Will This Too Have Been a Tree? Biblical and Biological Trees of Life-Science

What biologists have called the Tree of Life, an outline of evolutionary history as the branching descent of species, can be taken as an instance of the instability of fundamental scientific concepts. The tree-structure is fundamental to the point of necessity; as I will explain, even those models that aspire or claim to oppose it today, such as the web, network, or rhizome, unwittingly presuppose it. Despite this inevitability, or rather because of this non-oppositionality, the tree is an unstable foundation, whose displacements propagate through the histories and taxonomic concepts built upon it. This generalized non-self-identity, leaving science and its objects and subjects (life, life scientists) exposed to an unanticipatable future that overtakes unawares anything resembling positive knowledge, is what could be called the deconstruction of science.

It is a question of a story, history, or genealogy in which the narrator is a pivotal character. The life scientist is a living thing, and they chart their own pedigree with this tree. By questioning its roots, we open ourselves to other suspicions of the legacies—Abrahamic and ontotheological—that we may unknowingly or compulsively repeat or inherit today.