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 the German theoretical biologist Adolf Meyer-Abich, who introduced the holobiont concept nearly 50 years before her (in 1943). Although nearly completely forgotten today, in the 1940-60s he developed a comprehensive theory of evolutionary change through "holobiosis." It had a surprisingly modern outlook, as it not only addressed tenets of today's evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), like the origin of form and production of variation, but also anticipated key elements of Margulis' later endosymbiotic theory. As the holobiont concept has become an important guiding concept for organizing research, labeling conferences, and publishing articles on host-microbiota collectives and hologenomes, the field should become aware of the independent origin of this concept in the context of holistic biology of the 1940s.

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 obesity and type-2 diabetes, in ‘western’ or indigenous populations with particular microbial characteristics. We are skeptical of this new environmentalist trend to racialize human bodies due to two reasons: (i) These race studies repeat outdated historical narratives, which link especially nutrition and race in ways that are prone to stir stereotypical and exclusionary views on indigenous groups. (ii) The concept of biological race used here is taxonomically problematic and conceptually inconsistent. It leads to a view in which human races are constituted by other non-human species. In addition, this approach cannot group biological individuals into human races and decouples races from ancestry. To support this critique, we draw on case studies of microbiome research on indigenous groups in Latin America.

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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 examine Caramex and show that it works according to specific ideas of nation, mixture (mestizaje), and race (mestizo). In contrast to racial ideologies in which purity is the assumed and desired condition of races, Caramex highlights hybridity. This specific framework—drawing on what I call “Mexicanness”—guides the construction of the database and thus the production of portraits. The analysis historically situates the development of Caramex and provides insights into the daily use of this technology. It shows that Caramex not only reproduces old views of nation and race but also generates new ideas on these issues, as users can alter the photographic database and contest the ideas that shaped the technology. Thus, more generally, this case shows how technologies of identification incorporate and construct ideas of nationhood and human variation in Latin America. [face‐recall system, mestizo, race, Caramex, Mexicanness, Mexico]