Transubstantiation in Science. Review of Anglea Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and M. Norton Wise, Science Without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives; Jessica Riskin, Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life

These two volumes made me think about transubstantiation, the process through which something retains its form, color, and shape, yet becomes, in reality, something else. The usual example is the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, in the Roman Catholic ritual of the Eucharist. Transubstantiation is a standardized miracle (the repetitive, guaranteed miracle of the Mass, offered four times a day). The miracle requires dense layers of social and rhetorical labor, and in this sense, it is not unlike the work of using models in Drosophila genetics, plate tectonics, or primatology. But I have something a bit grander in mind.