“Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of the Nöosphere” is a multidisciplinary non-fiction novel written by rhetorics professor Richard M. Doyle from Penn State University. His work consists of exploring what makes the world a network, linking biotechnology with consciousness, ego, quantum mechanics, death and everything in-between. Or, as he states on his blog, he explores the “betweenness” between living and nonliving systems.

 

“Darwin’s Pharmacy” is Doyle’s attempt at changing the rhetoric that governs our relationship with the planet. In “Darwin’s Pharmacy,” he builds this image of the ecosystem of the universe, that is people, animals, plants and everything in-between as being interconnected, and interconnectedness is his central theme. Starting with the premise of changing the language of the dynamic between homo sapiens and its home planet, "Darwin's Pharmacy" is an exploration of both the visible and invisible realms that connect us to the planet, physics as well as consciousness, connecting the scientific with the mystical. And to build this image of a web of matter and natural laws and everything else, he calls on different disciplines, such as physics, biology, rhetoric, philosophy, religion, etc. 

 

Doyle calls upon the work of scientists and psychonauts (users of entheogenic substances) alike to “re-articulate human autonomy” in relationship with the Earth and especially plants (Doyle 7). As a rhetorics academic, Doyle recognizes the hardships of such a task. 

How can we completely re-engineer our perception of nature through language? What rhetorical choices are necessary? The book is a response to these two questions, and Doyle lays out the vision of interconnectedness by revealing where it already manifests in nature as well as how people can experience it. For instance, Vladimir Verdansky, a scientist Doyle cites abundantly in the book, posits that live beings are organically tuned to their environments “first and foremost by feeding and breathing.”

 

We breathe the air refined by plants through photosynthesis. We feed on plants and animals engaged in an infinite web of connections with their environments, down to the most minute particle. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell of the mission Apollo 14 experienced interconnection when glancing back at the Earth from his spacecraft, a sensation he called “cosmic consciousness” (Doyle 8). A vision of imbrication, all being aboard the spacecraft on mission “Evolution.” Not only in perspective, but also in theory, according to John Bell’s theorem of quantum non-locality, proof that matter itself is all entangled at a subatomic level (Doyle 8). Matter exists in entanglement, beings exist in entanglement, and both exist within what Charles Darwin called an “entangled bank.” The exchanges that take place between living and non-living systems create a network, whether it be a food chain or a thermodynamic field of energy. These are only a few of the ideas that Doyle uses to build the image of interconnectedness. And the fact that he also draws connections between the fields themselves, physical and metaphysical alike, is in itself an exercise in imagining interconnectedness. 

 

Mind and matter, human and plant, they coexist in more ways than we easily perceive. Human consciousness alters evolution, and it also exists within a cosmic consciousness, the noosphere. Doyle argues that we must learn to really tune into the noosphere, and thus to everything around us. “Darwin’s Pharmacy” draws on the ecodelic (entheogenic) experience to illustrate how beings can experience interconnectedness viscerally. Even more fascinatingly, “Darwin’s Pharmacy” demonstrates that the common occurrences of psychedelic interconnection, like the entity of a benevolent peacock angel, these images are manifestations of the noosphere, drawing from phenomena that happen in nature. Just as the peacock angel seduces human consciousness into tuning to something higher, so does the peacock seduce mates with their plumage. Thus, the peacock angel entity mirrors the real peacock. A spiritual epiphany mirrors a natural phenomenon, cosmic Darwinism and natural Darwinism. This, according to Doyle, is proof of a field of consciousness that connects us all, the noosphere, a layer of interconnectedness to complement the visible, tangible ways in which interconnectedness unfolds.