Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Biological hermeneutics

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. ✗plicit 01:13, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Biological hermeneutics

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This appears to be a neologism. The article went through the Articles for Creation process and was approved for creation in 2017. This coincides with the only use of the term that I've been able to find in the sense used in the article, an event at Chetam's Library in mid-2017 entitled "Biological Hermeneutics at Chetham's Library". Now, I've no problem with the inclusion of the topic in Wikipedia, but the term used here is not a correct one (I'll get to that in a minute), and I do not believe a term has been coined for exactly this discipline. The closest I've been able to track down would be something around (still a new term) biology of the technosphere. There is an equivalent of microbiology of the technosphere→Microbiomes of the built environment; however, the concept included in the article up for deletion here is not restricted to microorganisms. I've not found a corresponding term which would cover macromes of the built environment either, which would include rat infestation in the sewers of New York City, for instance. So, in closing, I'm arguing to delete based on this being a neologism for a discipline that is currently ill defined in the round, but aspects of which have been described and have concept representation in Wikipedia.

Now, I said I'd get back to why the title is the incorrect term. Hermeneutics is first a philosophical discipline, much of which devolves to an information science related to the interpretation of symbols and symbology. In fact, a form of biological hermeneutics is the study of the interpretation of the DNA code, and there are terms like "biohermeneutics" and "biosemiotics" that explore this area; see "The Role of Hermeneutics in Biology", for instance. I think that continued retention of this article title associated with this article content confuses an admittedly transdisciplinary physical science with a domain of philosophy and information science.

Thanks for thinking this through. The reason I landed on this page (and edited it) is that I've been looking for articles that have not been substantively edited in several years, in this case no work being done since its creation in 2017. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:46, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Literature and Biology. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 03:15, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete This appears to be one of the many, many neologisms floating about the academic literature that has had no significant uptake. Indeed, as used in the article, the term appears to apply to a single project, where an artist and a scientist collaborated on reading and interpreting the microbiological detritus that had gathered on a 300-year-old copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses [1]. That project was on display at Chetham's Library, as mentioned in the nomination. We could in principle write about such work in an encyclopedic way, but this article isn't it. XOR'easter (talk) 23:25, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. The text boldly asserts that biological hermeneutics "came into being after the development of the microscope during the seventeenth century", though, of course, no 17th, 18th, or 19th century source offers anything similar to that description. The very term "Hermeneutics", for starters, is a purely 20th-century theoretical offspring. As to the contested article, it constitutes almost entirely personal work, with its creator and main contributor being a kamikaze account. And it's no surprise that the harvest of sources is so wanting: We come across papers about "biological interpretation", such as this; Wikipedia mirrors such as this; works, such as this, about something else, in this case "the author in literary theory", which mention the term but once; art shows that use the term, such as in this notice; a book about "environmental hermeneutics," a field of study, the author writes, that's also called "ecological hermeneutics", "ecohermeneutics," "hermeneutics of landscape" and "biological hermeneutics"; and so on. There is almost nothing upon which one can build an article. The way ahead is probably a redirect to Philosophy of biology, simple and pure (no moving original texts). -The Gnome (talk) 13:31, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.