In the first post of this series, The Little People, we broached the subject of microbes within the context of the Fourth Tenet.We urged acceptance of the notion contained in that tenet, which asserts that even the tiniest of living organisms on this planet should be highly esteemed and protected along with every other "big" living organism on the planet.
Now, the Dredd Blog and the Toxins of Power Blog have shown how utterly critical "the little people", the microbes, really are.
In the posts The Tiniest Scientists Are Very Old - 2, Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power, and A Structure RE: The Corruption of Memes - 4, recent incredible scientific discoveries concerning symbiotic relationships between humans and microbes are pointed out.
Those two posts show that microbes are players in human genetics, as well as human cognition.
Before that science became known, in one of his many papers Richard Dawkins elaborates:
Since all organisms alive inherit their genes from their ancestors, rather than from their ancestors' unsuccessful contemporaries, all organisms alive tend to possess successful genes. This is why organisms tend to inherit genes that build a well-designed machine, a machine that behaves as if it is striving to become an ancestor.(Universal parasitism and the co-evolution of extended phenotypes, Dawkins, Whole Earth Review, Volume 10, Issue 62, p.90, 1989). Dawkins did not have the benefit of later genetic research that caused "shifts in perspective ... occurring throughout cellular biology ... seem as dizzying as what happened in cosmology ... issues once thought settled are up in the air".
Dawkins is also criticized by creationists for attributing almost an intelligence to genes:
Since evolution can't consider an intelligent designer, they have elevated the genes themselves with intelligence beyond the species. Genetics becomes a collective mind that spans species in the sci-fi world of evolution.(Intelligent Genes). In the post Will Humans Evolve Into Machines? the evolution from machine to organism is perused and reviewed, noting that combining machine-into-organism evolution with consideration of Dollo's Law (reverse-evolution back into machines is a no-no according to Dollo's Law), we must have some skepticism when considering Dawkins' quote above:
"... organisms tend to inherit genes that build a well-designed machine, a machine that behaves as if it is striving to become an ancestor"
This skepticism is required because going back into any machine state is a no-no per Dollo's Law, so we must assume that Dawkins conflated the meaning of "machine" with the meaning of "organism".
Furthermore, Dawkins fails to mention the role human symbiosis with microbes has on his hypothesis, because that discovery had not yet been revealed and considered when he did that paper.
So, it is not out of line to recall and consider that:
Microbes existed on the Earth billions of years before humans did.
Why do microbes need humans, seeing as how humans have been on the planet such a very tiny amount of time?
Do the microbes need humans via symbiosis in order to become fit enough to survive in this cosmos?
How does all that fit into The Tenets of Ecocosmology?
We will address those issues now that we have set forth the preliminary considerations.
The first fundamental consideration is the scientific fact that the Sun will destroy all life on this planet Earth, including microbes, at some unspecified time in the future.
Next, in order to survive, microbes and humans must care for this planet while developing a way to leave this planet in order to find another planet or moon with microbe and human life sustaining capability.
We violate the criticism above in the "Intelligent Genes" quote (which alleges that evolutionists attribute intelligence to microbes) if we say "microbes are aware of the condition of the Sun, so they became symbiotic with humans because humans are the only species capable of developing space travel to another habitable planet, therefore microbes are preserving their species via symbiosis with humans".
There are many questions that arise unless we relegate the whole evolutionary scheme to absolute chance mutation, because "genes that build a well-designed machine" attributes way too much to microbes without explaining at all how that could be, not to mention that it violates Dollo's law if it was meant literally.
Perhaps we can say that there is now a requirement to determine when the first meme concerning space travel came to the human mind, how it came there, and where it came from?
