ABSTRACT
A decolonised, politically ontologised collective provides a way to move beyond modern/colonial binaries that continue to shape discussions of science in relation to environmental activism. For critical scientist Susan Oyama, a central feature of traditional genetics is its reliance on making an ontological distinction between the 'being' of information and the process of its realisation. In making this distinction, one part of the organism is cut off from the rest and allocated the function of eternal, atemporal developmental 'cause'. One discovery of the Human Genome Project (HGP) was the existence of 'alternative splicing', which means that different genes can be and in fact are spliced together to generate the huge variety of proteins in the human body. Developmentalist biologists, who have opposed and been marginalised by the dominant gene-centric school of thought for decades, have taken the results of the HGP as confirmation of their competing theory of organic development.
