Abstract

This dissertation reports on anthropological fieldwork conducted at the Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, among researchers working in the nascent discipline of Artificial Life. Researchers in this field--a multidisciplinary set of mostly biologists, computer scientists, and physicists--attempt to capture in computer simulations the formal properties and evolutionary trajectories of organisms, populations, and ecosystems. Artificial Life researchers claim that "life" is a property of the formal organization of matter, and they maintain that this makes sensible the attempt to model life in a computer. Some have found this claim so compelling that they maintain that alterative, real, artificial life forms can exist in the computer, and some hope that the creation of computer life forms will expand biology's purview to include not just life-as-we-know-it, but also life-as-it-could-be. This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of how Artificial Life scientists' computational models of "possible biologies" are inflected by their cultural conceptions and lived understandings of gender, kinship, sexuality, race, economy, nation, and cosmology. It follows work in the cultural study of scientific practice and in constructivist, feminist, and anti-racist philosophies of science. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and observations, as well as close studies of a few Artificial Life computer simulations, the thesis locates Artificial Life science as a culturally specific enterprise which, at many moments, resonates with and is informed by the values and practices of white middle-class Judeo-Christian U.S. American and European heterosexual culture. It situates changing concepts of "nature" and "life" in Artificial Life as diagnostic of the ways dominant Euro-American notions of "life," "nature," and "culture" may be reproduced, recombined, and reconfigured in the near future