The Vaccine of Ancient Times: Sharing Water

 The "Old Normal" was an age that spanned from the end of the last Ice Age to the start of the Covid Age. One of the weird things that the people used to do during those remote times was to collectively dip their fingers into a horrible soup of bacteria and viruses called "holy water." Then, they engaged in a ritual gesture that involved touching one's own face with their fingers still wet with that water. How could they survive that remains a mystery. (image source)

 

Last week, I stopped to visit a church in my neighborhood. An eerie silence reigned among the benches where no one seemed to have been sitting for ages. The holy water bowls at the entrance of the deserted church were completely dry -- not even a trace of humidity! They had been replaced by disinfecting gel bottles. You see both the empty bowl and the gel bottle in the picture. Maybe the priest had blessed the gel?

The elimination of the holy water dispenser would seem to be an obvious thing to do. Think of the unhygienic condition of the water: with people dipping their fingers into it, it must have rapidly become a cocktail of viruses and bacteria, maybe holy, but surely unhealthy. 

But, amazingly, these "stoups" of holy water are a very ancient tradition. They go back to the very origins of Christianity. Were our ancestors so stupid to pass germs to each other in this way?

It is a diffuse hobby to think that our ancestors were ignorant and superstitious. But if they had been really so ignorant and superstitious, we wouldn't be here. If the holy water rituals were killing people, that would have been noted and people would have stopped using them. 

But all the variants of Christian religiosity include this kind of ablution rituals. Islam does, too, although in different forms. And many other religions include communal ablutions. These rituals go very deep into the very essence of religion. Whether it is water, wine, or bread, it doesn't matter: it is the sharing that counts. And if those habits were supposed to be purification rituals, they had to purify something.

There is a good reason why purification rituals were good for the health of the faithful. They were early forms of vaccination. 

Think about that: the idea of a vaccine is to put a person in contact with some forms of pathogens in order to stimulate one's natural resistance. An early form of vaccination was called "variolation" (from the Latin term "variola," "smallpox"). It goes back to several centuries ago and it consisted of actually infecting people with smallpox. The idea was to have them develop a mild infection that would then protect them from more dangerous forms. Later, variolation was replaced with vaccination using a live form of the smallpox virus, taken from cows. And, of course, our modern vaccines are small miracles of molecular biology, but they do basically the same thing. They put our bodies in direct contact with some forms of the pathogen we want to fight.

You see that our ancestors were doing the same with their ablution rituals. Of course, they knew nothing about bacteria and viruses but, again, they were not stupid. They tried many things and they kept what worked. The idea of communal ablutions was to put everyone in contact with the skin biome of the whole community, sharing the "good" germs and stimulating an immune reaction that would protect the person from worse infections. That was done also outside religious practices -- in Buddhist countries, for instance, there is no equivalent of the holy water basin of the West, but they do have a tradition of communal bathing.

These old traditions could also go beyond ablution. Look at the picture: it is the "Madonna del Parto" in the Church of St. Augustine in Rome. If you go there, you are supposed to kiss the foot of the statue for good luck. Imagine many people kissing it, one after the other. Can you imagine a better way to transfer bacteria and viruses to one another? Actually, the foot is in silver, known to have some bactericidal properties. The idea may have been that, yes, it is good to share germs in this way, but let's not exaggerate. But, surely, if you didn't want bacteria to spread, you'd better avoid that people would kiss the Madonna's foot, rather than making it in silver! They wanted some germs to be transferred!

So, the ancients had empirically understood the concept that today we call "holobiont."  Our bodies are not single organisms, we are colonies of microscopic creatures: our microbiome. These creatures are part of us and, among the many good things they do for us, one is to protect us from the external microbes that tend to invade our bodies. The microbes living on our skin are the first line of defense we have, but we are protected by multiple defensive layers. The active immune system, the "adaptive" one, is the final layer. It enters into action only after that the other lines have been breached. Your microbiome makes sure that it rarely happens. It is part of the good thing that is being a holobiont!

But there is more than sharing water in being holobionts. It is a deep and significant way to show that we belong to a community, which we can see as a higher-order holobiont. The basic idea of religion, any religion, is sharing. Sharing is the essence of the great planetary holobiont we call sometimes Gaia, from which we came and to which we return. Without sharing, there is no God/Goddess, no community, no life. 

Something of this attitude has filtered through the rather anodyne ritual of modern vaccination, with many people reporting a feeling of spiritual completeness after receiving their vaccine against the Covid pandemic. They felt they had done their duty in protecting not just themselves, but the whole community and they were proud of having shared the burden with everyone else. Which is the way any good holobiont should feel! 

Of course, this kind of feeling depends on trusting that you are doing the right thing. One thing is dipping one's finger in a bowl of holy water: you trust your local community. Another is to have synthetic RNA being delivered inside one's cells to operate the molecular mechanisms of protein creation: you trust science.  

Is science an entity worth our trust? Trust is not bestowed by definition, it must be earned. And we must say that the composite entity we call "science" has not been always up to the standards that would make it deserve everyone's trust. Especially in recent times, scientists have shown attitudes involving petty squabbles, greed, ignorance, subservience to power, arrogance, political partisanship, and more. That explains the diffuse resistance against the modern forms of vaccination, perceived as a violation of one's body. Scientists must do much better than they are doing now if they want to maintain the trust that the community still places on them.

In the end, we keep making the same mistake we have been doing for quite some time: contrasting religion with science, as if the former were superstition and the latter the truth. It is not like that. They are different forms of understanding ourselves and the world (and, eventually, understanding is sharing). 

Even in health care, we are creating a schizophrenic situation by creating an artificial contrast that doesn't need to exist. Are we sure that we did well in abolishing the basins of holy water? They were ways to "prime" our skin microbiome against infection. With our emphasis on molecular vaccines, we forgot that the human defense system is multilayered. And if this first line of defense works, we are not necessarily forced to recur to more invasive ones.

Worse, we are forgetting that being human means sharing with others. Saint Francis would kiss lepers when he met them. We don't need to go to such extremes, but we still need to remember that we are human. Masked, disinfected, and isolated, as we all are nowadays, we are declaring that we are not willing to share anything with anyone. Are we still human? And, if we are, why we treat each other as if we weren't?

This Planet Needs us, Just as we Need this Planet

 

The baroque music of Jean-Philippe Rameau coupled with modern street dance. The result is nearly mind-boggling. Gaia appears to us in her vital, strong, exuberant form.

