These two chapters define and explore many of the philosophical theories that the rest of the book leans on. Chapter 2 names the present epoch the “Chthulucene” and proposes “tentacular thinking” as the cognitive style adequate to it; Chapter 3 supplies the biological substrate, sympoiesis, that demonstrates how this thought process literally operates on a scientific level. Read together, they argue that the dominant frames for the present crisis (Anthropocene, Capitalocene) fail both politically and ontologically, as they presume a detached, boundaried individual whom 21st-century biology cannot actually identify.

The Evolution of Nature in a Collective System is the claim that organizes both chapters, and Haraway grounds it by reaching past philosophy into cell biology. The opening of Chapter 2 poses the question directly: “What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences?” (30). Chapter 3 answers by following Lynn Margulis’s symbiogenesis to its logical end. Margulis’s Mixotricha paradoxa, a protist composed of at least five taxonomic kinds of cells in a termite gut, is a model for how cells, tissues, and species come into being in an interconnected way. Haraway’s adoption of “holobiont” (a symbiotic assemblage whose partners do not precede their relations, after Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber’s “We Have Never Been Individuals”) forces a redefinition of what counts as an organism. The analytical payoff is that autopoiesis is retired as a model for living worlds. Sympoietic, collectively producing systems without self-defined boundaries, which Haraway credits to M. Beth Dempster’s 1998 master’s thesis, replaces it. For the rest of the book, then, Haraway can explore based on the assumption that if no organism makes itself, then political and ethical frames built on the self-owning individual have no biological warrant.

Storytelling as a Tool for Living on a Damaged Planet is where Chapter 2 stages its sharpest argument through the passage on the “carrier bag.” Borrowing Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier-bag theory, Haraway sets the common literary structure of the hero’s journey against “a leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient” (39). The point is not literary preference. The Anthropocene narrative, with Species Man as the protagonist and Tool as an accomplice, is itself a hero story, and Haraway’s eight-point objection list treats it as such. It cannot think relationally, it cannot accommodate microbes or sympoiesis, and it excludes much of the world, “especially but not only among indigenous peoples” (48).

Anna Tsing’s matsutake ethnography, wherein she follows the mushrooms from growth through their many travels and uses worldwide, models the situated, carrier-bag accounts where analyzing what survives and how teaches one what to do next. For Haraway, this contrasts with “thoughtlessness,” or the inability “to make present to himself what was absent” (35). The analysis of Hannah Arendt’s reading of Adolf Eichmann relates to a broader argument that a detached, disconnected, and human-centric approach to life breeds the violence and apathy that enables the global ecological crisis that humanity currently faces. The Anthropocene’s presentation of Species Man and his hero narrative cultivate exactly that incapacity. Choosing which story tells the story, or which term defines the current era, determines what “response-ability” is possible. Response-ability enables people to take responsibility for other species and accept their connections in a way that drives them to act. With an individualistic, singular narrative, this reaction isn’t fully possible.

“Make Kin Not Babies” is not yet named as a slogan in these chapters, but the “oddkin” logic that will carry it is being assebled here through Chapter 3’s four “science art activist worldings” (71). The Crochet Coral Reef of Margaret and Christine Wertheim, the Madagascar Ako Project, the Inupiat video game Never Alone, and Navajo-Churro sheep restoration on Black Mesa are all alliances that cross species, generations, and the gap between scientific and Indigenous practice. None depends on shared genealogy; each builds obligation through situated, sustained work. They reach across conventional boundaries to create positive practices and new relationships.

The Chthulucene is deepened through the myths of Medusa and Potnia Theron and the biology of corals, octopuses, and Pimoa cthulhu precisely because these are kin networks “without a proper genealogy” whose “reach is lateral and tentacular” (52). They appear to be from completely separate spheres—literary myth and contemporary science—but are united as all things inherently are, in Haraway’s depiction. Kinship is what corals, lichens, and people on damaged reefs already practice through their interconnection, and the Chthulucene is the name for that practice. The takeaway from these two chapters is that the book’s later “kin-making” demand is the practice that naturally follows once sympoiesis is taken seriously as how the living world works.