The Bugs Keep Asking
To continue the last post, we humans keep asking where did we come from, what are we doing here, and what's next? Okay, there was a bit of flack over my mentioning how we humans are just not the most complex beings on this planet, and particularly of issue was my mentioning of wheat. But as The Atlantic pointed out: For a start, wheat’s genome is monstrously big. While the genome of Arabidopsis --the first plant to be sequenced-- contains 135 million DNA letters, and the human genome contains 3 billion, bread wheat has 16 billion. Just one of wheat’s chromosomes --3B-- is bigger than the entire soybean genome. To make things worse, the bread-wheat genome is really three genomes in one. About 500,000 years ago, before humans even existed, two species of wild grass hybridized with each other to create what we now know as emmer wheat. After humans domesticated this plant and planted it in their fields, a third grass species inadvertently joined the mix. This convoluted history has left modern bread wheat with three pairs of every chromosome, one pair from each of the three ancestral grasses. In technical lingo, that’s a hexaploid genome. In simpler terms, it’s a gigantic pain in the ass. So what happened to humans along the way, since our genome has basically remained the same and truth be told, is quite a bit easier to manipulate? After reading about the longer evolutionary stay of plants on this planet, one would think that bugs and cells and microbes would also be more complex than humans...and again, egos aside, for the most part they are. Take termites...
Some of this came with the release of the book, Underbug by Lisa Margonelli where her U.S. publisher's page asked: Is a termite an individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite’s properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many others -- unearthing disquieting answers about the world’s most underrated insect and what it means to be human. A review of the book in the NY Times added this: Margonelli, like the researchers she encounters, attempts to free herself from the shackles of human perception and enter the social insect psyche. It is a meditative state that allows her to ponder how innocent innovations can transform into destructive technologies, as well as the nature of individuality and the limits of human understanding. And The New Yorker, in describing the fate of the queen, began its piece with this quote from Eugène Marais: Although you will apparently be an immobile shapeless mass buried in a living grave, you will actually be a sensitive mainspring. You will become the feeling, the thinking, the seeing, of a life a thousand times greater and more important than yours could ever have become. Three different viewpoints, and all from termites.
To date there are 2600 species of identified termites (only 28 are "destructive") and they not only have 10 times the mass weight of us humans but they appear to have eliminated male dominance...all in all, it would seem that termites may have indeed evolved further than we humans. But here's what stuck with me in the latter article, that the termite internal biome is far more complex than we humans are ready to admit: They do this with the help of the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of species of microbes --bacteria and protists-- that live in their guts, ninety per cent of which are found nowhere else on earth. Some of these microbes are themselves, like the termite superorganism, composite animals. But beyond that, some of the lab experiments with termites are forcing scientists to rethink how important DNA really is and if that type of sequencing is what we should be pursuing. The article continues: In 2014, Keasling (Jay Keasling, head of the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute, or J.B.E.I) and three other prominent synthetic biologists published a paper in the journal Cell, in which they declared it an “open question...whether biology is genuinely modular in an engineering sense” --that is, a predictable aggregation of rudimentary components--“or whether modularity is only a human construct that helps us understand biology.” But the spectre raised by termites, microbes, and other organisms that are at once simple and devilishly complex is that the very metaphor of modularity might be misleading: that, as long as we think of living systems as machines, we are guaranteed not to understand them. And this: The first challenge is overcoming the fickleness of microbes: less than one per cent of them can be isolated and grown in a petri dish....microbiologist Carl Woese, who observed that, unlike electrons, cells have a history -- something like memories of what they have metabolized in the past. These “memories” are encoded not in the cells’ DNA but somewhere else in their chemistry...