To be sure, it would be difficult to say that Rameau was an ecologist. This opera, "Les Indes Galantes" was composed in 1736 and the views of the time were very different from ours and the story is weak, a sugary pastiche of exotic loves, not truly very interesting. But Rameau was first and foremost a composer, a great innovator in his times. And, here, the music he proposes to us sounds very modern in how it catches the strong armonies of the natural world. What's most remarkable is how some people in the early 18th century already saw forests as a source of life and peace.  The main words say,

Pleasant Forests, pleasant forests

Heaven, heaven, you made them

For innocence and for peace

 

After that Luisella Chiavenuto sent me a link to this piece, I have seen it, I think, 20 times, maybe more. And every time I watch it, it seems to me mind-boggling that in 1736 someone could compose a music that would match so well and so perfectly with our modern street dancing. The intensity of the whole scene... it is indescribable. Look at the faces of the dancers, look at the singer, Sabine Dievilhe, look at how intensely she sings, she acts, she moves. You have to feel in your guts, you cannot perceive it with your brain. 

 

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that this moment of incredible intensity comes from a opera that's little more than a sugary story that reflect plenty of prejudice against the "savages" that Europeans encountered in their saga of domination of the lands beyond the oceans.

 

Yet, Rameau manages to convey the feeling they must have had at that time, the discovery that the world was so much larger than it had been thought to be not long before. A world that, in our times, has shrunk to nearly nothing, encroached by the human expansion that has destroyed nearly everything that at the time of Rameau could be called "savage."

 

So, today, like at the time of Rameau, we lounge for something that maybe exists/existed only in our dreams. But dreams are not a matter of little importance. They have a remarkable tendency to tell us much more than we can perceive when awake. And the dream of the "pleasant forests" that Rameau thought and that Sabine Dievilhe sings so well remains with us.

 

Humans are not just wood-cutting animals. When they are at their best, they can do this and even more beautiful things, all part of the infinite variety of Gaia. 

 

 

h/t

Luisella Chiavenuto

Braiding Sweetgrass

 

A contribute by Robinne Gray

 

When Erik asked me about potentially leading a book discussion, I told him there are two books that really rocked my world(view), one is Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass The other is Thomas Berry's The Great Work, which I'd love to revisit in 2021.

For those unfamiliar with this book and author, a little enticement: Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi woman who is also a plant ecologist and professor in the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. So she is uniquely positioned to bring together two very different ways of engaging with the natural world in a way that (IMO) the world really needs. It helps that she's a wonderful writer, so her work is getting a lot of attention and inspiring many people. 

I'm a lifelong reader who hasn't participated in many book discussions because I'm stubborn and only want to read what I choose and when - and also because I don't always finish a given book in a timely way, and may be reading several books at once. An encouragement I offer is: Braiding Sweetgrass is a series of essays, so even if you make time to read one or two of them to get a taste, it would be wonderful to have you be part of our discussion of this rich work!  I've included a quote from the book below.

 Note: this text appeared in the discussion group "Gaian Conversations" kept by Erik Assadourian and is published here by kind permission of the author. If you are interested in joining the discussion group, write to Erik at info(thingything)gaianism.org

 

Unexpected Symbionts: What if Your Health could Benefit from Creatures you Normally Despise?

 

"Lice Capades" (2007). An absolutely wonderful episode of the "South Park" series. The world as seen from the viewpoint of lice. Fantastic. 

In Italy, there is a legend that says you may be cured of hepatitis b (jaundice) by eating lice. It is not just a vague legend, I personally know people who swear they were cured of jaundice by doing exactly that. Apparently, in the 1960s, there were still people who sold live lice packed in a small wafer (where they got the little beasties is anybody's guess). No trace of this story can be found on the Web nowadays, I can only relate it from what relatives and acquaintances tell me. But I have no reason to doubt that it was a common belief some 50 years ago, although it may have been limited to Tuscany, or perhaps only Florence. There are reports of people eating lice in other cultures and, of course, monkeys, apes, and other furry animals do that all the time. 

About this story, let me say that I am a big fan of evidence-based medicine and I am the first to doubt this story (and, also, I never had lice in my life). But, once you acquire the concept of "holobiont," you start reasoning that lice must have accompanied the human organism for millions of years. And, if they did, there has to have been some reciprocal adaptation and -- why not? -- mutual benefit. Of course, as a human being, you won't even remotely imagine that lice may be good for your health. But are you sure? 

At this point, you start searching the web and, surprise! (or maybe not), you immediately find an article titled "Unexpected Benefits from Lice" Look, this is serious stuff, evidence-based, not old folks' tales. And they say: 

Parasites such as lice have a role in the conditioning of a 'natural' immune system and reducing the likelihood of immune dysfunctions,

Of course, that's true for mice, but there is no reason to believe that it wouldn't work for human organisms, as well. Some people have said exactly that, "lice can be good for you." Maybe that's a bit optimistic but, surely, there is no reason to fall into hysterical reactions when dealing with lice in children. In some cases, lice may be bad for your health, but the little critters are not a major threat.

So, may lice be a symbiont rather than a parasite? As usual, the boundary between the two categories is fuzzy. Likely, no creature living inside the human holobiont is 100% parasitic. Most of those that lived with us for millions of years surely have at least some beneficial effects. And let me tell you just one thing: my mother-in-law holobiont had flatworms for most of her life. She turned 100 two months ago and she is in reasonably good health for her age. Would there be a correlation? At least, you can't rule that out!

You see how ideas interlock with each other and branch out generating new ones? Once you have the concept of holobiont, you have access to a whole new host of concepts. It is the beauty of the world we live in: truly Gaia takes many forms!

The Evolution of Human Empathy: From bronze age warriors to us, and beyond

 The human mind is the most complex entity we know in the whole universe. One of the fascinating things about it is how it has been evolving over time. What could have been the thoughts of a bronze age warrior? What thoughts did an ancient hunter-gatherer think? Why do we think the way we do, nowadays? As Sir Thomas Browne said, these are puzzling questions, but, like the song the Sirens sang, not beyond all conjecture. And here I am presenting a sweeping review in this area that starts with the work by Julian Jaynes on the mind of our remote ancestors, connects it with the most recent result of genetic studies, and even tries to peer into the future: how will the human mind evolve? Another question not beyond all conjecture. We may be moving toward much more complex and intricate forms of empathy than those we know nowadays.

 

The Mind

The mind is a tool, this much is clear. Of course, it is a special tool, able to do many things in many fields. But it is a tool and it has evolved to perform the tasks it performs. Do you remember Darwin's finches? They are birds with beaks of different shapes that were the source of inspiration for Darwin's idea of evolution: the beaks adapted to the different kind of food eaten. The human mind does the same. If it is like it is, nowadays, it is because it is functional to what it does. 

