The Imperial College research demonstrates what many -- from X Files stalwarts to UFO fanatics -- have long claimed: We are not alone. Specifically, the human genome does not carry enough information on its own to determine key elements of our own biology.Should be an interesting avenue of future research! The superorganism!
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Humans, the superorganism
Via Follow Me Here, this interesting scientific note: our bodies contain hundreds of species of bacteria and other microorganisms that we peacefully coexist with; in fact, on a cell-by-cell basis, they outnumber our actual human cells. Some British scientists are arguing that we need to start taking this situation into account when thinking about medical interventions. For one thing, some bacteria make us less susceptible to certain diseases, so killing them indiscriminately could be a problem; furthermore, their presence can affect how we digest medicines and how effective they are systemically.
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Lynn Margulis, one-time University of Chicago student and MacArthur recipient notes in an article from In Context that " ...Fully 10 percent of our own dry weight consists of bacteria, some of which - like those in our intestines that produce vitamin B12 - we cannot live without." (http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC34/Margulis.htm) A scientific loner who has done a huge amount of work on co-evolution in microorganisms, she was one of the early proponents of symbiosis as the answer to the question of eukaryotic emergence. Couple this idea with Leo Buss's ideas about metazoans (loosely summarized as societies of self-promoting cells) and the superorganism of which she speaks is really a kind of federation...where the human body, taken sterile, is a kind of nation state.
It also reasserts a very key issue in evolutionary biology: how do symbiotic systems, perhaps all systems, pass information between the components such that they evolve coherently (I ain't much of an Occam fan on this point)?
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