Dawson's Paradox

We all recall Dr Enrico Fermi's Paradox regarding the supposedly huge numbers of alien civilizations out there in the Cosmos, "then why aren't they (the space aliens) here !?"

Another professor at Fermi's university, Dr Henry Dawson, posed a similar question about the invisibly small aliens hidden everywhere on Earth : "Why are they (these microscopic aliens) still here !?"

In the 1940s, as in the 2010s, most conservatively minded scientists regarded microbes to be 'the darkest of the darkies' of the domain of life : incredibly simple, backward and primitive.

The general scientific consensus was that these lesser races were bound to fade away very soon before the superior (White) (European) races.

How much faster then would the microbe races fade away before the advanced larger complex species like Man.

But Dawson, like a lot of people with a trace of humility, couldn't help but be troubled by one inconvenient fact in all this orgy of self congratulatory hubris.

Because, awkwardly, the microbes, the supposed living fossils of life's primitive beginnings, had in fact survived the worst that planet Earth and the Cosmos had thrown at them for almost four billion years.

Meanwhile the truly big beings - like the dinosaurs or the woolly mammoths, had gone very dead at the first hurdle.

But where Professor Dawson differed from all others was his belief that he had found the answer to explain this apparent paradox : HGT, horizontal (rather than vertical) gene transfers : the genetics of inclusion.

Well actually he called it bacterial transformation (and bacterial variation) but the labels don't change the import of what he saw under the microscope.

In times of crisis, stressed out individual microbes get deliberately and creatively careless - ringing out many new changes from their older genetic material.

Some of these new mutations - very few - a precious very few - offer that individual bug a way to survive the crisis and even flourish.

If they were current capitalistic greedy selfish humans, that is where it would all end.

The individual microbe would either keep it totally a totally private trade secret or it would copyright, patent or trademark the new mutated gene at a very steep price and only to members of its own tribe (think Stephen Harper trusting only his base - and that on a good day).

But instead, individual microbes drop bits of copies of their new improved, mutated, genome into the environment they share with other microbes.

These individual microbes are then free to pick them up and put them to work and also to drop them in their environment for yet others to take up in turn.

Here is the real clever bit : these microbes can be from any or every possible species and strain of microbe - be they bacteria, archaea, fungus, virus - there is no narrow niqab-hating tribalism in this world of the tiny and the powerless.

This is why resistance to a new human antibiotic can emerge in a few years, in a wide variety of microbes, clear around the world.

This is how an incredibly tiny single microbe can actually have access to far far more different genes that the entire human race all combined !

Their effective genome is far wider than our's could ever be, despite the vast difference in their body's physical size and ours.

Now humans can't pull off this neat genetic trick, but we can achieve the same survival-securing success with HGT-like efforts in the social and cultural area.

Genes after all are but information expressed in a physical form rather than in words and formulas.

Through mechanisms like Open Access and Open Source and Copyleft and PD/Public Domain and of course the Internet, we can send any new solution around the world even faster than the microbe HGT system can pull off.

But whole purpose of my blog is to point out that these technological efforts to loosen up the free flow of survival-ready new solutions will end up effectively useless ----- if we adopt the fearful conservative attitude to anything new.

We can't possibly survive the current environmental crisis if we reject every new idea simply because the bloodlines of the person with the new proposal fails to match our own.

That may be the Conservative-Republican way but it is not my way or the way of the political party I support.

And hopefully, not yours either....