That applies also to the entity we call consciousness. We can define it as the capability of "modeling oneself" just like we can model other people's behavior in order to predict it. You probably heard the story of the "mirror neurons," brain structures specialized in understanding the behavior of other people. In a way, it means reading other people's mind. Your dog can do the same: dogs have mirror neurons, too. You can use the term "mirroring" or also "modeling." It doesn't matter the term. if you can model other people's behavior, you have a certain degree of empathy. And, very likely, high empathy and self-consciousness go together. They are two axons of the same neuron. 

Empathy is surely useful for us in many circumstances (also for dogs). You need to know if the person you have in front is there to help you or he wants to use his battle-axe on you. But that doesn't require much effort in terms of sophisticated mind-reading. Where modeling truly shines as an evolutionary tool is in the mating game. At least in our modern world, the competition for mates is fierce and ruthless and it involves many factors. Surely money and status count, but empathy does a lot as the capability of mirroring your perspective mate means behaving in a way that you know that he/she will appreciate. Ask any pick-up artist about that and he'll confirm that it is the tactic they use. Also, if you ever chatted with a professional sex worker, you may have noted how they have an uncanny ability of reading your mind and say exactly what they know will please you. The whole game is played by modeling another person's mind inside one's own.

So, it is no surprise that most of the modern literature and fiction deals with what we call "romance," men and women getting together. We seem to be deeply interested in the courtship rituals and about everything involved with it. It is one of the top skills of our mental arsenal. But have we always been like this?

 

The Evolution of the Mind

At which point in their evolutionary history did humans develop this exquisite ability of reading each other's minds -- including their own -- that we have today and we also call empathy? There are cartoons that describe cavemen using their stone axe to stun a woman before pulling her by the hair all the way into their cave. But that's of course a little unlikely to have ever been our ancestors' behavior, to say the least! But how did cavemen woo their women? Of course, the entity we call the "mind" leaves no fossil record, so what do we know about the empathy capabilities of our remote ancestors?

The first to pose this question was Julian Jaynes with his "The Origin of Consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind" of 1976. It was a milestone in the field: Jaynes analyzed ancient written records and he concluded that the people living during the bronze age were not really "conscious" in the modern sense of the term. They had what Jaynes called a "bicameral mind." They would "hear voices" in their minds and act accordingly, but we have no evidence that they had the kind of self-recognition that we normally have today.  

The idea of the "bicameral mind" as described by Jaynes has been often criticized and, indeed, there is no proof that the inner mechanisms of ancient minds worked the way he proposed. But it doesn't really matter whether the "voices" are the result of the interaction of the two halves of the brain or they originate in some other sections of the brain. The point is that the behavior of the people described in such documents as the "Iliad" or some books of the Bible is completely different from that of modern people. The ancient just seem to lack empathy, they act like automata, without evident feelings of love, compassion, or concern for other people. In modern terms, we would define bronze age people as "autistic." Maybe it is a literary style, but Jaynes' idea that people truly behaved in this way makes a lot of sense. 

Just as an example: think of the Iliad. The story start with Paris, a Trojan prince, stealing Helen from her husband, Menelaus, king of Sparta. Then Paris is killed, and Helen marries another Trojan, Deiphobus. Finally, Menelaus kills Deiphobus and takes Helen back. Does the Iliad report of anyone caring about what Helen feels during these events? Was she unhappy, concerned, sorry, or what? No -- nobody gives a war cry about that. Another example: consider the case of  Tamar and Judah, as reported in the Genesis. In the story, the only problem for Tamar is how to give children to Judah's clan despite the death of her first and second husband, both sons of Judah. And nobody cares about what Tamar feels. Nor, there is any feeling or care for what Tamar's husbands feel, or pity for their fate.

Now, let expand the discussion a little. Jaynes had only written data, so his analysis couldn't go further back than the 3rd millennium AD, more or less. Before that age, there are no written records, at most pieces of statuary that might be interpreted in various ways, but that don't tell much to us about how people thought or behaved at that time. 

But we now have genetic data that, amazingly, give us a chance to go well  beyond the "literacy limit." I refer to the recent discovery of the "Y-chromosome bottleneck" in humans (Karmin et al., 2015). I described these findings in some detail in a previous article on "The Proud Holobionts." Here, let me summarize these results.

 

The figure above, (Karmin et al., 2015) reports the degree of diversification of the human Y-chromosome and of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) over time. Both are elements of the genome that are passed only from male to male (Y-chromosome) and female to female (mtDNA). So, the curves are roughly proportional to the active male/female reproducing population. 

For most of the record available, some 50 thousand years, the population of reproducing males is smaller than that of the females, roughly a factor of three. It doesn't mean that there were less males than females in these populations. Then as now, the male/female ratio for the people alive at any given moment was approximately equal to one. But not every human being manages to leave descendants: many disappear from the genetic history of the species. For some reason that would be long to discuss, females are normally more successful than males at that and that's what we see in the curves of the study. 

But the study shows an impressive and unexpected feature. A "bottleneck" in male diversification that takes place between 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. In this period, there was only about one reproducing male out of 20 reproducing females. 

If we now compare with Jaynes' data, we see that he placed the bicameral mind as existing approximately during the 3rd-2nd millennium BCE, while the breakdown took place during the late 2nd millennium, roughly with the end of the bronze age. So, Jaynes' time window overlapped in part with the bottleneck. What he was seeing was the climbing side of it. He saw modern consciousness appearing (re-appearing?) with the male reproductive effectiveness gradually regaining the normal value of 1:3 with respect to the female effectiveness after a period of eclipse. But what does that mean?

 

Interpreting the data

We said that the conscious part of the human mind is mainly a tool used to find sexual partners. So, the mind must have adapted to the social and economic structures of society as they changed and evolved. Then, let's start from the beginning, the left side of the curve reported by Karmin et al. from ca 50.000 to 10.000 years ago. We see that during that period the average the reproductive success of human males was about the same as it is today, that is one male reproduced for about three females .

