Good Bacteria

Relatedness

We tend to associate all pathology with germs, but most bacteria is not going to harm us. Why should it? It benefits from having us, as we do from it. Only about 5% of all bacteria is pathogenic. The other 95% if useful, natural and point of fact, necessary.

Everyone needs them. We could not survive without bacteria. I'm a bit sensitive about taking antibiotics for that reason. Often antibiotics kill a whole lot of good bacteria with the bad bacteria whereas in most cases an immune system will get rid of the bad bacteria. Even other good bacteria will get rid of the bad bacteria. And when you introduce bad bacteria is mutates and it does it fast; like in 20 minutes and you may end up without good bacteria and a lot of new bad bacteria.

Everyone has about 10 trillion human cells which are outnumbered by about 100 trillion bacterial cells.

Instead of getting rid of bacteria medicine ought to be more concerned about protecting and nurturing all our good bacteria. We ought to work with them because they don't want to kill us; they just want to use us. Maybe that is why they may have put us here in the first place?

We generally co-habitate with bacteria in a mutually beneficial relationship with them, the communities of bacteria (or referred to as microflora) which are in our mouth, our digestive tract our skin and which we depend on to help digest our food and even attack and destroy the bad pathogenic bacteria.

Bacteria have been here for over 4.5 billion years. They lived on earth a lot longer than we have. They were the only life on the earth for 80% of earth's time-line. They seem to be in charge of much of the life here on this planet. They can destroy life with their toxins or they can help life to proliferate with their unique ability to emulsify fats, to break down cellulose, etc.

No organism can grow and flourish without the presence of bacteria. Remember that next time you bathe or brush your teeth or have a colonic.

We Are Lunch

Scientist (chemist) James Lovelock (with Lynn Margulis) proposed the "Gaia hypothesis" in 1972. (* James Lovelock wrote in The Revenge of Gaia, Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity, by James Lovelock - 2006,)

He suggests evolution works at the level of chemical molecules and cells.

We also know that natural laws are not exactly the same when we get down to the size of nanometers and we see examples of this in quantum physics.

We are also tending toward extinction just like 99.99% of everything which preceded us. Except the exception of a few "breeding pairs" as he calls them, we will for all intents and purposes become extinct. Not only will we become extinct, but wildlife and of course our domesticated animals; all of them will be gone. He says that we, through our human civilization, or attempt at civilizing our species is a "precious resource" which will be lost. But he says we are selfish and consider our human needs while we cause great harm to the living Earth.

Gaia is not a God, it is more of a metaphor. His use of the term is descriptive for a "living earth" but others see it as just another bubble universe. A bubble which is expanding until it bursts.

We may be a universe living inside another universe. 90% of our cells are not our own. There is a theory called Panspermia of our planet being seeded with molecules which evolved from bacteria or archea to eukaryotes, which are you and I and all the other animals and plants on the planet. Prokaryote chromosomes are a singular circular loop and so is the DNA in Mitrochondria but eukaryotic DNA is a linear helix. In humans there is a double (diploid) pair of 23 chromosomes. They are not composed only of DNA; they are coated with histone, a protein, whereas bacteria DNA is naked (no histones). These histones protect eukaryotic genes.

Prokaryotes (bacteria) came here and established colonies. There are 22,000 different strains of bacteria. Some prokaryotes are extremophiles and the constitution of archea, recently discovered as another domain, is part of the evolutionary process as we eukaryotes are part of that process and our world is a dimension we relate to but it is only a middle-world or universe and even natural laws are different at the smaller dimensions which are measured in nanoscale. Mortality with most animals does not exceed reproductive maturity, but we have achieved the capability to extend our life's much greater than that. I'm not sure why it matters because the changes are dramatic. We are not the same organism we started out as. Everything except our brain has changed completely. We retain memory but so does our lymphatic system. Some memory is conscious and some memory is not. There really is no beginning or end. There is no real death. Matter and energy can't be destroyed. It just melds with other molecules. We are just food and we are being harvested right now by the other 90% which lives in us and shares this body with us. Some of us just just don't know that all we are is lunch.

Each Cell is a Self-Propagating Microcosm

What is the boundary between life and non-life? Viruses are perhaps technically dead, or is it? What constitutes life is still being debated by science. Steen Rasmussen has been trying to create life in the artificial life movement at Los Alamos which was started by Rasmussen in the 80s with Chris Langton and Norman Packard (1987) called ALife launched at the AI workshop in Los Alamos.

Life is organized which puts it at odds with the second law of thermodynamics which says energy and matter move toward disorder and entropy increases. However, the exception is in closed systems where entropy actually decreases pursuant to an increase in entropy outside the boundary; to-wit: living cells are self-sustaining, thus autopoetic and they metabolize and replicate. Chemical energy turns to heat which increases the entropy outside the boundary - in the environment - which compensates for the decrease in entropy inside the boundary which forms a division between life and the environment.

Rasmussen explains life this way: "Any given entity...had to have three main attributes in order to be considered alive: it had to take in nutrients and turn them into energy, meaning it had to have a metabolism; it had to reproduce itself; and its descendants had to be able to evolve by means of natural selection. A conventional biological cell, which did all that and more, as a masterpiece of complexity; it had an outer wall through which various essential substances were selectively transported in and out. It had an inner wall around the nucleus, which did the same. And both the nucleus and the cytoplasm surrounding it were brimming with all sorts of enzymes and other bio chemicals, plus micro-structures and organelles: the ribosomes, the mitochondria, the Golgi bodies, and all the rest..." (Ed Regis, What is Life? - 2008)

The separation of these living cells are some natural feature of walls or membranes. The consumption of carbohydrates and fats and combined with oxygen through mitochondria respiration produces energy for organs and tissues.

Mitochondria can only manufacture energy (ATP) within host cells and are thus correctly designated as "organelles" and not symbionts. But they do in fact work together. Mitochondria uses it's own genes but also the genes of its host but as Darwin himself pointed out, "Each living being is a microcosm -- a little universe formed of self-propagating organisms inconceivable minute and numerous as the stars in the heavens."

Hank Roth