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. Continue reading “Conflict Creating Communities, Even On a Cellular Level”