We know in those remote times, humankind was mainly practicing a hunting and gathering lifestyle. What were people's minds like at that time? Of course, we have no written records from those times. But we still have hunter gatherers around in our world, so that we can have some idea of how they think. Helga Ingeborg Vierich has lived with hunter-gatherers and she reports that they are kind and considerate, and rarely polygamous. In their societies, males have about the same chance as females to marry outside the group. Women have positive roles in society, separate but not inferior to the roles of males. On this point, I can also report my personal experience with the Roma (the Gypsies) who are perhaps the closest approximation to a hunter-gatherer society existing in Europe nowadays. In terms of empathy, I can tell you that their skills in reading the mind of a gajo (a non-Rom) are nothing less than exquisite. They need these skills in order to survive in a world where the gaji are a large majority. If empathy is a useful skill in a monogamous, relatively egalitarian society, then our hunter-gathering ancestors clearly had it, just like our modern hunter-gatherers do (and the Roma, too).

Then, there came the "bottleneck" that corresponds approximately to the end of the Neolithic and the start of metalworking, first copper then bronze. As it normally happens, technology changes society, sometimes very deeply. The bronze age saw people moving away from the traditional hunting-gathering lifestyle to that of farmers and pastoralists. It is normal (but with plenty of exceptions) that pastoralists tend to live in patrilinear "demes" (you can call them "clans"), a term used in biology to indicate groups in which individuals tend to mate mainly with other members of the deme. 

In human patrilinear demes, males tend to remain within the deme, while females are more mobile and move from a deme to another (it is called exogamy). In this kind of society, women marry a clan, not a person, just like Tamar did in the Biblical story. Even in the case of Helen of Troy, the story of her abduction may refer to a form of exogamy.

In this kind of patrilinear societies, we can imagine that there is little need for either males or females to develop the kind of empathy that we moderns need. Neither Paris nor Helen are reported in the Iliad to have been "in love" with each other in the modern sense of the term. There is nothing romantic in their relation. In general, if a woman marries a clan, then she doesn't care whether the male they mate with is nice, considerate, and gentle. What counts is how many sheep the clan has. Maybe this is a little schematic (a lot), but it seems to fit with what we know of the age described by Jaynes. 

These genetic data are in line with the interpretation that the age of the bottleneck corresponded to an increasing population of pastoralists living in patrilinear demes. This is explicitly discussed a 2018 paper by Zeng et al. They explain the bottleneck as due to evolutionary competition between demes, rather than individuals. A deme can "die" either because it is outcompeted by the others for scarce resources or because its members are killed in battle. Since the males in a deme are closely related to each other, there is a good chance that, when the deme dies, their Y-chromosome disappears from the human genetic history. Females, instead, owing to their exogamic habits are more likely to have their genetic signature survive, being spread over several memes. 

Can these social changes affect the genetic build-up of the human mind? We cannot say for sure, but don't forget how powerful evolution is in shaping the functioning of living creatures. The whole "bottleneck" episode lasted a few millennia and Cochrane and Harpending suggest in their "The 10,000 year explosion," that the human genome could change significantly in such a short time. For instance, they note that bronze age people had a significant brow ridge that was later mostly lost. Human females of the late bronze age didn't seem to like this feature very much in their males, just like modern human females don't. But no amount of cultural change can make you gain or lose a prominent brow ridge. It can only be genetic.

But it is not really fundamental to decide whether the big changes we see across the bottleneck are genetic or cultural: let's just say that they occurred, quite possible because of a mix of the two factors. Then, everything clicks together, more or less. The bottleneck was caused by the rise of a patrilinear society organized in small demes, then it disappeared when the demes were superseded by new social organizations: cities, states, and empires. Kings and emperors didn't want their subjects to fight tribal battles against each other. So, they broke the deme structure in various ways -- they never were able to eliminate them completely, but their importance was enormously reduced. With this, the old bronze age "bicameral" mind became obsolete. And evolution did its job: what is not needed or is harmful, disappears.

The rise of monogamy

Over the past 2-3 thousand years, we see a gradual tendency for rigid clans to disappear and a certain degree of egalitarian society developing. Monogamy becomes more and more common, at least for the average people (kings and emperors are not bound to their own laws). Monogamy was not only a social custom, but often enforced by laws and by religious commandments. The main reason for this development is that monogamy is a useful feature for a military empire (and all empires are). Armies need soldiers and cannot tolerate that soldiers fight with each other for females. Instead, if every male has one female, at least on the average, there is no need for internecine fighting among males to hoard as many women as they can. And so all the men of the empire could be turned into fighters to use against external enemies. Then, if the state takes care of enforcing monogamy, soldiers can embark in a long campaign in remote lands knowing that, at least theoretically, their wives will be waiting for them. The Romans, the paradigmatic military society in history, were strictly monogamous, at least with respect to the marriage of free Roman citizens. That was typical for most empires in history.

Monogamy may be one of the main reasons for the development of the emphatic mind we all have. If you live in a relatively egalitarian society, you have a large number of potential partners: choosing the best one becomes a difficult game that requires sophisticated empathic capabilities in order to convince a perspective mate that one is the right partner for him/her. It is a game where you have to deploy all sorts of strategic skills to optimize your chances. And it is a risky game: you may not be able to find the right partner or you may need to settle for a less-than-perfect partner. You may know the story of the man who had decided he would never marry until he could find the perfect woman. And after much searching, he found her. The problem was that she was looking for the perfect man! 

So, you see how difficult the game is, and you probably experienced that yourself. For sure, bronze age people wouldn't do too well at it. Imagine a bronze age warrior walking into a modern ballroom. He would stand in front of a girl and state, flatly, "I have plenty of sheep and you are to be my woman." Not exactly the best strategy to win the hearth of the prom queen.   

Then, of course, monogamy was never perfect and it was always accompanied by the activities that we call "philandering" for males. For females, we use terms such as strumpet, harlot, trollop, slut, or whatever. It doesn't matter, it is still the same game and it requires empathy. Married men are easily convinced by women who woo them, while married women have sophisticated ways to let men understand that they are happy to be wooed. But no modern woman would be interested in an affair with a bronze age man, no matter how many sheep he has. And no bronze age woman would be interested in an affair with a man who doesn't have any sheep. Empathy rules the game, that much is certain.

So, we can explain why the Western civilization has developed so many examples of what we call today "romantic fiction," from the saga of King Arthur, to modern telenovelas. It is probably a form of training for young minds that emphasizes such feelings as romantic love and typically involves a couple of lovers who face all kinds of obstacles but who, eventually, are reunited all thanks to being faithful lovers. This kind of fiction would be most likely totally incomprehensible by our ancestors. Imagine asking Tamar (the one of the Genesis) "but do you love your husband?" I can see her face looking like if you had asked her, "do you like French cuisine?" Some people have tried to cast Tamar in the role of a modern character with results, well, lets say not completely satisfactory (more details at this link).

 

The Final Question: How about the future of the mind?

