Dr. Noh’s lecture on the presence of the past in multicellular aggregated amoebas really stood out as unique among all the lectures I have attended in this seminar. Her presentation had the most scientifically-technical jargon and content of all the previous ones in the series. This placed her talk firmly outside my typical comfort zone, where I usually focus more on literary analysis and its correlations in art, history, and philosophy. I was fascinated, then, that the themes of the seminar could fit so well with Dr. Noh’s research. Of course, “the presence of the past” is a fairly general theme, so one could find echoes of it in many different areas of study and fields of research, but the exact significance of it really resounded well in Dr. Noh’s work. Using what data is present to extrapolate how things might have been in the past, while also acknowledging that the opposite is also true, and what occurred in the past informs what sort of data one has access to in the present, fit Dr. Noh’s study of dicty in the same way it does the humanities and human history. Scientific exploration while in a world that is forever moving into the past and the future at the same time emphasizes the importance of temporality in all endeavors.
The way Dr. Noh used comparisons between the regulated functions of chimeric and clonal organisms to find evidence for inducible adaptations to social conflict really reflected a macrocosmic tendency of human society, if I may trace a little philosophical parallel about her scientific research. Dr. Noh explained that social conflict would affect how the aggregates form together into a fruiting body, as they compete against each other for varying spots in the body, or else the formation would always be predictable. In the context of this experiment, “social conflict” mostly meant environmental changes, like the overall decrease in temperatures that comes with seasonal changes, and the subsequent decrease in nutrition sources. Those same environmental changes also affect humans, who aggregate into different types of societies based on environment and the specific problems of that area in that time. In different parts of the world, various societies might have lived in very close quarters, or in disparate communities, or in mobile groups, and all of those formations of communities depend on the social conflicts that would have affected those people in that place in the past.
One member of the audience asked a question about Dr. Noh’s insistence that she obtain wild strains of dicty to use in her experiments. She explained that often many researchers who study dicty use the same ones that have been inside laboratories for several decades. If she used those for her research, and discovered a set of evolutionary genomic changes, there would be no way of knowing if those were common or not. The kind of research on dicty Dr. Noh is doing requires environmental factors to have influenced the evolutionary development of the organisms, so a set of sample organisms kept in a lab inventory over a long period of time cannot be used. Put succinctly, Dr. Noh needed an accurate representative piece of the present in order to study the past.