TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

As an adoration mania for human exceptionalism grows ever stronger, this paper develops an argument for devolution. In a climate that appears more obsessed than ever with the ideology of progress and human advancement, the author looks to the taboos of the non-progressive, even luddite or primitive, to find a world of biological devolutionary possibility. The regenerative power of devolution is viewed as an equally intrinsic aspect of the morphological complexity of human adaptation and evolution. In the same way that viruses are said to once have been more evolved, humans too, could de-evolve. 

While disgust is said to be the evolutionary gatekeeper at the boundary of the individual ‘self’, disgust can also be understood as a useful guide to otherness. Parasites, and so called evolutionary ‘cheaters’ are explored to develop new perspectives on the morally disgusting phenomena of becoming less. These so-called lower life forms which disgust us, are also intrinsic to the human microbiome. As the human condition oozes with holes of disgusting biofluid otherness, anything is possible in the intrusion and extrusion of genetic information. The author proposes the outsider notion of devolution, to romanticize the plasticity to become a less complex life form through lateral gene transfer and co-evolution, not out of existential distress but out of passion for the simple structures within highly complex systems.

Through literature and art review the paper maps out artistic, scientific, and philosophical perspectives on devolution, in addition to reflecting on the author's own artistic practice within the context of evolutionary disgust and sacrifice. In this context the author understands sacrifice to be the movement away from the current state of exceptional human ‘being’ and its parallel ideology through the manifestation of mutational metagenomic therapeutics.