After a few thousand years of prevalence, monogamy is clearly in decline. It never was perfect but, once, it was enforced by law and customs and, in some countries, you can still be stoned for being an adulteress. Even divorce used to be illegal in many Catholic countries up to recent times. Today, these rules have mostly disappeared, although 19 US states still define adultery as a crime and there exist two countries in the world where divorce remains illegal, the Philippines and the Vatican. 

This relaxation of the monogamy rule can be explained as the result of the decline of the role of males as fighters. Up to a certain time, not many decades ago, wars were won by the state that could line up the largest number of poor clods in uniform and have them march forward while being shelled by the enemy artillery. That's not so important anymore and the development of drones and war-robots has made the very concept of "soldier" obsolete.

The current situation is basically unheard of in the history of humankind. There has never been an age in which males had become useless as military machines. This point may not have been understood by the leaders, yet, but it seems clear that, if there is little or no need males as soldiers, there is little or no reason to enforce rigid codes and laws on sexual behavior for them and their wives. 

That's rapidly modifying the standard way of thinking about sexual codes of conduct, especially in the West, even though we can probably rule out that it is modifying the human genetic code (yet). In any case, the current way of thinking of Westerners is as far away as that of bronze age warriors as it could be. The focus on mind-reading is being turned to one's own mind and modern Westerners can be defined as extreme cases of narcissists, interested only in their own well being. It is what we call the "me-generation."

The problem with the me-generation is that it is generating a class of people who think they can do everything that pleases them. And the only thing that's worse than a narcissist is a rich narcissist. One of the things human males like to do is to hoard women in personal harems, as it was the use in some societies in the past. So, if a male is both a narcissist and he has enough power in the form of money, what can stop him from having multiple female partners in the form of occasional or stable concubines, or even in the form of a traditional harem? 

The current laws and customs prevent the men in the most visible positions from explicitly expressing their sexual habits, but if you look at the recent sex-scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein, you can notice that there are things going on with our leaders that don't appear in the media. Even without concubines or harems, already now, we might say that in the West the elites enjoy "time-dependent polygamy," in the sense that they periodically switch from an older wife to a younger one. That, of course, deprives young and poor males of suitable female partners, but it is the law of money. In time, we might see the development of a rigidly stratified society where the elites accumulate women just like they accumulate money. 

Then, if women are seen as accumulated capital, there follows that methods are needed to make sure that they are not stolen or lost. Eunuchs are a traditional way to keep women in their place -- and they also help solving the problem of excess males. But there are even more invasive methods to control women. Several societies in our time practice "female genital mutilation." The idea is that if a woman feels pain during sex, she will be less interested in cheating her husband (or harem master). In its extreme form, infibulation, the woman is treated like a coffer that can be locked and unlocked at will. Female genital mutilation is not so popular nowadays in the West but, who knows? Fashions change so rapidly!

Chances are that someone who owns a harem of infibulated women doesn't think of them in terms of romantic love, not any more than one of our billionaires have romantic feelings for their stock portfolio. Indeed, it is often reported that the rich are nasty, unfeeling, and uncaring for others. That's what you would expect. Why would the rich need to care for others? They don't need empathy-based skills. Then, the women in a harem would hardly be thinking of their master as someone to love in romantic terms. To say nothing about the eunuchs. 

So, if these habits were to become the rule in the future, then the human mind could change, culturally and perhaps even genetically. Evolution, cultural and genetic, does it work of eliminating those features that are not needed, think of the wings of the dodo bird. So, the sophisticated empathy capabilities that we had developed over the past 2-3 thousand years could disappear in a few centuries. Then, future scientists may discover a second bottleneck in the human Y-Chromosome diversity and wonder what caused it.

But there are other possibilities and it is not farfetched to think that the next step for society will be to discover that the modern obnoxious alpha-males and their manic sex-habits are not only useless, but expensive and dangerous. So why don't we just get rid of most of the males, leaving around just the tiny number needed for reproduction? After all, it is a choice that ants and bees made millions of years ago. Their social organization is called "eusociality" and human society already has some of its characteristics, so that it can be defined as "ultrasocial".

Is it possible to transform human society in such a radical way? Why not? We evolved, and we keep evolving. Already, the features of our society would be completely unrecognizable to someone living just a few centuries ago. And if ants and bees (and also the naked mole rat) evolved toward eusociality, there is no reason to think that we can't follow the same steps. Nate Hagens has been discussing how our society is already moving toward what he calls the "superorganism" -- a term used also for anthills and beehives.

Our society is already much more complex than the patrilinear demes of the Bronze Age and a future eusocial version would be even more complex. In the network of complex subsystems we live in, and in those in which we may live in the future, empathy deals with many more things than just finding a sex-mate. As Chuck Pezeshki notes, empathy is not a rigid concept, it is a process that evolves toward more complex and sophisticated forms (this figure is from Pezeshki's blog).

So, humans might be moving toward a version of empathy that will be highly sophisticated and structured as it can be in a universe that we are perceiving as more and more complex, a hierarchy of systems that we call "holobionts" and that culminates on this planet with the highest level holobiont of all, the entity we call sometimes "Gaia." Developing this kind of empathy could place humans truly in harmony with nature and with their own species. It would be a form of empathy that we can imagine as connected to what we call today the "religious experience." And maybe they'll perceive things that current humans cannot even imagine. It would be the "revelation through evolution," a concept that Michael Dowd has perceived. The Goddess Gaia revealing herself in her full glory,

And onward we go, evolving all the time. 

___________________________________________________________

h/t Michael Dowd, Chuck Pezeshki, Nate Hagens, Maria Mercedes Sanchez, and Helga Ingeborg Vierich,

Genes, Demes, and Holobionts: What genetic studies tell us of the behavior of our ancestors

 

 Once you discover the concept of "holobiont," its ramifications keep surprising you. Here is a brief discussion of how the competition among the human meta-holobionts called demes affected and was affected by the human sexual behavior. 

How could it be that for a few thousand years only one human male out of about 20 females left descendants? What had happened that had removed so many males from the human gene pool? This is a story that would require an entire book to explain, but it is so fascinating that I thought I could write a quick survey, here. 

So, take a look at the image above. It is taken from a 2015 article by Karmin et al.  There is a lot of information in that figure, but let's concentrate on the left graph. It shows the degree of diversification of the human Y-chromosome over time. You know that the Y-chromosome is something that only males have in humans, so the curve is roughly proportional to the active male reproducing population. The more diversified it is, the more males there are around, reproducing. Be careful: this is not the total male population. It is the population of those males who reproduce. Males who never mate with a fertile female don't appear in the graph. Note also that females are tracked using their mitochondrial DNA that they inherit from their mothers.

