8 They are “world-forming and world-destroying.” 9 7 Viruses are best understood as swarms, clouds, and ever-mutating ecological actors within specific contexts rather than singular things or objects. 5 Viruses are also “good, bad and pluripotent.” 6 They are processes as much as biological forces. In the words of Eben Kirksey, “Viruses are usually only noticed when something goes wrong.” 4 Viruses, the most diverse life-forms in the world, are pathologized despite being largely unknown and vastly understudied. Starlings outsmart peregrine falcon with murmuration manoeuvres The presence of these viral elements in us is an opportunity to fundamentally rethink what a virus actually “is.” They are what remains from past viral infections, what can be reanimated to become “jumping genes” that are mobile elements in our genome. 3 The fossil elements in our genome are actually a mishmash of viral remnants and noncoding genetic material. Perhaps if one understands the fossil record as an evolutionary glimpse and pushes against Western scientific notions of fossils that assume “common ancestors without reciprocity,” as Todd insists, then we might understand viral fossils as lively entities in continuous motion. “fossil” falls far short as we try to grapple with the pluripotent capacities of viral genetic elements in our cells. If the fossil record is static, dead, and biologically set in stone, the word They not only show how ancient viruses might remain with us, as us their residual haunting also unravels what has long been presumed about viruses: that they are supposedly fixed, solely pathogenic particles with unchanging (rather than continuously evolving) impacts and roles in the genome.
Like the fossils Todd speaks of, DNA fossil records of past viral infections likewise have lessons to convey. As the geneticist Edward Chuong suggests: “In the human genome we can see traces of these invasions everywhere, like a fossil record of infections.” 2 Bits and bobs from past infections, along with parasites and other material, remain in our genomes for millennia, acting as a fossil record of sorts in our bodies. License: CC BY-SA 3.0.ĭNA can leave traces of the past.
#Rusty palmer crack#
This essay engages with the complexities, possibilities, and extended relations with viral junk in our DNA, bringing my perspective as an interdisciplinary waste scholar to bear on that which is left behind in the wake of viral exposures.Ĭontraction crack polygons releasing acid on Arctic sediment. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on the possibilities provided by viruses and junk DNA, which are parts of ourselves that represent a continuous interaction across species and over time. She notes: “In western ontologies, artifacts are things (no longer a ‘who’) whose kinship has been severed: their people can no longer speak for or with them.” 1 This suggests a need to shift towards finding more sustained, ongoing connections with ancient ancestors. She explains that they are ancestors who are often turned into “artifacts” by science for purposes of extraction, weaponization, or capitalist fossil-fuel interests. How can they be gone when they are right here before me, almost clamoring and springing from the stone? What does it mean to be fossilized, to be consigned to the fossil record, but to be preserved in time and space in all of one’s deadness? Zoe Todd writes of fossils from a Métis feminist lens. Walking past a few more hushed museum portals, my sandals echoing along the sleek marble floors, clusters of long-dead starfish and gigantic clams rise out of the ancient rock like blossoms opening to the sky. A US soldier stands guard near a burning oil well in the Rumaila oil field in Iraq, April 2003.
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