The Memesphere as a Holobiont (the Mousetrap Experiment)

 

Ilaria Perissi with our mechanical model of a fully connected network. You may have seen this set-up as a way to demonstrate the chain reaction that takes place in nuclear explosions. It is simulated here with 50 mousetraps and 100 wooden balls. When you trigger one mousetrap, it releases two balls that may go trigger two more mousetraps, and the reaction rapidly flares up and then subdues when it runs out of mousetraps.  And here is what happens

This experiment is a lot of fun (apart from the pain when one trap snaps as you are loading it). But it is not just about nuclear reactions: we engaged in this demonstration because we wanted to show that what happens with the mousetraps is much more general than that. What you have here, is a kind of network that's called "fully connected." The traps are nodes of the network, the balls are elements that trigger the connection between nodes. It is a kind of communication based on "enhanced" or "positive" feedback.

Imagine that the traps oil wells. Then, the balls are the energy created by extracting the oil. And you can use that energy to dig and exploit more wells. The result is the Hubbert curve, nothing less! We found this kind of curve for a variety of socioeconomic system, from mineral extraction to fisheries (for the latter, you can see our (mine and Ilaria's) book "The Empty Sea." 

But there is more: imagine that traps are people while the balls are memes. Then what you are seeing is a model of a meme going viral in the Web. It works exactly like that: ideas (also called memes) flare up in the Web when they are stimulated it is the power of propaganda that affects everybody.

It is an intelligence because it can amplify a signal -- that's the way it reacts to an external perturbation. You could see the mousetraps as an elaborate detection system for stray balls. But it can only flare up and then decline. It can't be controlled. That's the problem with our modern propaganda system that exists in the memesphere. It is dominated by memes flaring up out of control.  The main actors in this flaring are those "supernodes" (the Media) that have a huge number of long-range connections. That can do a lot of damage: if the meme that goes out of control is an evil meme and it implies, say, going to war against someone, or exterminating someone. It happened and keeps happening again as long as the memesphere is organized the way it is, as a fully connected network.

Now, let's go to the holobiont part: you could call the mousetrap network a holobiont because holobionts are non-hierarchical networks of entities that communicate with each other. Yes, but this kind of holobiont is not a good holobiont. That is, it exists in nature. Think of a flock of birds foraging in a field. One bird sees something suspicious, it flies up, and in a moment all the birds are flying away.

It is a chain reaction. In a sense, the flock is endowed with a certain degree of intelligence. It can process a signal and act on it. You can see in the figure the measurement of the number of flying birds. It is a logistic function, the integral of the bell-shaped curve that describes the flying balls in the mousetrap experiments

But holobionts in Nature are not normally fully connected. Their connections are short-range, and signals travel more slowly through the network. It is often called "swarm intelligence" and it can be used to optimize systems. Swarm intelligence does transmit a signal, but it doesn't amplify it out of control, as a fully connected network does, at least normally. It is a good control system: bacterial colonies and ant colonies use it. Our brains much more complicated: they have short range connections but also long range ones and probably also collective electromagnetic connections. 

All that means we are stuck with a memesphere that's completely unable to manage complex systems. And yet, that's the way the system works. It depends on these waves of out-of-control signals that sweep the web and then become accepted truths. Those who manage the propaganda system are very good at pushing the system to develop this kind of memetic waves, usually for the benefit of their employers. 

Can the memesphere be re-arranged in a more effective way -- turning it into a good holobiont? Probably yes. Holobionts are evolutionary entities that nobody ever designed. They have been designed by trial and error as a result of the disappearance of the unfit. Holobionts do not strive for the best, they strive for the less bad. It may happen that the same evolutionary pressure will act on the human memesphere. 

The trick should consist in isolating the supernodes (the media) in such a way to reduce their evil influence on the Web. And, lo and behold! Haven't you heard of how many people say that they don't watch TV anymore, they don't connect to CNN, and the like? That's exactly the idea. Do that, and things will be better for everyone. 

Societal Holobionts: An Introduction to the Concept

 

God must be incredibly fond of holobionts, since He created so many of them. And He (or She) may be a holobiont as well. 