As you can see, the population of reproducing males is always smaller than that of the females (right graph). That doesn't mean that the total number of males (reproducing + non-reproducing) is smaller than that of the females -- for all we know, these numbers have remained comparable over human history. It seems that human males always have more competition and more troubles to reproduce than females (if you are male, you understand what I mean). So a sizable number of males always disappear from the genetic history of the species, even though they did exist and maybe they were also sexually active. It is just that they left no descendants.

But the impressive feature of the male curve above is the dip that takes place between 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. Hard times for males: only about one reproducing males out of 20 reproducing females. Ouch! (or maybe not so much of an ouch for those who did reproduce, who had 20 females each). That's weird: how can that be?

As always, we should take into account that all scientific results are affected by uncertainty. But this work seems to be solid and so far it has not been challenged. So, the question is, what happened that made our female ancestors so selective in choosing just one male in 20 as the father of their children? 

You bet that a lot of hypothesis have been proposed to explain this catastrophe that hit human males in their reproductive success (but, again, it doesn't mean they didn't have female partners, just that they didn't mate with them when they were fertile). But what happened? An epidemics? The wrath of God? The spread of the fashion of monastic life? 

It is a long, long story and we are far from having understood this pattern. But I think that a 2018 paper by Zeng et al. gave the correct interpretation. It all has to do with demes.

One more paragraph, one more thing to learn: what the chuck is a "deme"? Well, it is a known concept in biology, although not so common for most of us. Basically, a deme is a relatively stable group of individuals who often mate within the group and rarely outside. In human terms, you may think of a deme as the equivalent of a "tribe" or a "clan." 

A characteristic of human demes is that they are often patrilinear: that is, they are dominated by a male hierarchy: there is a patriarch on top, his son, grandsons, and maybe great-grandsons. The females are more mobile. They practice exogamy, that is they tend to marry outside the deme (clan). The exchange of females among tribal groups is well known in anthropology. 

Now, you see here the holobiont emerging: a deme is a kind of a holobiont, we might call it a "meta-holobiont" in comparison to the normal human holobiont. But a holobiont is a holobiont is a holobiont. It is a group of organisms that collaborate in a symbiotic structure. Not just that, but demes practice "holobiont sex" by exchanging genetic material in the form of female organisms. See how many patterns tend to repeat? Wonderful!

Here goes the explanation by Zeng et al., that I think makes a lot of sense. As all holobionts, demes have a finite lifetime. They can die because of various natural reasons, starvation, disease, etc. Or they may be killed by aggressive neighborhood demes. And here is the trick. In a deme, there is very little differentiation in the Y-Chromosomes. The males are all related to each other and you know that brothers all have the same Y-Chromosome. So, the deme dies, the Y-chromosome dies. How sad! Those males who were part of that deme don't pass their Y-Chromosome to their descendants, so they disappear from the human genetic history. But so is the way things are. The great holobiont called Gaia loves life, but She knows that there cannot be life without death.

But the death of a deme doesn't mean the disappearance of the female genetic imprint. Not at all. Since females practice exogamy, likely, the females of a dead deme had sisters in other demes that survived. Besides, killing a deme in war doesn't mean that the winners exterminate all the females, not at all and for good reasons! Males consider the females as a war prize. Nowadays we tend to think that killing males and raping their females is not a very nice behavior, but it was very common in history (and still is). 

And here goes the final trick that explains the whole story. The drop in the reproducing male number takes place in a period of great expansion of the human population. It means that the demes were closer to each other and fighting for increasing scarce resources. It meant holobiont-style selection. Those demes that were less efficient in exploiting the available resources, and also less effective in war, disappeared, and with them a lot of Y-chromosome lineage. And that's what you see in the curve. Amazing!

But then, what happened that restored the chance of reproducing for human males? Well, there came the age of kingdoms, and then the age of empires, and kings and emperors don't like clans to fight against each other. They want all the males to fight for them, and that changed everything. Another long story that I'll tell in another post. But all these stories that deal with holobionts are fascinating! 

And here is how Conan the Barbarian interprets deme competition

 

Longevity secrets of a 100-year old holobiont

 

These four holobionts are related by vertical gene transmission through their female organisms. Among other things, their mitochondria have all the same DNA. The oldest of the three, Liliana, is 100 year old. There follow Grazia (68), Donata (31) and Aurora (1). Photo taken in July 2020

When my mother-in-law, Liliana, turned 100 last month, several people asked me what is the secret of her longevity. Not only it is not usual to reach that age, but to reach it in relatively good conditions. Liliana surely has problems: she walks very slowly and she tends to forget things. But her mind still works and, the day of her birthday, she categorically refused to be carried to the garden where we were having the celebration. She insisted to walk there by her own, even climbing the steps of the stairs leading there. It took her a lot of time, but she made it.

As you know, there is an entire field of research that studies centenarians. In particular, the gut microbiota of centenarians seem to age together with the main organism, but we don't know exactly how longevity is related to these modifications. So, here I'll just tell you something about Liliana and you may make your own deductions on what may be the ways to reach a very old age, still healthy.

First of all, Liliana was born in 1920 and she was young in a world that was very different from ours. The kind of diet, the way of living, the ways of seeing the world -- she might as well have been born on another planet. Imagine a world where there is no central heating, no TV, no telephone, where women still washed clothes by hand and hung them to dry out of the windows. A world without showers, only bathtubs where the water had to be heated by a wood fire. In the morning, there were standalone washbasins in the bedrooms where you could wash your face when you woke up. In winter, it was not uncommon to find that the water had frozen solid in the basin. 

It was a world where cars were rare and reserved for the rich: life was mainly within the area that could be reached on foot. And when a boy wanted to woo a girl, he would normally use a method already described by Boccaccio in his "Decameron" (14th century), that is making "passes" on foot under the windows of his beloved. Liliana confirmed to me that this was the way her future husband courted her, in the late 1930s. 

Coming of age in Italy during the 1930s meant a very different kind of life for women. Liliana never learned to drive a car and she can't even ride a bicycle. She completed he middle school curriculum ("scuola media" in Italian), but even for a middle-class girl, as she was, it would have been considered a little weird to continue her studies. She was supposed to become a housewife, and she did: she never had a salaried job during all of her life, although she worked occasionally as a seamstress. But her life was far from being easy. She went through the ordeal of WW2 when she survived the bombings and the shelling of Florence. Her boyfriend was drafted in the Italian army and he barely survived the war in North Africa, then he was wounded in the Italian civil war in 1944. The war may have been a watershed for many people alive today: those who survived it were especially resilient people. 

