Abigail Nieves Delgado

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Utrecht University

This paper critically discusses the increasing trend in human microbiome research to draw on the concept of race. This refers to the attempt to investigate the microbial profile of certain social and ethnic groups as embodied racial traits. Here, race is treated as a necessary category that helps in identifying and solving health challenges, like o...

Dietary changes can alter the human microbiome with potential detrimental consequences for health. Given that environment, health, and evolution are interconnected, we ask: Could diet‐driven microbiome perturbations have consequences that extend beyond their immediate impact on human health? We address this question in the context of the urgent hea...

Against the common historiographic narratives of evolutionary biology, the first decades of the 20th century were theoretically far richer than usually assumed. This especially refers to the hitherto neglected role that early theoretical biologists played in introducing visionary research perspectives and concepts before the institutionalization of...

Recent human microbiome research has suggested that racial patterns between different groups of people can be understood as variation in how many and which microbes live in and on their bodies. Such racial classifications (from 'Indigenous' to 'Black' or 'Caucasian') are said to be helpful to better grasp microbiome-linked health-disparities (espec...

Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This paper reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subjugated...

In the introduction to this special issue on ethnobiology and philosophy, we consider how the included papers show that ethnobiology is an inherently pluralist project that has a unique potential to foster inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives on issues such as the complex multispecies relations between humans and non-humans that one finds in l...

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a common statistical procedure. In forensics, it is used in facial recognition technologies and composite sketching systems. PCA is especially helpful in contexts with high facial diversity, which is often translated as racial diversity. In these settings, researchers use PCA to define a ‘normal face’ and organ...

The current COVID-19 crisis has brought to the forefront the ways in which our proximity to non-human organisms and our biological exchanges with them are central to human health. It has also made clear that pandemics have different consequences depending largely on social disparities and conditions of inequality in different geographical contexts....

Empirical data gathered from group discussions with Mexican undergraduate students from different regions and backgrounds showed that students tend to incorporate information about genetics into their accounts of hereditary intergenerational transmission linked to issues of family resemblance, health, and mestizaje (racial admixture) in a nuanced,...

Privacy loss is one of the primary issues associated with the use of social media or social network sites. These sites operate by collecting and sharing data from users to obtain economic revenue. As a solution, it is recommended that users be informed about safe online practices and that they should behave accordingly. However, this does not usual...

Apart from being a space for doing STS research, the RUSTlab (Ruhr University Science and Technology Studies lab) is also a laboratory for experimenting with modes of building caring relations (cf. Mol 2008, Mol et al. 2015, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) in academia. A core device for driving this experiment is a document we call “lab coding” to empha...

Various scientific techniques are used worldwide in contemporary criminal identification. Caramex, called the “Face of the Mexican,” is a face‐recall system for criminal identification specifically developed for the Mexican population. It is a photographic database composed of Mexican facial traits to generate composite sketches. In this article, I...

Facial reconstructions have gained importance in museum exhibitions and in forensic sciences in recent years. These objects aim to represent faces from the past and present to elicit recognition in the public. Even though the face is a highly individual object, its reconstruction depends on the application of a number of general categories. One of...

In recent years, Lynn Margulis has been credited in various articles as the person who introduced the concept of holobiont into biology in the early 1990s. Today, the origin of evolutionary studies on holobionts is closely linked to her name. However, Margulis was not the first person to use this concept in its current context. That honor goes to t...

The current overproduction of images of faces in digital photographs and videos, and the widespread use of facial recognition technologies have important effects on the way we understand ourselves and others. This is because facial recognition technologies create new circulation pathways of images that transform portraits and photographs into mater...

This paper addresses historical dimensions of epigenetic studies on human populations. We show that postgenomic research on health disparities in Latin America reintroduces old colonial views about the relations between race, environment, and social status. This especially refers to the idea – common in colonial humoralism and epigenetics – that di...

In the history of biology, knowledge about human differences often has been produced through an interaction with politics and values assumed to be external to science. Two recent books—Jonathan Marks’ Is Science Racist? and Maurizio Meloni’s Political Biology—shed new light on this interplay. While Marks looks into the field of anthropology, Meloni...

Genetic anthropology studies offer evolutionary and migratory narratives to characterize individuals and human groups based on genetic traits. From the analysis of genetic information, these studies construct genealogies that connect body characteristics with geographies and stories of origin. In recent years, an international group of researchers...

Genetic anthropology studies offer evolutionary and migratory narratives to characterize individuals and human groups based on genetic traits. From the analysis of genetic infor- mation, these studies construct genealogies that connect body characteristics with geogra- phies and stories of origin. In recent years, an international group of researc...

Los proyectos de antropología genética ofrecen explicar la historia evolutiva y migratoria de los grupos humanos y los individuos con base en sus características genéticas. Suelen dibujar genealogías que se narran en términos genéticos y que vinculan rasgos físicos con geografías e historias de origen. En este artículo presentamos los resultados de...

La bioeconomía es un modelo económico que promueve el uso de la biotecnología para la creación de bienes que permitan resolver los problemas sociales y ambientales contemporáneos. La OCDE ha tomado a la bioeconomía como centro de su programa para el futuro. Recientemente en México sucedieron dos eventos importantes en el desarrollo de la biotecnolo...