Microbial Languages: Rehabilitation of the Unseen

Some of my best friends are Germs

The Fourth Tenet of The Tenets of Ecocosmology urges us to recognize that microbial and other small life forms are useful as well as mandatory for our own existence and betterment.

In modern times this tenet has been considered to be an alien concept in Western Culture, especially in the Western medical sciences, so, in today's post let's discuss an emerging revolution in those general concepts of Western Civilization concerning perceptions of what it means to be "a human" and what it means to be "a germ."

Yes, let's reconsider the general concepts which without reservation tell us that the anti-biotic wars without any reservation have been a good thing, that consider microbes to be something to exterminate, and that are ignorant of what it actually means to be human in the biological reality of the planet Earth.

The text of the Fourth Tenet currently reads as follows:

The seeds of intelligence (genetic and memetic clues) required to successfully perform The Test are distributed into all species, races, religions, sciences, creeds, and genders. Thus, all individuals should be respected as carriers of some quanta of the seed of intelligence required to pass The Test, lest a fundamental quantum of necessary intelligence be lost.

(The Tenets of Ecocosmology, emphasis in original). The meaning of the word "intelligence" as it is first used in that text is enhanced by the later use of that word in the section of the text that reads "intelligence required to pass The Test" (compare: What Kind of Intelligence Is A Lethal Mutation?).

Which begs the question, what is "The Test"?

That question that is answered by the first three tenets to be the survival of species on planets near central stars.

Stars which eventually change in ways that mandate travel to another star system.

That is to say (taking our star the Sun as an example) that species on planets orbiting near the Sun are naturally destined for utter extinction and obliteration when the Sun enters its final phase.

Our star, early in that final phase, expands out to, or near to, the orbit of Mars, vaporizing or otherwise destroying those inner planets in the process (see Tenet One Basics).

There are other intermediate threats to species on habitable planets in our solar system, which we call "extinction events" (Asteroid Killed off The Dinosaurs, Sixth Mass Extinction?).

The sixth mass extinction is currently underway.

It is being caused by current human civilization.

The first five mass extinctions were primarily cosmological and other non-human events.

This brings us to the recent scientific discoveries in the microbiological sciences which focus on our new understanding of what it means to be human:

... the fields of medical and environmental microbiology have begun to merge. The resulting hybrid discipline embraces the complexity of a larger system; it’s integrative rather than reductive, and it supports the gathering view that our bodies, and the bodies of other animals, are ecosystems, and that health and disease may depend on complex changes in the ecology of host and microbes.
...
“We’ve all been trained to think of ourselves as human,” he says. Bacteria have been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. But now, he says, it appears that “we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn’t thought about.” It will take a major cultural shift, says Karasov, for nonmicrobiologists who study the human body to begin to take microorganisms seriously as a part of the system.
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Equally challenging, though in a different respect, will be changing long-held ideas about ourselves as independent individuals. How do we make sense of this suddenly crowded self? David Relman suggests that how well you come to terms with symbiosis “depends on how comfortable you are with not being alone.” A body that is a habitat and a continuously evolving system is not something most of us consider; the sense of a singular, continuous self is a prerequisite for sanity, at least in Western psychology.

(On The New Meaning of "Human" - 2, see also On The New Meaning of "Human"). Those two posts are a couple of years old, so let's look at a couple of more recent writings which show that this new science is moving along rapidly:

Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford, suggests that we would do well to begin regarding the human body as “an elaborate vessel optimized for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.” This humbling new way of thinking about the self has large implications for human and microbial health, which turn out to be inextricably linked.
...
Our resident microbes also appear to play a critical role in training and modulating our immune system, helping it to accurately distinguish between friend and foe and not go nuts on, well, nuts and all sorts of other potential allergens. Some researchers believe that the alarming increase in autoimmune diseases in the West may owe to a disruption in the ancient relationship between our bodies and their “old friends” — the microbial symbionts with whom we coevolved.
...
Human health should now “be thought of as a collective property of the human-associated microbiota,” as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology — that is, as a function of the community, not the individual. Such a paradigm shift comes not a moment too soon, because as a civilization, we’ve just spent the better part of a century doing our unwitting best to wreck the human-associated microbiota with a multifronted war on bacteria and a diet notably detrimental to its well-being. Researchers now speak of an impoverished “Westernized microbiome” and ask whether the time has come to embark on a project of “restoration ecology” — not in the rain forest or on the prairie but right here at home, in the human gut.

(Some of My Best Friends are Germs, see also Smithsonian - Microbial Revolution). The Fourth Tenet has to do with the survival of human civilization long enough to develop the behaviors and skills necessary for space travel away from this solar system before the Sun extinguishes all life on Earth.

Living in harmony with the nature around us and in us is a fundamental prerequisite --because if we make critical life forms extinct, we thereby make our species extinct at the same time.

