Humans an annual; bacteria a perennial

The single human species can be thought of as an showy but short lived annual with the hundreds of thousands of unspectacular bacteria species as the perennials of major lifeforms.

Today's typical born-in-North-America human reproducing unit consumes enough energy and materials over a typical 25 year generation period to reproduce about a billion trillion trillion of individually slightly different bacteria in the same period of time.

Humans need hundreds of energy slaves to maintain their life style and even then many couples have only one or none kids - kids that take 25 years for themselves to be able to reproduce.

And of course, it takes two adults to make a baby.

Bacteria need very little material and energy to reproduce, sometimes in as little as 25 minutes, not years, and don't need a mate either.

They operate collectively as a vast world wide quasi lending library of genes - every bacterial a potential lender or borrower of 'sometimes useful' unique genes.

This would be far too expensive a library, in metabolical terms, for all bacteria to make all these genes all the time.

But when bacteria somewhere on Earth suddenly need one of these rare genes, they quickly obtain it from other bacteria that hold that particular rare gene, via horizontal gene transfer, HGT.

So while somewhat simple individually, overall the bacteria family is complex enough to handle almost any curve ball the changing environment can throw at it.

But above all, bacteria have evolved downward in size and movement and reproductive choice ( cloning) as to need very little energy and matter to survive, endure and in better times, reproduce.

Put another way, bacteria are not just Life's fastest breeders - they are also its slowest.

Bacteria can survive a hundred and fifty years or more barely alive before they get enough energy and material to reproduce, allowing this form of life to survive on one billion trillion trillionth of what a human couple would need to survive upon.

Human civilization is all very elaborate and showy but without a massive steady flow of energy and material to sustain it will quickly collapse.

A few thousand humans could live on as hunter gatherers in a moderately impoverished world - below that level of subsistence, they do would die out and vanish for all time as a species.

Meanwhile, those barely mobile tortoises of Life/ those non-spectacular perennials of Life (the bacteria) end up finishing the race of Life well ahead of the more showy annuals and speedier hares.

And what we humans need to ask ourselves : is true 'Progress' better defined as a matter of shortlived Annuals or of long living perennials ?

VHS 1978 - primitive by definition, but definitively not simple

VHS machines first went on sale in most of the world at the end of the 1970s - by the dictionary, that makes those first machines primitive by definition.

Because all that primitive actually means is "first", not "crude" or "simple".

Those early VHS machines certainly weren't simple - but rather were big, heavy, very expensive and filled with tons of complexly machined moving parts.

By the time research on consumer video shifted to DVDs in the early 1990s, VHS machines were small, light, cheap, reliable and had the minimum of moving parts.

Parasites, like the viruses that attack bacteria and all other life, are indeed simple in a complex, pared down sort of way but arrived relatively late in Life after being greatly pared down, in terms of genome, from the bacteria which had arrive much earlier and which had lots of molecular machinery.

Early doesn't always mean simple and later doesn't always mean complex.

Factory floor engineers instinctively know this - a pity they haven't yet convinced most scientists/journalists/citizens of that fact.....

Modernity's separate spheres for bacteria and, of course, for women and blacks

Until the rise of postmodernity in the early 1970s, most women viewed themselves as not at all "very like men in their shared humanness", but rather as definitely existing in a separate and in many ways superior sphere.

Blacks, the handicapped and bacteria - on and on and on - also existed in some of Modernity's many 'separate' spheres --- but these spheres were usually viewed as more clearly inferior.

Martin Henry Dawson, post his discovery of bacteria DNA HGT, didn't necessarily see bacteria as being that however ...

The "Absolute Destruction" .... of germs and insects

I don't mean germs and insects as metaphors for 'Hebs, Commies or Japs' --- I mean real life insects and germs in relationship to the modernists' much anticipated day when these tiny pests were no longer are around to bother mighty Man.

No longer around, period : their absolute destruction ensured.

Isabel Hull's multi prize winning book "ABSOLUTE DESTRUCTION" works best when it gets down to her thesis as to just why the Imperial Military of Germany was so particularly brutal, particularly against innocent civilians, in its heyday from 1860s to 1920s.

We always knew the Huns were brutes, we just never knew why.

 She shows that the German military elite was relatively unrestrained by German parliamentary opinion or general German public opinion - unlike the case with the equally bloody-minded British military, which was sharply restrained by critics back home, particularly during the Boer War.

I like her thesis , crassly enough because it fits my own thesis so well.

My thesis is that all the ideologies of the early 20th century, seemingly so different from each other at the time, a century on all look like subtle variants of one overarching modernist world view.

'Bigger is better' and 'Might is right' were the flavours of the day.

But just how all these (very hasty) ideologies actually played out in real time very much depended on how strong the opposing pre-modernist thought patterns (Christianity, basically) still were --- in different societies and in different decades.

As is well known, Imperial Germany exalted the reified State over the individual enormously and its constitution ensured almost that there be almost no civilian oversight of the military.

The same idea was slavishly taken up by the German Army worshipping Japanese militarists 50 years later.

The military in both nations thought only of winning wars by the total destruction of the enemy (every single last member of the enemy society if need be) ---- never thinking how to handle the resulting peace.

Or reflecting upon whether anyone could ever ensure the total destruction of anything but a tiny opponent.

To the Japan and Germany empires, it mattered little that their opponents, consisting of the British, French, American, Chinese and Russian empires, are all empires that were vastly bigger than their own empire.

Bigger, each in isolation, let alone all banded together.

But the Japanese and German elites felt that human brainpower and sheer willpower would surmount any material or spatial deficits.

