Robot life: simulation and participation in the study of evolution and social behavior.

This paper explores the case of using robots to simulate evolution, in particular the case of Hamilton's Law. The uses of robots raises several questions that this paper seeks to address. The first concerns the role of the robots in biological research: do they simulate something (life, evolution, sociality) or do they participate in something? The second question concerns the physicality of the robots: what difference does embodiment make to the role of the robot in these experiments. Thirdly, how do life, embodiment and social behavior relate in contemporary biology and why is it possible for robots to illuminate this relation? These questions are provoked by a strange similarity that has not been noted before: between the problem of simulation in philosophy of science, and Deleuze's reading of Plato on the relationship of ideas, copies and simulacra

Organisms in experimental research

Rachel A. Ankeny and Sabina Leonell

Identifying ontologies in a clinical trial

For a number of years now clinical trials have been the focus of a growing body of social science research and have come to represent the gold standard dor evidence-based medicine. While a considerable and wide–ranging body of research has been devoted to trial participants themselvcs, the approach is partial in that the participants’ reality tends to be cut loose from the very practices that constitute the beating heart of the trials. The practices of clinical research tend, indeed, to be accepted as an unquestioned premise from which myriad actions and consequences emerge. Following the praxiological turn initiated by Mol and basing my analysis on my fieldwork and an ethnographic account of the running of a clinical trial, I hope to propose a new reading of trial participation. Indeed, whatever their form or their objectives, trials are scientific experiments essentially and invariably grounded in a clinical design. The individuals who tajke part in trials must also contend with these two types of practices – the clinical and the scientific – yet the latter are often occulted or reduced to the former in terms of their significance for participants. Using my account of a routine visit in a trial conducted in Burkina Faso, I would like to examine the specific nature of these research practices and, in doing so, identify the ontologies they involve. How do these practices do the body? And what might the consequences be