| Summary, etc. |
Is biochemistry really so significant that, as Aaron Ciechanover once claimed, "biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes-walking, talking, moving, feeding— are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life,..."? (BQ 2016) This affirmative view on biochemistry can be contrasted with the negative rebuke by Rupert Sheldrake, who critically pointed out that "to describe the overwhelming life," for example, "of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world." (BQ2016a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), biochemistry (in relation to bioticness and abioticness) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no bioticness without abioticness (and vice versa). Needless to say, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that biochemistry is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to biochemistry)-such as botany, microbiology, ethology, genetics, medicine, molecular biology, inorganic chemistry, chemical biology, chemical engineering, chemical ecology, agrochemistry, organic chemistry, neurochemistry, biotechnology, chemical industry, abiogenesis, materials science, philosophy of chemistry, philosophy of science, and so on-should be rejected. (WK 2016) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of biochemistry (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between bioticness and abioticness— 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 conjunctive theory of biochemistry) 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 biochemistry (in relation to the dialectic relationship between bioticness and abioticness) 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. |