So, are we back to the drawing board here? In one review by Jerome Groopman in The New York Review of Books, he noted: ...bacteria reproduce at an astonishing rate. E. coli, commonly found in our colon, has a generational interval of about twenty minutes. Homo sapiens has an average generational interval of thirty years. So, over two and a half years, E. coli goes through the same number of generations as we do in two million years. Along those lines it was noted that mushrooms are more similar to us humans than they are to plants, perhaps partially explaining why fungal infections are so difficult for us to fight off. The most recent issue of Scientific American featured an article on microbes and how, almost in similarity to termites, they work together on keeping the ocean's methane in check: Methane, after all, is a strong greenhouse gas: although it constitutes only 0.00018 percent of the atmosphere, it accounts for 20 percent of the atmosphere's warming potential. Estimates suggest that roughly 10 percent of atmospheric methane emerges from seafloor seeps every year. Unchecked, this bubble stream could wreak climate havoc, but something prevents more methane from reaching the atmosphere: the microbes living in the seeps...These microbes, which dwell underneath the white microbial mats and clam shards, consume methane with remarkable voracity. Individually miniscule but collectively mighty, they work together in ways that help to shape landscapes, sustain ecosystems and impact the planet's climate. Their power lies in their cooperation...is their propensity for cooperation exceptional among microbes, or is it commonplace? Prevailing views long helpd that such organisms mostly compete with one another for resources. But maybe teamwork is actually their default mode.
Obviously there is much we've yet to learn. Here are a few to consider: we're discovering that the tiny bones inside our ears hold "an especially high density of DNA compared to other parts of us; and the lanternfly (a moth now invading the U.S. and about which little is known) disrupts a tree's photosynthesis as it feeds thus killing the tree, and it appears to have little preference for what type of tree it lands on; from fruit trees to lumber trees the decimation is massive and little appears able to stop it (even the bee-killing imidacloprid seems to have limited effect); and a new book on whales talks of prehistoric whales eating other whales (a whale skeleton with another whale skeleton inside was recently discovered in an Egyptian valley dig) -- there are 600 prehistoric whale species that are now extinct, says author Nick Pyenson. But a review of the book Who We Are and How We Got Here, which appeared in the London Review of Books, asked these questions: It was the assumption of many that this work would make it possible for us to identify the genetic differences between early and modern types of humans, say between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. What was the genetic basis of the evident differences in their behaviour and thought? What was the genetic mutation that occurred about a hundred thousand years ago to produce those Homo sapiens we refer to as modern humans, resulting in the origin of art, language, human global dispersal and the replacement of all other human types? That we would be able to answer these questions was, it turns out, something of a pipe-dream. We now know that there are about a hundred thousand places in the genome where modern humans are genetically different from Neanderthals, but we aren’t much further along in understanding the biological consequences (if any) of those differences.
So here's my take in sorting out this mess. Franklin Foer has written a book titled World Without Mind, a book which one review described this way: Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon; socialize on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspection -- a world without mind. A world without mind; it might be how I would describe our place in this world. We are the new kids on the block, relative newcomers to this planet, us having just arrived some 100,000 years ago (for goodness sake most species have been here for millions of years). And we've been presented a magic show, a series of illusions and wonders that thrill and delight us, only we've grown impatient. We want to know the secret behind the tricks; how are they done? Only we've discovered that we're not going to be told so we're going to pout a bit and grow a bit angry and stubborn and say fine, then we'll find out ourselves. So we've gone on to create machines and even "artificial" intelligence and to poke and probe almost everything as if we know the answer is there, just behind that next door...but it isn't, and we just keep growing more stubborn and more self-righteous and more angry and more determined. We're like kids, frustrated and tired and we're about to cry.
Ages ago, Michael Talbot wrote The Holographic Universe, a down-to-earth attempt to blend physics with our place in our world, real or imagined. Towards the end of the book, he encounters several spiritual leaders, people whom even yogis and gurus felt that perhaps just three or four such people exist in the world due to the difficulty of attaining such enlightenment; and he asks a couple of them what is our purpose in life to which they answer 1) to find unconditional love and 2) to gain knowledge. Nothing else. My take is that we, as children on this evolutionary planet, have been given our own magic box to explore but it seems we're not satisfied. We're pushing that unopened box away in order to hurry to get to the next present before the other person. What's in that? I want to see. We may feel that we are loading ourselves up with knowledge, but perhaps we have failed to learn what so many other more complex, and possibly more advanced species (such as microbes) have already learned...that we simply need to cooperate.
