Skip to content
2026
Mind Matters Dialogue & Book Launch with Prof Scott Gilbert and Prof Donna Haraway, moderated by Prof Bruce Clarke
“We Are All Lichens”
In this very special Mind Matters Book Launch, we have the pleasure of welcoming Prof Scott Gilbert and Prof Donna Haraway for a generative dialogue that celebrates both the release of Scott Gilbert’s forthcoming book, We Are All Lichens, and his lifelong intellectual friendship with Donna Haraway, who wrote the forward to the book. In a year in which we are meditating on themes of power and care, this conversation will offer some surprising perspectives to help revise some of our standard narratives about the ethical, religious, and biological grounds on which we form worlds together and can enact more caring futures for the planet. Prof Bruce Clarke will moderate the event, helping to draw together the many threads of wisdom from these two thinkers.
We Are All Lichens: World-Making through the Strange Alliance of Science and Religion claims that science and religion come from the same source—the wonderment that is generated when the mind apprehends the world. Moreover, biology and religion always have alliances with each other. In the twentieth century, biology and religion agreed to ignore the body as a temporary garment (worn by genes or souls), to view nature as the mechanical sum of its parts, and to separate the spiritual from the physical realms. However, in the current century, new revolutions in biology (“the extended evolutionary synthesis”) and in religion (“the new materialism”) are forming new alliances that celebrate physical bodies, that view nature as dynamic, interactive, and full of agencies, and that can fight those forces presently destroying the wonders of the natural world. These new approaches in biology and religion can form symbiotic alliances—not a fusion and not a take-over—that can combat the extractive economics that is ruining the planet. This book is a guide to how this might be accomplished.
Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus at Texas Tech University and a Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. His writings explore critical ecologies of narrative, systems theory, posthumanism, and Gaia theory. His most recent books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, coedited with Sébastien Dutreuil (Cambridge 2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020). Previous monographs include Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minnesota 2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (Fordham 2008), and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Michigan 2001). With Henry Sussman he co-edits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham University Press. Since 2019, with David McConville he has co-curated the website Gaian Systems: Planetary Cognition Lab for transdisciplinary research communicating modes of participation with and within Earth’s biotic and metabiotic processes. For more information: brunoclarke.net.
Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and speaks in science and technology studies, feminist theory, biology, and multispecies studies. She has served as thesis adviser for over 60 doctoral students in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Cultural Studies. In 2025, Haraway was awarded the Erasmus Prize by The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
Attending to the intersection of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and multispecies worlding. Her books include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016); Manifestly Haraway (2016); When Species Meet (2008); The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); The Haraway Reader (2004); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (1997, 2nd ed 2018); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); Primate Visions (1989); and Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976, 2004). Her books aand articles are translated into many languages. Fabrizio Terravova made a feature-length film, titled Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival ( 2016), and Diana Toucedo made Camille & Ulysse with Haraway and Vinciane Despret (2021). With Adele Clarke she co-edited Making Kin Not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), which addresses questions of human numbers, feminist anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multispecies flourishing.
Scott F. Gilbert is the Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology (emeritus) at Swarthmore College, where he has taught embryology and the history and critiques of biology. He is also a Finland Distinguished Professor (emeritus) at the University of Helsinki. He received his B.A. in both biology and religion from Wesleyan University, and he earned his MA in the history of science and his PhD in biology from the Johns Hopkins University. Scott’s biological research concerns how changes in embryonic development can generate evolutionary novelties, focusing on how changes in gene expression create the shell of the turtle and how microbes generate the rumen of cattle. Scott is the co-author of the textbooks Developmental Biology (13th ed, 2023), Evolution Evolving (2024), and Eco-Evo-Devo (2026). Scott has received several awards for his work in evolutionary developmental biology, including a John Simon Guggenheim grant, the Kowalevsky Prize in Evolutionary Developmental Biology, and the Biannual Award from the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology. He has been awarded honorary degrees from the University of Helsinki in Finland and the University of Tartu in Estonia. He is one of the few scientists to have published an original limerick in Nature.
21-10-2026 07:30 PM