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Richard M. Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011, 368 pp. $70.00 cloth, 35.00 paper.
Bringing together discourses of rhetoric, information science, and the life sciences, the final text in Richard Doyle's "Transhuman Trilogy" is nothing short of a radical rethinking of our most enduring evolutionary narrative: survival of the fittest. Contra popular (mis)readings of Charles Darwin's work, Darwin's Pharmacy argues that survival is not so much determined by an organism's toughness or propensity for battle, but by its ability to meaningfully manipulate information, whether this be in speech, bird song, dance, or writing. Building on his work in the first and second books of this trilogy, On Beyond Living (1997) and Wetwares (2003), Doyle uses the concept "rhetorical software" to describe how fluctuations in patterned behavior incite attention and sexuality. This conceptual pairing is particularly useful, because it greatly revises our notion of the import of rhetoric in the life sciences. Seeing rhetorical efficacy as being determined by an organism's ability to manipulate information, Doyle emphasizes the already rhetorical nature of the life sciences, while providing researchers and theorists a methodology for following similar connections in literary and new media studies.
The chapters of Darwin's Pharmacy function as standalone essays, but add up to a carefully woven argument when read together. In chapter 1, "The Flowers of Perception," Doyle takes up Henri Michaux's and Aldous Huxley's midtwentieth- century writings on mescaline in an effort to explain how the concept of rhetorical software might (re)orient our thinking about "trip reports," a genre devoted largely to user accounts of their experience with psychedelic substances. Despite contrasts in writing style, Michaux's The Miserable Miracle and Huxley's The Doors of Perception both function algorithmically, providing protocols for the dissemination of psychedelics (pp. 52-53). These complex rhetorical and programmatic responses do not report...