It's all there, from the oceans to our rolling fields, from our bugs to our guts...our own box of magic. But if we fail to stop fighting and stop arguing and stop feeling so "advanced," --to stop looking at things in a mechanical way-- then we may discover that the curtain may soon simply fall and the show will be over. As with other species now extinct, perhaps we will have been given a chance to discover why we are here, and where we came from, and where we are going...only we didn't take it. Instead, we were content to let our big cities and powerful governments and massive empires claim immortality only to fall and be buried to dissolve back into dust...to date, none have survived. But as with the microbes, we are individually miniscule but collectively mighty. Perhaps now is the time to return as a group, as a species, to work together, to cooperate...and to just marvel at the magic before us.
Some of this came with the release of the book, Underbug by Lisa Margonelli where her U.S. publisher's page asked: Is a termite an individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite’s properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many others -- unearthing disquieting answers about the world’s most underrated insect and what it means to be human. A review of the book in the NY Times added this: Margonelli, like the researchers she encounters, attempts to free herself from the shackles of human perception and enter the social insect psyche. It is a meditative state that allows her to ponder how innocent innovations can transform into destructive technologies, as well as the nature of individuality and the limits of human understanding. And The New Yorker, in describing the fate of the queen, began its piece with this quote from Eugène Marais: Although you will apparently be an immobile shapeless mass buried in a living grave, you will actually be a sensitive mainspring. You will become the feeling, the thinking, the seeing, of a life a thousand times greater and more important than yours could ever have become. Three different viewpoints, and all from termites.
To date there are 2600 species of identified termites (only 28 are "destructive") and they not only have 10 times the mass weight of us humans but they appear to have eliminated male dominance...all in all, it would seem that termites may have indeed evolved further than we humans. But here's what stuck with me in the latter article, that the termite internal biome is far more complex than we humans are ready to admit: They do this with the help of the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of species of microbes --bacteria and protists-- that live in their guts, ninety per cent of which are found nowhere else on earth. Some of these microbes are themselves, like the termite superorganism, composite animals. But beyond that, some of the lab experiments with termites are forcing scientists to rethink how important DNA really is and if that type of sequencing is what we should be pursuing. The article continues: In 2014, Keasling (Jay Keasling, head of the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute, or J.B.E.I) and three other prominent synthetic biologists published a paper in the journal Cell, in which they declared it an “open question...whether biology is genuinely modular in an engineering sense” --that is, a predictable aggregation of rudimentary components--“or whether modularity is only a human construct that helps us understand biology.” But the spectre raised by termites, microbes, and other organisms that are at once simple and devilishly complex is that the very metaphor of modularity might be misleading: that, as long as we think of living systems as machines, we are guaranteed not to understand them. And this: The first challenge is overcoming the fickleness of microbes: less than one per cent of them can be isolated and grown in a petri dish....microbiologist Carl Woese, who observed that, unlike electrons, cells have a history -- something like memories of what they have metabolized in the past. These “memories” are encoded not in the cells’ DNA but somewhere else in their chemistry...
So, are we back to the drawing board here? In one review by Jerome Groopman in The New York Review of Books, he noted: ...bacteria reproduce at an astonishing rate. E. coli, commonly found in our colon, has a generational interval of about twenty minutes. Homo sapiens has an average generational interval of thirty years. So, over two and a half years, E. coli goes through the same number of generations as we do in two million years. Along those lines it was noted that mushrooms are more similar to us humans than they are to plants, perhaps partially explaining why fungal infections are so difficult for us to fight off. The most recent issue of Scientific American featured an article on microbes and how, almost in similarity to termites, they work together on keeping the ocean's methane in check: Methane, after all, is a strong greenhouse gas: although it constitutes only 0.00018 percent of the atmosphere, it accounts for 20 percent of the atmosphere's warming potential. Estimates suggest that roughly 10 percent of atmospheric methane emerges from seafloor seeps every year. Unchecked, this bubble stream could wreak climate havoc, but something prevents more methane from reaching the atmosphere: the microbes living in the seeps...These microbes, which dwell underneath the white microbial mats and clam shards, consume methane with remarkable voracity. Individually miniscule but collectively mighty, they work together in ways that help to shape landscapes, sustain ecosystems and impact the planet's climate. Their power lies in their cooperation...is their propensity for cooperation exceptional among microbes, or is it commonplace? Prevailing views long helpd that such organisms mostly compete with one another for resources. But maybe teamwork is actually their default mode.
