Abstract: Microbiome research analyses the microbial communities living in host organisms and other environments. The field has taken off in recent years with an abundance of claims about the human microbiome’s causal role in everything from our physical health and disease states, to our mental health and food preferences. Biologists, science journalists, and philosophers—rightly impressed by some of this research—are increasingly making claims which I summarise under the umbrella of the microbiome-humanity claim: ‘the microbiome profoundly affects what it means to be human’. These claims are vague, and are rarely carefully explained or justified. This talk attempts to fill in what the microbiome-humanity claim might mean, and whether any versions of it are worth making. I identify a range of potential interpretations of ‘the microbiome’ and ‘what it means to be human’ in this context, and show that the resulting claims range from trivial, to suggestive of interesting research, to guilty of conceptually overselling the microbiome. I recommend that people stop making the microbiome-humanity claim, and suggest some avenues for more productively developing the interesting versions of it. 

This will be a zoom seminar with two attendance options:

1. Attend using Zoom on your personal computer on or off campus.

Zoom details are below. Please make sure you are familiar with the Zoom Seminar guidelines here, particularly the use of the hand/finger rule on Zoom! https://bit.ly/3h99STB

1. Attend the Zoom broadcast in Seminar Room 6.71. To adhere with COVID-safe practices, you must register to attend the seminar room broadcast (follow this link: https://tinyurl.com/y2mbpcvh). To maintain social distancing, tickets are limited. Please do not attend if you are unwell.