Living in harmony may also require us to do "remedial rehabilitation of the unseen", as the title of today's post suggests.

By that I mean to rehabilitate the microbes that have experienced past mass extinction events that utterly upended their world.

Which may have caused some of them to thereby end up going rogue and to then eventually become ill behaved parasites (Are Microbes The Origin of PTSD?).

Perhaps by learning to communicate with the rogues among them we will thereby be able to talk sense into some of the microbes that have become killers, maimers, or otherwise harmful?

The next post in this series is here.

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The following video illustrates how we are beginning to understand the tiny language of the unseen world where most living things dwell.

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The Little People - 2

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?

Biochar: A Green Way Out Of Here

This blog has asserted over and over that there are many ways out of the climate changing cycle we are currently in.

That is what makes not feverishly working toward climate safety criminal.

We have discussed some of the ways out of our predicament, including methanol, dandelion, and solar, to name a few.

There are many others.

In this post today we mention another one for your perusal.

Yes, it is TIME for a biochar solution.

More information is available at BIOCHAR Solution.

A Green Way Out Of Here

One of the myths that the destroyers of the Earth want us to believe is that there is no way around dirty oil, gas, and coal.

Even some of those who fancy themselves to be astute, enlightened, and aware of our plight as a civilization, have been propagandized into the fallacy that there is no way out.

This blog and others have intimated that there are many ways out of it, but that the criminally insane powers that be are making the deliberate choice to continue down the path of destruction.

A recent report says that there is a sunny way out of addiction to oil, coal, and gas:

Arguably no challenge is more serious for the world’s future than bringing about a rapid decarbonation of the energy infrastructure with the possibility of preventing the onset of catastrophic climate change. With a mathematical model we demonstrate that this transition is technically plausible using modest inputs of existing fossil fuel reserves in the creation of a global solar power infrastructure even with existing solar technologies such as wind turbines. In addition, this global power capacity can likewise provide energy consumption per person levels for all of humanity consistent with high human development requirements.

(Sunny Transition, PDF Version). There are criminally insane elements who do not want that reality to be known or to be believed.

Why MOMCOM wants that to be kept secret, or wants to brand it as pie-in-the-sky, can only be known by those who understand the criminally insane mind.

Nevertheless, we street people do not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, or to know that environmental destruction is a suicidal endeavor for civilization as we know it.

Ancient Ecocosmology?

The taste of mystery does not belong only to the fanciful among us.

Mystery is real and powerful.

Take for example the most mysterious book so far known, a book older than the Gutenberg Bible, a book not yet translated, the book with an unknown name, but now called The Voynich Manuscript:

The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten book thought to have been written in the early 15th century [circa 1404] and comprising about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations. The author, script, and language remain unknown: for these reasons it has been described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript".

(Wikipedia, cf. The Voynich Manuscript website). Tenet Four advances a theory that within the ecosystem are answers to questions we need to have as a civilization.

Some of the most profound mysteries of science and power are very, very old, as we pointed out in an earlier Ecocosmology post:

While watching the other species in the world around us, scientists noticed that some of the tiniest of them are good at quantum mechanics:

A team of University of Toronto chemists have made a major contribution to the emerging field of quantum biology, observing quantum mechanics at work in photosynthesis in marine algae.

"There's been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices," says chemistry professor Greg Scholes, lead author of a new study published in Nature. "Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis."

(Quantum Mechanics at Work in Photosynthesis). Algae have been familiar with these quantum mechanical processes for nearly two billion years.

(The Tiniest Scientists Are Very Old). Contempt for the natural world is an exceptionalist religious doctrine of modern origin.

Is what we call the The Voynich Manuscript some missing wisdom this civilization could use to stem the tide of the epoch of criminal insanity that threatens to bring us down?

In any case, it is no mystery that the new phrase "global weather wierding" should give us pause.

UPDATE: Software engineers are using AI to figure it out (Famously Indecipherable Coded Manuscript Cracked by AI?).

Ents & The Entities Become Nomadic

If a keyword on this post is biomimicry, why is "Ent" in the title?

Before the answer begins, let's contemplate some statements by scientists from a few years ago.

At that time the study was probably poo pooed by the climate change deniers.

But we can't debate the undebatable, so let's move on and reflect on the words of those scientists:

"Geographers have projected temperature increases due to greenhouse gas emissions to reach a not-so-chilling conclusion: climate zones will shift and some climates will disappear completely by 2100. Tropical highlands and polar regions may be the first to disappear, and large swaths of the tropics and subtropics will reach even hotter temperatures. The study anticipates large climate changes worldwide."

(Completely New Climates). Ok, so how does that tie in to the Ents and Nomads?

