4 ms·
When Evolution Is Infectious
- alextheparrot 6y agoReally enjoyed this piece. It makes a lot of scientific rigor readable, and presents a few different, useful viewpoints on how this advances science (Or how we should be careful to over-reach). I especially like the frog story - the bacteria treatment solving the invasive fungus issue only for greater forces to keep their fate the same the next year. A recent obsession has been understanding how much the Earth may be giving us that we don’t really comprehend fully. One clear item is a reservoir for bio-diversity - all the viruses, bacteria, fungi that we’ve evolved alongside. Our DNA is littered with battle scars or alliances. The reason for this interest is in the context of colonizing other planets - we’ll likely abandon a huge part of our biological history. This will be good in some ways, such as certain diseases (or pests) no longer being a threat, but also could leave our martian children less adaptable or equipped with fewer tools than their ancestors.
- dharma1 6y agoThis is why I think quotes like "making humans a multi-planetary species" sound like the speaker hasn't fully realised how dependent/part of the whole biosphere we are, and not functional as an isolated species.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIt's always implied that along with humans, you take a chunk of the biosphere with you to other places. Long term - in the timespan of decades, particularly allowing for people being born away from Earth - it's an open question of how much of the biosphere we truly need. Probably more than it's immediately apparent, but obviously less than all of it.
- fallingfrog 6y agoIt’s possible that all the habitable planets nearby have life, but it’s incompatible life to our own. After all we have specific enzymes for digesting specific molecules in terrestrial organisms. If we were to eat a plant on another planet it might be like eating dirt. This might even be part of the answer to the Fermi paradox.
- kace91 6y agoI remember that being a plot point in Asimov stories: people from earth are eventually treated as inferior because they are potential carriers of sicknesses that don't exist anymore in colonised planets, and for which the habitants no longer have natural defences. That, combined with the new planets' ability to form new societal structures (unlike Earth that has to work with the legacy existing ones), end up leaving earth as a backwards, shunned place.
- Daniel_sk 6y agoWhile partly true, it's also true in the opposite way. New viruses and microbes would evolve in the new environment to fill the void (since they would have no competition) and they would become probably also much more deadly for original Earth people.
- TT3351 6y ago"Skeptics of the hologenome idea—that microbes and host comprise a single evolutionary unit—argue that microbes aren’t always passed like heirlooms between generations. And if they’re not, then does the holobiont really persist over evolutionary time?" Genes aren't always passed like heirlooms between generations either; only half of each parent. This doesn't make much sense to me as a criticism. It sounds from this article alone like a repeatedly observed element of the process of selection. I would suppose a hologenome trait may only last for a few generations of human generations, perhaps many more. How much need we concern ourselves with the exact details of the dizzying number of bacterial generations.
- fallingfrog 6y agoGreat article. I do hope that coral reefs can acquire some resistance to bleaching in this way- a bit of good news for once.