So, Liliana had an eventful life. One reason was her decision to marry a Sicilian man, something that was considered a scandal in his family. In the 1940s it was like, say, if today a middle-class American girl were to decide to marry a poor boy from Afghanistan. For Liliana, that implied several adventures but she was stubborn. She wanted that boy and she had it. Eventually she settled with her husband in the house that her grandfather had bought for the whole family in Florence and where she is still living today. She had three children, all born at home. Right now, she has four grand-children and two great-grand children.

As you can imagine from what I just told you, Liliana could be, and still is, a rather stubborn character. But I can also say that she is not very aggressive, she has always been flexible and friendly to everybody. A positive character in many ways, I have never seen her truly angry or mad at someone. Maybe this easygoing character was a help for her in getting old so gracefully. 

How about Liliana's diet? I can tell you that if you want to have some idea of what Liliana eats today, you can find it in books such as  "A Room with a View" (1908) by E.M. Forster and "Etruscan Places" (1932) by D.H. Lawrence. Incredible as it may sound, there was a time when the British would complain about Italian cuisine: the tasteless soups, the hard-to-chew boiled meat, the uninspiring kind of cheese made from sheep milk, and the mysterious castagnaccio that, according to Forster, tasted "partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown." And I have a feeling that Forster really wanted to write "the great unwashed." 

Today, Liliana still eats those thin soups that Lawrence hated and that nobody would want anymore in Florence. She eats cheese, eggs, and a little meat, not much but she is not vegetarian. She likes cooked vegetables, she seems to be a little wary of raw greens and she never cultivated anything edible in her garden -- she was a housewife, not a peasant. She is not fond of pizza, but occasionally she eats it. She never went to a Chinese restaurant in her life, she knows what a "hamburger" is (she can make them at home) but she has no idea of what a McDonald's restaurant might look like. She doesn't drink wine and she has never tasted beer in all her life. One characteristic that may be relevant to her longevity is how she tends to eat slowly. And she never-ever was overweight.

Then, how about Liliana's microbiota? We have no analysis of it, but I can tell you that she had flatworms in her gut for a long time. Some people say that flatworms are part of our biome and that they are good for health. On this point, I can't say much, but surely flatworms didn't harm Liliana. Then, I can also tell you that she never took a shower in her life and she never washed her hair with soap. On this, she seems to have been extremely modern, following the advice we are receiving today from James Hamblin in his recent book "Clean." Hamblin has not been taking showers for 5 years, not much in comparison to Liliana who has been shower-less for much longer. In both cases, anyway, the effect on preserving one's skin's microbiota seems to have been good. At 100, Liliana still has thick, white hair. 

What else? Liliana told me that once she took a bath in the sea. She didn't like it and she never wanted to repeat the experience. She hated the sunshine and she would never dream of sunbathing. She never took an airplane flight, her longest trip ever was from Florence to Sicily, for her honeymoon. It was just after the war and the trip took two days by an old, chugging steam train.

Among other things, Liliana always maintained a deep distrust in medical doctors and in medicines. For most of her life she succeeded in not seeing doctors and avoiding pills of any kind. Now, of course, she needs various pills everyday, but not so many. Ah... and of course she never smoke cigarettes nor indulged in any kind of what we call today "recreational drugs." She did like coffee, though, although she can't drink it anymore.

So, where is Liliana's secret of longevity? Hard to say. Maybe we could conclude that it consists in not taking too many showers, eating a little of everything, and slowly. Maybe eating thin soups helps, just as having survived a major world war. And a little coffee won't harm you. But maybe the main point is to stand by one's ideas but also take life as it comes. We are all holobionts, just passengers of the ecosystem of this planet that's engaged in an immense journey that has been ongoing for billions of years. And onward we go, fellow holobionts!

But what is a "superorganism," in the end?

What is a superorganism, exactly?

I was mulling over this question and I came up with the classic example: the ant colony is supposed to be a superorganism in the sense that all the organisms in it share the same genome, just like in a human beings all cells have the same DNA (except mitochondria, of course).

But no, wait! That cannot be: ants are sisters, not clones. They may even have different fathers. For a quirk of the genetic setup of male ants, ant sisters share 75% of their genes, not 50% as human siblings do. But they are not clones. So an ant colony is not a superorganism, but a kind of tightly knit holobiont.

But then, a discovery: that's not true, either! As reported in this paper, there are ant colonies where all the ants are clones of each other! Unbelievably, some ants have discover tricks to completely eliminate the need of males: yes, no males and no queens. They reproduce by parthenogenesis. These colonies are true superorganisms, not holobionts. And I keep discovering new things: one that starts to be very common is that males seem to be obnoxious and useless in all species!

The Earth Goddess According to Jenny Jinya

The Earth Goddess in the interpretation of Jenny Jinya

Jenny Jinya is a phenomenal German artist who knows something about empathy, the fundamental element that keeps together the multiform creatures we call "holobionts."

For a taste of her awesome work, you may start from this one. (be careful, this is powerful stuff -- it may make you cry like a child).

In the most recent comic strip by Jenny Jinya, we even see appearing the Goddess of life herself, mistress of all the holobionts of Earth. You can find it here. Enjoy the good ending!

A happy holobiont is a holobiont that takes care of its microbiome

An obviously unhappy holobiont engaged in exterminating its own microbiome. Bad idea.

The epidemic of biophobia is still raging worldwide, with people still washing their hands with poisonous substances, convinced to do something good, or forced by law to do so.

Not a good idea. You skin microbiome is precious to you, among other things it is the first true barrier against infections. Some people are recognizing the problem, as it is described in a recent article on "The Guardian"

Just an excerpt:

Hand-washing aside, James Hamblin has not used soap for five years. He warns that our obsession with being clean is harming the microbiome that keeps us healthy

Take care of your microbiome, and be a happy holobiont!

(h/t Miguel Martinez)

The Holobiont as a New Vision of the World

Long-term predictive models don't have a very good record, but some turned out to be prophetic. One case is that of Hubbert's 1956 prediction of a peak in the production of fossil energy shortly after the start of the 21st century. He was optimistic about the possibility of replacing fossil fuels with nuclear energy, but, apart from that, he was right on target. Now we are on the edge of the cliff and we have to take a different attitude toward the ecosystem that supports our existence. The concept of "Holobiont" may help us a lot in this task. We are holobionts, the ecosystem is a larger holobiont, we must find a way to live together. 