For those who do not know what an "Ent" is, let's start off with this:

Ents are an old race ... Shepherds of the Trees to protect the forests from ... perils ... the Ents were sentient beings ...

(Wikipedia - Ent). They are tree-like mythical creatures that could move their locus from place to place, making them totally unlike the real trees.

Right?

Wrong.

New scientific studies, following up on the climate change studies linked to and quoted above, show that in fact the trees are moving out of Dodge:

Vegetation around the world is on the move, and climate change is the culprit, according to a new analysis of global vegetation shifts led by a University of California, Berkeley, ecologist in collaboration with researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

In a paper published June 7 in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, researchers present evidence that over the past century, vegetation has been gradually moving toward the poles and up mountain slopes, where temperatures are cooler, as well as toward the equator, where rainfall is greater.

(Major Vegetation Shifts, emphasis added). The Earth's vegetation has enough sense to move when it is in danger.

Biomimicry is what the human species does when it sees some beneficial behavior in the biosphere that helps us.

Could this be a harbinger of things in store for us?

The Tiniest Scientists Are Very Old

Microbes do quantum mechanics

Tenet Four of the tenets of ecocosmology indicates that we should preserve all species.

One good reason is that they may have within them some quantum of intelligence we need in order to survive as a species in this cosmos.

A complete field of science, biomimicry, is dedicated to listening and watching what other species have to say.

While watching the other species in the world around us, scientists noticed that some of the tiniest of them are good at quantum mechanics:

A team of University of Toronto chemists have made a major contribution to the emerging field of quantum biology, observing quantum mechanics at work in photosynthesis in marine algae.

"There's been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices," says chemistry professor Greg Scholes, lead author of a new study published in Nature. "Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis." ... It also raises some other potentially fascinating questions, such as, have these organisms developed quantum-mechanical strategies for light-harvesting to gain an evolutionary advantage? It suggests that algae knew about quantum mechanics nearly two billion years before humans," says Scholes.

(Quantum Mechanics at Work in Photosynthesis). Algae have been familiar with these quantum mechanical processes for nearly two billion years.

Note also that these creatures use all their ability to help others, including humanity, for without photosynthesis we would not exist today.

It behooves us to learn what we can from the cosmos around us, including our ecosystem here on the earth, because we have a long road ahead of us, according to the tenets of Ecocosmology.

It behooves us to stop destroying species at such an alarming rate, or at any rate above zero.

The next post in this series is here.

Dandelion Farmers of the World Unite!

Even I could grow Dandelions, but I have a difficult time not growing them, if you know what I mean.

That which may seem to be bad news can actually lead to some good news upon occasion. For example, Time Magazine has awarded the invention of the year to those who invented a way to make rubber from Dandelions:

A fast-spreading fungus is ravaging the world's rubber trees. But thanks to researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology, there's now an alternative: dandelions. Scientists have long known that the weed's sap contains latex, but it's difficult to harvest because dandelion ooze polymerizes — goes gummy — when it hits the air. The Fraunhofer team overcame that sticky problem by switching off a key enzyme. The new, improved dandelion produces 500% more usable latex than the old weed does.

(Time). Add to that the fact that the methanol economy would allow plastics and fuels to literally be made from the air / atmosphere around us, powered by wind, wave, and solar generated electricity, and we can say "the green revolution got game baby"!

We could have the best year ever in 2010 if we really want to. I mean really want to in the sense of rejecting some world destroying bad habits.

Will We Destroy Food - The Bees?

There has been concern in the past ten years or so about the mysterious disappearing of entire groups or hives of bees.

Bee keepers and scientists alike share the concern, and we who rely on the bees should too:

It has been stated by several biologists that, if it were not for the honey bee pollinating plants, humans would only last 3 or 4 years as our food supply would disappear [but see here].

(Space). How it got to this is debatable, but we can agree to describe the bee / human relationship not as symbiotic, because the bees do not rely on us in return in the way we rely on them.

We are intelligent but they are intelligent too. A professor was doing an experiment, moving a source of nectar 25% further away each day, testing their navigation skills.

His student charged with the duty of calculating and moving the nectar each day called in one morning reporting to the professor that he had car problems and could not do the task on that day. The professor opted to do it himself:

When the professor arrived at the nectar source there were no bees present. But when he arrived at the place where the nectar should have been for that day (but had not been moved there yet), there were all the bees waiting for him! Not only had the bees gotten the math correct (25% farther), but the implication is that they had demonstrated the imagination to be able to picture the future by picturing the nectar—not where it was—but where it was going to be! The professor wrote that he would never have done such an experiment on purpose since he never would have thought that the bees could have been so intelligent!

(ibid, Space, link above). Those of you who read the biomimicry posts know that one of the tenets of Ecocosmology urges us to remember that we can learn about how to bring about our own survival by watching and studying nature appropriately.

