Do corals dream of simulated seas?

Abstract

What happens to a life science when its subject spans the globe yet appears fated to extinction? Such is the predicament that the field of international coral reef studies confronts under the strains of ocean stress. This article asks why this predicament becomes the basis for authorizing new powers of human intervention into the nature of biology. Through a genealogy and commentary of a theory and experiment known as "human-assisted evolution" and its quest for "super corals," I examine the conceptual trouble that issues from calls to use corals to change global ocean change. I claim that the push to engineer marine life and worlds in response to ocean stress is as much an experiment in evaluating nature as it is in theorizing evolution. First, I offer the genre of "Big Coral" as a way of understanding a description of coral reefs as biological exemplars of global environmental change. Second, I offer a genealogical reading of human-assisted evolution as a whole Earth salvage operation grounded in a fantasy of geological time travel. Third, I locate the figure of the "super coral" and the trouble it raises not only in playing with the nature of corals but the nature of the human. I conclude with some reflections on ontological ambiguity that results from intervening in the nature of biology.