The American geologist Marion King Hubbert deserves the credit of having been the first to see the main trends of the 21st century, nearly 50 years before it were to start. In his 1956 paper, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, Hubbert presented the figure above: a bold attempt to place the human experience with energy on a 10,000 years scale.

Of course, Hubbert was overly optimistic about nuclear energy which, in reality, started declining before fossil fuels did. But, with this graphic, Hubbert had laid down the human predicament several years in advance with respect to "The Limits to Growth" (1972). Catton's "overshoot" (1980), and many others. Without a miracle that could replace fossils well before they would start declining, the human world as it was in the 20th center was doomed. Nuclear energy was not, and could not have been, that miracle.

Hubbert's may not have been always cited, but the debate on the decline of the natural resources raged for decades -- with most of it based on various interpretation of the concept of technological progress. In the most optimistic views, depletion was not considered a pressing problem but, in any case, it was believed that technology would chase the problem away, automatically, and without pain for anyone, purely on the basis of market forces. In this view, it made no sense to slow down in order to save resources: on the contrary, accelerating the exploitation would lead to economic growth and to the consequent availability of more and more advanced technologies. The opposite attitude was that the problem was important and imminent, but that predictive models could lead to planning efforts based on slowing down the exploitation of the remaining resources and a technology switch toward higher efficiency/new sources.  Over time, the debate veered more and more toward the concept that climate change was a much more important problem than resource depletion. But the attitudes didn't change.

All the debate led to nothing. Nothing was decided, nothing was done. Society turned out to be impervious to early alerts and technology unable to be the miracle that was touted to be. In 2020, we have arrived to a critical point: the start of the irreversible decline of the technological society that had been developed over about two centuries of use of fossil fuels as energy source. We are seeing the "Seneca Cliff," the unavoidable destiny of a system that has expanded beyond its limits, that has gone in heavy "overshoot" to use Catton's definition?

And now? Clearly, it is too late to deploy miracle technologies: we are starting to go down and the question how to face the decline: can we still avoid to turn it into a crash? The data show that it would still be possible to soften the decline and to go down on a relatively smooth slope. But the resistance to the unavoidable is actually worsening the situation. Politicians and most of the public are still convinced that the way to go is to "restart growth" without realizing that they are hastening collapse and making it faster and harsher.

How did we arrive here? It was not a failure of science and technology. It was a cultural failure. We tried to manage the future without the right tools. In retrospect, it was obvious that tools developed in an age of abundance wouldn't be useful, actually counterproductive, in an age of scarcity. Imagine a banker stranded on a remote island trying to get food by building a automated cash teller. You get the point.

At this point, we could say that we need a new vision of the ecosystem. That's correct, although reductive. It is not a question of what we "need." It is a question of an unavoidable cultural transformation that's going to come, whether we like it or not. We have to come to terms with the ecosystem. In different terms, we could say that the ecosystem is going to decide what it is going to do with us -- not consciously (probably) but just practically. Either it is going to get rid of an obnoxious species -- the humans  -- that has done only damage to everything, or that species is going to take a different attitude that will make it less obnoxious.

That's the challenge we face, not an easy one, but not impossible either. The cultural tools we need have been partly developed and are being developed. A basic one is the concept of "Holobiont" the idea that the fundamental components of the ecosystem are not organisms, but holobionts intended as colonies of creatures that hang together for mutual benefit. Human beings are holobionts, trees, forests, steppes, and tundras are holobionts. The whole ecosystem is a holobionts. And we can be proud of being good holobionts and learn to live together with the greater holobiont we call "Gaia." Will we be able to do that?

We can discuss these matters on the new blog "The Proud Holobionts" and in the Facebook group with the same name. Onward, fellow holobionts!

Gaia as Holobiont

I started this morning reading the proceedings of a 2017 conference titled "Metaphors for a new body Politics" -- It is a lot of material, and it takes some time to go through it. Something from the chapter by Scott Gilbert, "Gaia as Holobiont" struck me as interesting and I am proposing it to you.

"You can see history in terms of the holobiont. The conquest of the Western hemisphere during the great Columbian Exchange was done not by the armed forces of Pizarro or Cortéz.It was done by diphtheria, cholera, smallpox, rubella, and Salmonella (37-39). The context determines the relationship. The European travelers brought with them all these microbes, which they had learnt to live with. The American Indians had no experience of these microbes, and it is estimated that 85 to 90% of the indigenous American community was wiped out by European microbes. What was mutualistic symbiosis to Europeans became parasitic symbiosis to the native Americans."

That made me think of the Covid-19 policy adopted (and much praised) by New Zealand. Keeping the virus away from their island. A fine idea in many respects, but they will never develop immunity against it. If something goes wrong and the virus starts diffusing there, it could be a disaster. Of course, they hope in a vaccine. Of course.....

Gaia: the planet Holobiont

This article by Matissek and Luttge goes in some depth into the definition of "Gaia" as a planetary holobiont. It is rich in ideas and concept, although I think it is not really as deep as it could be. On the other hand, we still have lots of things to learn!!

The strict definition of holobiont is that it is a host organism (plant or animal) in interaction with all associated microorganisms as an entity for selection in evolution. This definition can be generalized when not only microorganisms internal of or endogenous to a host organism are concerned but any regular organisms which strongly interact between each other also externally. Such latter associations may altogether function as co-evolutionary entities at the community level, as can be concluded from their evolutionary history. A thorough inspection of habitats and ecosystems shows that such kinds of mutualistic associations prevail. Therefore, we can scale up examples of endogenous symbioses to ecosystems, biomes and the entire biosphere as holobionts, where the planet holobiont is Gaia.

James Lovelock defines Gaia as the biosphere being a self-regulating entity that ensures the planet’s capacity for harboring life by controlling the chemical and physical environment in conducive ways. Thus, the question is of whether Gaia manages a global equilibrium which sustains life on Earth. Possibly this holds for life as such but not for any specific forms of life as illustrated by several extinction waves of organisms during geological history. Such events were typically followed by the emergence of innovative new forms as arising from adaptive radiation into abandoned ecological niches. Will man be subject of the next extinction wave? Such a possibility raises ethical imperatives for man to sustain the biosphere sensu Gaia on which he not only depends, but also is part of. Holobiont research must aim at gaining advanced understanding, both in mechanistic and holistic terms, by extending the holobiont concept across the spatio-temporal scales of ecological organization. This implies to delineate the humble position of man in the biosphere and to explore conditions for man’s sustained survival on Earth.

https://www.leopoldina.org/fileadmin/redaktion/Probekapitel_NAL391.pdf