Parasites and Planetary Systems: Towards an Eighteenth-Century Ecology?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As eighteenth-century naturalists sought to determine the nature and origins of biological lifeforms, from polyps to primates to people, novelists extrapolated their ideas to other biospheres to imagine how life might develop under differing circumstances and propose their own “systems.” This paper examines two late-eighteenth-century texts that promote a hylozoic cosmogony, in which all matter is animate and life arises from celestial bodies, cycling down to animals, plants, and minerals. These two texts, Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne’s proto-science-fiction epistolary novel Les Posthumes (1796-1802) and François-Félix Nogaret’s dialogue La Terre est un animal (1795), both describe humans, and all other life, as “parasites.” By analyzing these texts through the lens of the philosopher Michel Serres’s concept of parasitism, this paper argues that conceiving of people as parasites can provoke an ecological orientation that decenters the human and brings into relief humans’ relationality with and dependency on other lifeforms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".