Symbiotic bacteria

When I started doing some research about the bacteria that live in us and on us, I was blown away by the sheer numbers, varieties and power of the microorganisms [living single-celled entities that can only be seen with a microscope] that our bodies harbour. Those who study these bacteria tend to actually begin to wonder about who is in charge, the microbes or us. Their cells outnumber ours by a factor of 10 to 1 – it’s just because they’re smaller than our cells that they only weigh about 4 or 5 pounds altogether. The most amazing revelation is that their DNA produces 3,000,000 genes to our measly 23,000 – that’s over 100 times more genes, the pieces of DNA that code for the molecules that tell our bodies what to do to become us. If you watch the first few minutes by clicking on the video, you’ll really understand what is being discovered! It’s a veritable scientific revolution!

Looking at things from my new perspective after a week of this kind of research …. I understand that our planet formed about 4½ billion years ago, and the first living single celled microorganisms, mostly bacteria, appeared about ½ a billion years later. Then these simplest forms of life spent the next long 3 billion years evolving and learning and communicating until they got nature to help them by coming up with the idea of creating multi-celled creatures that they could inhabit. The bodies of these relatively big creatures acted as a nice warm safe home and and fed them and, in exchange, they did chores like digesting the food their host ate and creating an immune system to keep them healthy. 
The system worked so incredibly well that in the next billion years of evolution lots and lots of multi-celled creatures evolved and they got smarter until we human types came along a couple of hundred thousand years ago with enough brains and scientific know-how to finally, in just the last couple of years, start to figure this all out.  Pretty shocking perspective - but those are the facts.

Looking back at the evolutionary processes again, plants preceded animals because they could absorb the energy of the sun and use it to convert carbon dioxide into solid carbon compounds that allowed them to grow into things like grass or trees or carrots. Then came animals that harboured bacteria in their special stomach that would break down the long chain cellulose fibers that gave plants their structure.  They were herbivores and and they mostly ate grass and leaves. Then evolution marched forward and created carnivores and omnivores like us that could get their energy by eating the herbivores like cows and sheep  and goats. Apparently until humans learned to control fire and cook roots and leaves of plants, they could get almost no nutrition from vegetable matter. Scientists think our hunter gatherer ancestors eating meat and cooked vegetables had it made, they got lots of energy from both and so they could outsmart other creatures and evolved by getting even smarter and bigger brains that made them able to create our modern world.In all this, the bacterial flora we host were fine because up until the 1930’s [in my lifetime] when refrigerators and freezers came along, people managed to keep food from going bad by fermenting it. Fermenting breaks down food and produces lots of good bacteria like those in our intestinal system. The bacteria that digest our food could thrive on the arrangement and so did we and we multiplied.

But then we began to eat strange things like ‘cheesies’ and sugar coated cereals and chocolate bars and lots of convenient junk food that our myriads of bacteria didn't thrive on and so our immune system didn't work well either. Then when some bad bacteria or harmful viruses made us really sick we were given antibiotics that killed off lots of the good bacteria we needed to stay healthy.

The consequences of eating mostly processed food and what to do about it, comes in the next post – if you are still with me after this very broad brush treatment of our evolution and complex symbiotic living systems..    Rie

Alone in the Universe?

As usual my tendency is to look at things with a long perspective and scientific bent. However, it’s evident I’m not alone in wondering about the chances we’ll ever reach any form of life out there in the Universe. As is common knowledge, a radio call is being sent out through SETI – the global Institute whose purpose is to explore the ‘nature and prevalence of life in the universe’.

To answer that message, the life form on another planet would have to be advanced enough to understand it. Certainly we are unique on Earth in that we are intelligent enough to be logical and to communicate but it has taken most of the time since our planet was formed for us to have reached this level of complexity.

The fossil records are our main source of information on just what has happened during the evolutionary process. These scientific records tell us that:

- 4.6 billion years ago our planet was formed

- 3.8 billion years ago, life evolved in the form of single celled bacteria or microbes

- 0.53 billion [or 530 million] years ago bacteria got together to form multi-celled life forms and in a remarkably short period, many different species came into being in the so-called Cambrian Explosion

- 0.050 billion [or 50 thousand years ago] homo sapiens reached the modern form that could be recognized as us.

- 0.000,000,050 [or about 50 years] since radio became advanced enough to send messages out to the Universe. That has happened in the last very small fraction of time since the planet has existed.