Learning such behavior from nature is called biomimicry.

We must also be careful to not destroy the bees or their habitat, because then we could cease to exist as well, according to some scientists.

The next post in this series is here.

Copy Cats, Dogs & Bugs For Knowledge

Scientists are already serious about a discipline called biomimicry.

It is alluded to in several posts on this blog under the key word biomimicry.

The tenets of Ecocosmology also cover the subject as well.

Tenet Four of Ecocosmology reads:

4) The seeds of intelligence (genetic and memetic clues) required to successfully perform The Test are distributed into all species, races, religions, sciences, creeds, and genders. Thus, all individuals should be respected as carriers of some quanta of the seed of intelligence required to pass The Test, lest a fundamental quantum of necessary intelligence be lost.

(Tenets of Ecocosmology). Incredible engineering efficiency is gleaned from the most unusual of natural places.

For example robots walk on water as a result of the study of mosquito legs, and the study of beetles leads to new coatings.

This tenet is encapsulated in a specific scientific field:

WHAT IS BIOMIMICRY: Biomimicry is a field in which scientists, engineers, and even architects study models and concepts found in nature, and try to use them to design new technologies. It as a design principle that seeks sustainable solutions to human problems by emulating nature's time-tested patterns and strategies. Nature fits form to function, rewards cooperation, and banks on diversity. For instance, the Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe, is the country's largest commercial and shopping complex, and yet it uses less than 10 percent of the energy consumed by a conventional building of its size, because there is no central air conditioning and only a minimal heating system. The design follows the cooling and heating principles used in the region's termite mounds.

(ibid, and see Biomimicry). We may find microbes and other life forms on planets near us, as we have here on earth, that will have qualities to help us develop space travel of the type required for long term survival of our species.

I mean, there is the SAT and then there is in Ecocosmology what is called The Test.

The Butterfly Textbooks As Doorstops

The Monarch butterflies can migrate 4,000 miles, and they can do it every year.

As it turns out, they have functions in their antennae which work hand and glove with functions in their brain, which means throw out the textbooks:

Scientists say the finding is a surprise as it has always been thought that the butterflies used a 24-hour clock in their brains in conjunction with their "Sun compass" when they migrated.

But some observations from 50 years ago indicated that when the butterflies' antennae were removed the insects no longer flew in the right direction.
...

Dr Reppert said: "So this suggested that: Wow! Maybe there's a clock in the antennae that's more important for the time compensated component of the insects' Sun compass orientation ... It was a total surprise."

(BBC News). At some point in time we must migrate too, yes, we must learn to travel safely through space at very high rates of speed.

It is not safe to run into a piece of debris at near light speeds. So how are we going to learn to detect small rocks or debris 400,000 miles dead ahead (2.5 seconds at light speeds)?

We are going to have to learn it somewhere, and that somewhere is going to be from the material of the cosmos, and that "material" will be either organic, inorganic, or both.

Maxi-Morphs & The Copy Katz

The exceptionally successful movie series Star Wars unveiled the notion that wisdom does not always reside within an envelope of physical beauty.

The almost ugly, almost reptilian, and at the same time almost amphibian looking Yoda was a Jedi Master, a source of wisdom for bringing down the evil empire, and masterfully fought for good.

On a somewhat similar note, there is an astounding ability in a tiny, some would say ugly, creature that is worth noting:

The newt can reconstruct almost any body part, including the brain, spinal cord, heart and limbs. Planarians, a high-school laboratory favorite, can be sliced to bits and each piece will regenerate a new individual.

(The Scientist). The biological ability to morph back into what one was before being severely damaged is notable to say the least, and adds a new dimension to "physician heal thyself".

It stands out as very hip or evolved, especially remembering all of the national hoopla and debate about stem cells and stem cell research.

It seems that every cell in some creatures is like a stem cell, because when damaged, legs, tails, eyes, and even the brain can be reconstructed by these "lowly creatures".

Try walking into your super-duper best in the world realm of the robe wearers at your local hospital and have them grow you back a leg, eye, brain, or arm. Not gonna happen.

Trillions upon trillions of dollars in fantastic equipment and millions of hours of university study, yet the medical robe wearers can't do what the lowly newt can do. The fictional Yoda was spot on when he said:

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.

(Yoda Quotes). The Star Wars writers gave fictional life to what scientists who labor in the field of biomimicry know: the sum of wisdom and knowledge is not stored in the human species; so they artistically created the notion of The Force as the repository of that special something.

So, Tenet Four advocates learning from any and all of the creatures of the earth, including microbes, based upon the hypothesis that wisdom and knowledge is hidden down deep in these creatures.

Wisdom that may help pass The Test if we can only learn first to value our home: the earth's ecosystem.