, environmental microbiology, veterinary microbiology, industrial microbiology, evolutionary medicine, synthetic biology, gene therapy, abiogenesis, medical ethics, pharmaceutical microbiology, bio art, computational phylogenetics, philosophy of life, biological warfare, and so on—should be ignored. Indeed, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of microbiology in regard to the dialectic relationship between horizontalness and verticalness—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the vertical-horizontal theory of microbiology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about microbiology (in relation to the dialectic relationship between horizontalness and verticalness) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.