The CCI Program would like to invite you to a job talk by Jonathan
\nBasile:<\/p>\n
\u201cAtomism, Evolution, and the Eternal Return: Darwin\u2019s Library of Babel\u201d<\/p>\n
When: Tuesday, Feb. 3, 12:30-13:30
\nWhere: H-232<\/p>\n
Abstract: Two early critics of Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution found an image to voice their dissent in the work of Jonathan Swift. That the purposive arrangement of organic form could emerge from random variation and natural selection was equally ludicrous, in the eyes of these critics, to Swift\u2019s \u201cLagadan Word Frame,\u201d designed to generate great works of art and science by arbitrarily permuting words. This objection foreshadowed 20th-century developments in evolutionary science, which turned to precisely this model, language understood combinatorically or cybernetically, in order to represent the functioning of the \u201cgenetic code\u201d or \u201cprogram.\u201d The analogy between life and language, treating both as combinatoric systems, allows us to recognize evolutionary biology as part of a lineage\u2014dating back as far as the Ancient Greek atomists\u2014sketched out by Jorge Luis Borges in his work on the universal or total library. Borges\u2019s ironic treatment of combinatoric completeness reveals necessary instabilities within any such system; this necessity, I argue, accounts for profound contemporary transformations in evolutionary biology that are illuminated when these scientific and philosophical-literary traditions are read together.<\/p>\n
Bio: Jonathan Basile is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, teaching with their Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, and the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info. He has published one book on \u201cThe Library of Babel,\u201d Tar for Mortar (2018, punctum books), and one on biodeconstruction and virology, Virality Vitality (SUNY Press, 2025). His third book, Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution will be published this year with the University of Minnesota Press\u2019s Posthumanities series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The CCI Program would like to invite you to a job talk by Jonathan Basile: \u201cAtomism, Evolution, and the Eternal Return: Darwin\u2019s Library of Babel\u201d When: Tuesday, Feb. 3, 12:30-13:30 Where: H-232 Abstract: Two early critics of Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution found an image to voice their dissent in the [\u2026] <\/p>\n