If you consider that from our point of view on Earth, the sun has risen and set and the seasons have existed all those billions of years – in comparison to other planets, that makes ours a very rare and remarkably stable one. For this stability to occur we have had to:

- Be orbiting around a medium-sized, single sun in the outer reaches of our galaxy so as not to have been disturbed by other nearby suns.

- Be a planet that makes a circular orbit around the sun at just the right distance away to be in a good temperature range where most water was liquid.

- Be a planet spinning on its axis frequently enough (24 hours for us) so all parts were warmed in the day and cooled off at night. The axis had to be tilted so over a period of a year it wobbled and gave both hemispheres summer and winter seasons.

- Be fortunate enough to have a large moon that caught much of the debris during our planet’s early formative years.- There is much more about how rare our stable Earth has been if you click on the highlighted text.

Let’s try to always be aware how special and precious our planet is and do everything possible to prevent environmental deterioration so future generations can enjoy its beauty and bounty. Rie

Evolutionary Quantum Leaps

I am facing a serious operation this week that there is a more than 10% chance I may not survive. It has sharpened my focus and made the subject of this blog post a priority. 

Ever since I was introduced to PierreTielhard de Chardin's 'Phenomenon of Man', I have been captivated by his revelations about the processes that have taken place in the 4.6 billion years since planet Earth first formed as a huge mass of molten rock. My special interest revolves around finding clues that will help me understand how and why we humans evolved with the hope that this  knowledge will clarify for me our place in the whole grand scheme of things and more particularly why we are prone to behave in the ways that we do.

Interestingly, it appears that the laws of nature are such that evolution has happened in quantum leaps. When you study how it all has progressed, you see clearly that for long periods of time, one kind of process will be getting more and more complex until Boom - there is a new unpredictable, unimaginable and more sophisticated process that emerges - a quantum leap to a new level is reached. 

For example in the beginning, the planet finally cooled down so that the tiny basic fragments of matter were able to come together to form atoms. As the temperature cooled further and the atoms bumped into each other at slower speeds, they often interpenetrated and exchanged or shared electrons making a bond between them. A good example could be Hydrogen gas joining with Oxygen gas to form water - a totally different substance that bears no resemblance to the elements that have reacted to form it.  Boom, that kind of process, Chemistry was a quantum leap from Physics that just deals with matter and the forces that act on it. 

As Chemistry proceeded to become more and more complex, huge new compounds formed and they joined with others in chemical reactions until some systems became so large and interdependent with many self-catalyzing reactions that groups of compounds began to reproduce, and change. Boom, a quantum leap to a totally unpredictable advanced process - life occurred.  Biology is so different from the Chemistry that sustains it - it is recognizable as a quantum leap.

Single celled life forms that we call bacterium first developed and as they became more complex, intercommunicative and interdependent over a long 3 billion years, they finally cooperated and joined together to form multi-celled beings - animals and plants. Over the following 70 or 80 million years during the Cambrian explosion, the rate of evolution accelerated by orders of magnitude and major diversification of all living things occurred including the sprouting of our branch of the tree of life. A few 100 thousands of years later big brained homo sapiens evolved. Boom – a quantum leap to humans who form a whole new Psychological level so like but so different from other animals .

This is pretty broad-brush stuff that could include many more levels. These ideas have arisen from the Earth's fossil records as studied by paleontological scientists. If you are having trouble reconciling the scientific evidence and your concept of a great designer, ‘God’, you could simply change that aspect of your belief to accept ‘God’ as the Creator of the Laws of Nature. Evolution is after all just a playing out of these laws on our very stabe planet.

The sun keeps shining, fueling a push to more complexity and now logically, as we humans communicate, and become more interdependent [it's easy to see our drive and success in doing that] we are the ones pushing toward another emergence or quantum leap, For an overview of those ideas check out the highlighted site.

What can we learn from all this about ourselves and possibly our purpose? To me one of the main messages is that the looming possibility of destroying our beautiful sustaining planet, is a global crisis that we all need to cooperate in preventing. We need to support new 'green' technologies and also cooperate in working toward less adversarial societies that lead to greed and ecological destruction. Unless we support enlightened national leaders I cannot see them ever becoming globally cooperative enough to agree to the measures necessary. Let's hope nature gives us time to smarten up and prevent further global tendencies towards the destruction of our planet.    Rie