When it came to thinking of their human opponents, let us quickly say that the the other empires were not anywhere as stupid as the Japanese and Germans, not by any means.

The Soviets and Americans had no plans to wipe out every last member of other nations.

(Other political parties' entire membership - yes, maybe !)

But when it came to viewing the total destruction of bugs and microbes as do-able, all the modernist ideologies proved just as naft-headed as the Axis.

After all, it was the 1930s head of the British MRC , an equivalent of today's American NIH, Edward Mellanby, who looked briefly at the new Sulfa drug and opined expansively he could see a day soon when there would be no more infections or hospital beds assigned to them.

(Just as bacterial resistance to the new Sulfa was proving him wrong wrong wrong.)

Equally daft was the American Surgeon General ,  circa 1967, claiming we can close the books on infection thanks to antibiotics ----- just as bacteria began resisting them wholesale.

And how many experts saw DDT as the way to get permanently rid of endless bugs and insects that caused diseases and ate crops ?

Like the collectivity of individuals that was the Russian Empire, bacteria and insects as a vast collectivity are just too big a target for us humans to ever permanently beat.

Like the rich and the poor and the big and the small, they will always be with us, in eternal commensality.....

Frank Vertosick : the genius within even the smallest and weakest

I would like to highly recommend you read a book by the neuro-surgeon and author Frank Vertosick, The Genius Within, which makes it clear that while the mighty might indeed be wise, the weak are by no means always foolish.

Individually, nothing and nobody, from sub-atomic particles, human brain cells to bacteria and ants are particularly noteworthy in the area of intelligence.

Doubt me in the case of humans ? Then why not throw your newborn baby out in the woods and let it fend for itself from birth.....

But as bundles of information gathering linkages in all directions,  networks frequently react intelligently to the external environment in ways that enhance their continued survival and success.

Put in other words, their reaction to external threats and potentialities is more successful than mere dumb luck averages should allow.

Sounds like intelligent responses to me......

K-selection dominates history, First Law of Thermodynamics claims

Triumph of the K-selected ?

Nothing buttressed Victorian England's famous optimism and self-confidence more than that the fact that they understood the First Law of Thermodynamics far too well (and didn't understand or accept the Second Law of Thermodynamics at all !)

That First Law implies just one thing : that Reality is, on the whole and in the long term, simple, predictable and stable.

In other words, Reality is generally at or approaching Equilibrium.

In such conditions it seemed only natural that "the K-selected of all the K-selected", Man, would totally dominate "the niche of all niches",the Universe, a niche so vast that growth and expansion of man's domain was effectively infinite.

The K or the r : who has dominated history ?

Victorians didn't use the term "K-selected" but they knew, used and believed in the concept.

Bigger is better, might is right, law of the jungle, God is on the side of the bigger battalions.

 Never ending -ever upward - progress of ever bigger and more complex beings.

Bigger cities, bigger empires, bigger companies, bigger profits : ever onward and upwards : a tumour with "room to grow" (as if cancer chose to mate with Ontario premier Bill Davis).

But some Victorians - more sentimentalists than social darwinians, chose (consciously or unconsciously) to focus on the more fundamental of the two laws of thermodynamics : the Second Law.

And it portrayed a Universe of constant, but uncertain, change : progress yes, but downwards.

A niche that steadily was getting smaller over time, with beings constantly forced to adjust to less and less incoming "useful" resources of matter and energy.

Who was right ?

Have K-selected giants dominated the world's history of life over the last 4 billion years ?

Or have tiny nimble r-selected survivors successfully endured whatever reality has thrown at them , for the last 4 billion years ?

Dinosaurs or bacteria : who has been around the longest, dominated more habitats, had more individual unique members, had the greater biomass .

The K or the r ?

Put it like that to the libertarian think tanks of Washington and even they, they of the intellect a mile wide and an inch deep, even they squirm in embarrassed silence ....

If GOD is COMPLEXITY, He's not necessarily on the side of the BIG Battalions

Michael Marshall

Bacteria, like man-made proximity fuses, are very small but not necessarily simple.

Man-made polymer plastic molecules - or the world's largest molecule (the one large molecule of cell wall that wraps around and protects a bacteria's interior) - are big but not necessarily complex.

Modernity was naif in most ways, particularly when it came to the paradoxes of lifeforms.

It had a simplistic hierarchy of size and complexity - and could never stop from conflating the two.

Ever bigger and bigger hydro dams and cannons and skyscrapers  and battleships and on and on could always be trusted to get Modernist Man's juices flowing.

But inside a bacteria's tiny genome are packed a surprisingly large number of highly varied genes.

They don't program , for example, for 40 pounds of relatively undifferentiated muscle like you might see on the average male human.

Yes, its big, its butch, its bulky but frankly its like knitting : knot one purl one, knit one ,purl two - for billions of iterations.

By contrast each of a bacteria's hundreds of gene complexes can hide a completely different form of metabolism - those guys can eat a surprisingly wide variety of food stocks - thing that frankly we don't see as food.

That is why they have hung on on Earth for four billion years through extreme heat and cold, or poison gases and resource famines ; surviving millions of years of droughts and ice ages in deep sleep only to emerge alive and ready to rock and roll.

But us ?

Yes we're big.

Big like dinosaurs and all the other extinct mega fauna - and just about as vulnerable to even minor changes in our feeding regimes.

In our post-modern AGE OF COMMENSALITY we are beginning to accept that Life's tiniest beings have much hidden complexity under the hood that we are only just beginning to learn about.

Bring back the Dr Martin Henry Dawson from 1927 into the research labs of today and he'd hit the ground running - nothing we have uncovered in 85 years since would really throw him for a loop.

Been there, done that.....