Obviously there is much we've yet to learn. Here are a few to consider: we're discovering that the tiny bones inside our ears hold "an especially high density of DNA compared to other parts of us; and the lanternfly (a moth now invading the U.S. and about which little is known) disrupts a tree's photosynthesis as it feeds thus killing the tree, and it appears to have little preference for what type of tree it lands on; from fruit trees to lumber trees the decimation is massive and little appears able to stop it (even the bee-killing imidacloprid seems to have limited effect); and a new book on whales talks of prehistoric whales eating other whales (a whale skeleton with another whale skeleton inside was recently discovered in an Egyptian valley dig) -- there are 600 prehistoric whale species that are now extinct, says author Nick Pyenson. But a review of the book Who We Are and How We Got Here, which appeared in the London Review of Books, asked these questions: It was the assumption of many that this work would make it possible for us to identify the genetic differences between early and modern types of humans, say between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. What was the genetic basis of the evident differences in their behaviour and thought? What was the genetic mutation that occurred about a hundred thousand years ago to produce those Homo sapiens we refer to as modern humans, resulting in the origin of art, language, human global dispersal and the replacement of all other human types? That we would be able to answer these questions was, it turns out, something of a pipe-dream. We now know that there are about a hundred thousand places in the genome where modern humans are genetically different from Neanderthals, but we aren’t much further along in understanding the biological consequences (if any) of those differences.
So here's my take in sorting out this mess. Franklin Foer has written a book titled World Without Mind, a book which one review described this way: Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon; socialize on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspection -- a world without mind. A world without mind; it might be how I would describe our place in this world. We are the new kids on the block, relative newcomers to this planet, us having just arrived some 100,000 years ago (for goodness sake most species have been here for millions of years). And we've been presented a magic show, a series of illusions and wonders that thrill and delight us, only we've grown impatient. We want to know the secret behind the tricks; how are they done? Only we've discovered that we're not going to be told so we're going to pout a bit and grow a bit angry and stubborn and say fine, then we'll find out ourselves. So we've gone on to create machines and even "artificial" intelligence and to poke and probe almost everything as if we know the answer is there, just behind that next door...but it isn't, and we just keep growing more stubborn and more self-righteous and more angry and more determined. We're like kids, frustrated and tired and we're about to cry.
Ages ago, Michael Talbot wrote The Holographic Universe, a down-to-earth attempt to blend physics with our place in our world, real or imagined. Towards the end of the book, he encounters several spiritual leaders, people whom even yogis and gurus felt that perhaps just three or four such people exist in the world due to the difficulty of attaining such enlightenment; and he asks a couple of them what is our purpose in life to which they answer 1) to find unconditional love and 2) to gain knowledge. Nothing else. My take is that we, as children on this evolutionary planet, have been given our own magic box to explore but it seems we're not satisfied. We're pushing that unopened box away in order to hurry to get to the next present before the other person. What's in that? I want to see. We may feel that we are loading ourselves up with knowledge, but perhaps we have failed to learn what so many other more complex, and possibly more advanced species (such as microbes) have already learned...that we simply need to cooperate.
It's all there, from the oceans to our rolling fields, from our bugs to our guts...our own box of magic. But if we fail to stop fighting and stop arguing and stop feeling so "advanced," --to stop looking at things in a mechanical way-- then we may discover that the curtain may soon simply fall and the show will be over. As with other species now extinct, perhaps we will have been given a chance to discover why we are here, and where we came from, and where we are going...only we didn't take it. Instead, we were content to let our big cities and powerful governments and massive empires claim immortality only to fall and be buried to dissolve back into dust...to date, none have survived. But as with the microbes, we are individually miniscule but collectively mighty. Perhaps now is the time to return as a group, as a species, to work together, to cooperate...and to just marvel at the magic before us.
Comments
Post a Comment
What do YOU think? Good, bad or indifferent, this blog is happy to hear your thoughts...criticisms, corrections and suggestions always welcome.