 

It once happened, that the other members of a man mutinied against the stomach, which they accused as the only idle, uncontributing part the whole body, while the rest were put to hardships and the expense of much labour to supply and minister to its appetites. The stomach, however, merely ridiculed the silliness of the members, who appeared not to be aware that the stomach certainly does receive the general nourishment, but only to return it again, and redistribute it amongst the rest. (Plutarch, “Life of Coriolanus”)

In guerrilla warfare, select the tactic of seeming to come from the east and attacking from the west; avoid the solid, attack the hollow; attack; withdraw; deliver a lightning blow, seek a lightning decision. When guerrillas engage a stronger enemy, they withdraw when he advances; harass him when he stops; strike him when he is weary; pursue him when he withdraws. In guerilla strategy, the enemy's rear, flanks, and other vulnerable spots are his vital points, and there he must be harassed, attacked, dispersed, exhausted and annihilated. (Mao Zedong, 1937)

 

Maybe it happened to you to spend hours waiting for a flight in a busy international airport. You are blocked there and, after having had enough coffee to make you walk like a shuffle dancer, you have nothing else to do but to wander aimlessly from one shop to another. Bookstores offer something to read but, perhaps more interestingly, they give you a chance to get hints of what other people read. A rare chance of a glimpse of other people’s minds in our busy world.

So, what are people reading, nowadays? A lot of magazines and books that you can find in an airport bookstore are about the two primeval human interests: food and sex (the latter usually not so explicitly presented as the former). Apart from that, you find plenty of material on everyday matters: cellphones and other electronic gadgetry, cars, travel, religion, and more. In addition, the typical international airport bookstore has a section on how to deal with other people. They are self-help books that claim to train you on how to manage your relationship with your coworkers, your friends, and your family.

Evidently, many people find that dealing with others is a difficult matter, enough that they need help and guidance. It is a little strange, because we are all the result of at least three hundred thousand years of evolution of the species called homo sapiens. Our ancestors survived because they were good enough at creating and keeping relationships with their neighbors that would help them in times of need. But, perhaps, living in the modern society, so bewilderingly complicated, is more difficult than living in a tribe of hunters and gatherers.

Are these books really useful? There are good reasons to be skeptical. The books often seem to be a mishmash of this and that, they are not quantitative, not based on solid theories, not related to experimental evidence. The latest fad in management theory is a book titled “Reinventing Organizations.” The title may be interesting, but the substance of the book may be criticized. According to the author, good management has something to do with a hierarchy of colors. Infrared is primitive and bad, while the shade of blue called “teal.” is modern and good. Why that should be the case, is not explained anywhere in the book. That doesn’t mean to disparage a book that may have good points, but maybe you will agree with us that such a classification is a little arbitrary, to say the least.

So, can we make some order in this chaos? Maybe yes. And we can try to do that using the concepts of “holobiont” and the related one of “empathy.” The idea is that human societies of all kinds are the result of evolutionary pressure and that those you find in our world exist because there is a reason for them to exist. Just as biological holobionts are a feature of the biosphere, there exist societal holobionts, a feature of the human social sphere. Societal holobionts are an example of “Complex Adaptive Systems,” (CAS) that is, systems that develop a condition of stability called “homeostasis” and that tend to maintain it when perturbed. These holobionts are virtual, unlike the microbes in your gut. So, we may also call them “virtual holobionts.”

Let’s start with an example. The simplest kind of human organization is the least organized one: the crowd (you can also call it a “mob” or a “band”). It has no leaders, no hierarchy, no specializations. Yet, you recognize a crowd when you see one. Perhaps the first time when crowds were dealt with as something worth of interest was with the book by the French author Gustave le Bon “Psychologie des Foules, (1895) that was translated into English as « The Crowd, A study of the Popular Mind. ». Reading it today, you would probably judge it to be a poorly made political pamphlet. And, indeed, it had a certain success with right wing politicians. Nevertheless, it was one of the first studies of complex systems in sociology.

Crowds are not just a feature of human society; equivalents exist with many animal societies. They go with different names: storms (or flocks) of birds, schools of fish, herds of sheep, prides of lions, and there are other examples (for instance, a bacterial mat). In any case, they share the same characteristics: they are loosely bonded groups of individuals who may stay together for a while and dissociate back into single units at any time. But, as long as they exist, crowds (just like all human organizations) are groups of people linked together.

Let’s go deeper into the matter. If a crowd is an organization, albeit the simplest possible one, it could be described using those “organizational charts” that purport to describe how a company is organized. These charts are maps designed to describe the hierarchical territory of the company. They have also been used to describe the organization of entities such as the Sicilian Mafia and Drug Cartels. They can also map the relationships in a band of Chimps or Bonobos.

But an organizational chart can be much more than simply a static map that tells you whom you should see, for instance, to organize a shipment or to order a supply of something (or, if you are a male bonobo, where to find an available female). The chart tells us a lot on how the organization works and also something about how it developed over time. It is part of the field called “management science.”

A good way to interpret organizational charts is to see them as networks.  Network science is a relatively recent development that derives from a field called “graph theory.” It is something that deals with how points in space (called “vertices”, plural of “vertex”) are arranged in space in terms of pairwise links with other vertices. You see an example of a graph in the figure

 

You note that there are 6 vertices (also called “nodes”), each one connected to its nearest neighbors. In this case, the connections (“links” or “edges”) are not directional, but that may be explicit in some kinds of graphs. It may also be possible that a node is connected to several other nodes.

