...This introductory chapter provides a background to the connection between junk and late-modern humans. It talks about the contemporary art of Vik Muniz, who plays the history of art and re-creates past masterpieces in heteroclite media. Photographs of Mona Lisa in peanut butter or Sisyphus in junk...

...This chapter begins by discussing Richard Dawkins and Jeremy Narby’s take on junk DNA, followed by a review of the 1980 journal Nature to demonstrate how and why Dawkins’s notion of “the selfish gene” was incorrectly presented to found a theory of selfish DNA. It relates Dawkins’s...

...This chapter provides contemporary alternative and pseudoscientific accounts of junk DNA, offering different metaphors to distinguish the noncoding parts of DNA from a semiotic regime where DNA is seen as a multi-medium and life is cast as an interface problem. It traces references and characters...

... with an analysis of cyberculture in the capacity of junk culture, and the central metaphysical notions of “common nature” and individuation. gene activity autogeddon clone code in antescience computer in molecular biology crime against the species DNA as an ecology genetic capitalism capitalism becoming...

...This chapter summarizes the meaning of the word “junk”, which is both described as an unknown part of DNA or the binding principle that holds the world together. Junk is the cement of cultural experience and the fractal principle that unifies DNA to the cosmos and everything in between, and can...

...This chapter talks about false promises of the molecular revolution, the persistence of junk, and the victory of stasis over entropy. It reviews the cinematographic presence of junk in cyberfictions, such as Alfred Elton van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle, Philip K. Dick’s...

... race between spam-zapping programs and junk-mail programmers by making use of a statistical method called a Bayesian filter to rank words according to their likelihood of turning up in a piece of junk e-mail. Spambots countered via camouflage whereby they inserted random words or letters into headers...

...Are we made of junk? This book believes we are. Examining an array of cybernetic structures from genetic codes to communication networks, it explores the idea that most of culture and nature, including humans, is composed primarily of useless, but always potentially recyclable, material otherwise...

...This chapter describes the changes from “garbage” to “junk” DNA in the 1960s and 1970s, and examines what junk became when it entered the realm of simulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It focuses on the works of Susumu Ohno, who coined the expression “junk DNA,” and Roy Britten, who...