An Ecological Context

Literary formalism, incorporating structuralist ideas developed by the Prague Linguistics Circle, proposes that literature is not the effect of an external cause or set of historical circumstances. Literature has autonomous and immanent properties. These principles could be applied to biology. An alternative approach to agriculture, and the use of biological organisms in general, would be to engage with them as entities within ecological relations, and not as genetic resources to extract and manipulate. Under current approaches, biological phenomena are categorised with the inorganic world, as materials to manipulate to fulfil humanist aspirations. The structuralist approach rejects current systems models of emergent properties based on the gene, as providing the best solutions to agricultural and environmental problems. In effect, it does not accept an authorial role, whether this is ascribed to Weismann’s germ line or an idealist ‘archetype’. In agriculture, genetic manipulation is conflated with traditional (quantitative) breeding methods. However, direct genetic manipulation needs to be distinguished from quantitative breeding. Quantitative breeding deals with the combined effect of genes on different chromosomes and, moreover, is applied within a regulatory context of meiosis and influencing environmental factors. However, molecular biology makes valuable contributions to modern breeding methods, for instance through the identification of quantitative trait loci or by applications of marker-assisted selection. Integrative approaches, such as agroecology, engage with organisms as interacting entities in ecological systems and could provide more sustainable solutions.