Graph theory is a branch of pure mathematics, and it deals only with geometric arrangements. Instead, “Network theory” (or “network science”) deals with applications of graph theory to the real world. In this case, the nodes are real entities: people, departments, servers, combat units, and much more. Also, the links are related to real methods of information exchange: documents, orders, radio signals, fiber optics, and more.

Armed with this a basic knowledge, let’s go back to the example of the crowd. The simplest crowd network we may imagine is one formed of just three people (or bonobos). Here is the graph.

You see that each node (one member of the group) is connected to his/her neighbors. Information flows from each node to the closest one. There is no hierarchy: all the nodes are the same, which is one of the characteristics of crowds/bands/flocks, etc. You can say that the relationship between the elements of this crowd is horizontal, as opposed to the vertical kind seen in hierarchical organizations such as companies, armies, etc, as we’ll see later on.

We can expand the graph to describe a system where there are more than three nodes. You see below several possible arrangements

 

In the first case (a), each node is connected only to its two nearest neighbors. It is a little like being squeezed in the crowd in a busy subway station – if you have ever visited Tokyo, you know what that means. In such a condition, you can only move together with the crowd, and you don’t see anything more than your nearest neighbors.

Things may be more complicated than that and, in the other images, you see how nodes may be connected to more nodes than just their near neighbors. In case (b) each node is in contact with 4 neighbors. It is still a crowd, but not so dense as case (a). Case (c) shows the possibility of long-range connections for some of the nodes. Maybe someone in the crowd is in contact with a friend in the same crowd, but using a cell phone. Case (d) refers to a kind of network that is called “fully connected,” meaning that every node is connected to every other node. In the real world, it is a rare occurrence, even though it may exist for very small networks. For instance, the 3-nodes example seen before is a fully connected network. All these arrangements are non-hierarchical, or “horizontal”.

All these examples are special cases where all nodes are not only identical, but have all the same number of connections. In most cases, this is not true and each element is connected to a different number of nodes.

The figure illustrates the variations in the number of connections. The left examples shows a network where every node has 4 links. The central one is called the “small world” network. Most connections are to the close neighbors, but some are long range. The right one has more links, randomly arranged, but it is not fully connected.

The reason why the central diagram is called “small world” deserves some explanation. It has to do with the distance (in terms of number of links) between nodes. In this kind of network, it grows proportionally to the logarithm of the number of nodes, so it is not as large as it would be if you had to crawl every node, one after the other, to reach a node on the other side of the circle. In a small world network, if you wanted to contact, say, the president of the United States, it is said that you need to go through no more than six steps, starting with a person you are in contact with. It is not exactly like this, but it is a long story. Let’s just say that it is a “natural” way in which networks tend to arrange themselves.

You may say that the number of connections provide an embryonic form of hierarchy in these networks. If knowledge is power, then more connections mean more knowledge and therefore more power. This hierarchical relationship is especially evident on the Internet. A site such as, say, the CNN is defined by an URL (Uniform Resource Locator) just like any other blog or site on the web. But the CNN has a hugely larger number of connections than the average web site and there is no doubt that it has much more power in terms of pushing memes in the memesphere. But, overall, these systems remain horizontal in the sense that CNN doesn’t have the possibility to order to bloggers what to publish or not to publish in their sites (so far). Many internet “bubbles” are relatively egalitarian, although some nodes (people or groups) carry more weight than others.

These non-hierarchical networks are the general representation of the concept of “holobiont.” The way Lynn Margulis described holobionts was in terms of a group of individuals of different species that moved together in the condition called “symbiosis,” a mutual relationship that provides advantages to all the creatures engaged in it. Holobionts imply an intricate network of relationships among the various member of the community, but no fixed hierarchical structure although, obviously, some members have more prestige and power than others. Margulis was thinking of microbial communities, but we can enlarge the definition to ensembles of animals (if you prefer the formal term, we could say “ensembles of metazoa”). But the organizational diagrams in the form of circles could describe them nicely.

But what is the advantage for an individual to be part of a crowd? (or a flock, or a herd, or a pride?). Are these individuals in a symbiotic relationship? Yes, they are, by all means. Symbiosis is a condition of mutual help that in systems is generated by the way the system is organized, NOT by the good will of the individuals (it would be hard to speak of good will among bacteria, for instance). The beauty of symbiosis is that all the creatures engaged in it strive for their own benefit but, in the process, they manage to benefit every other creature.

Said in this form, it sounds as an extreme version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” still today the basis of liberalism as a political ideology. The idea of the invisible hand has been much ridiculed over the years (you know how many economists it takes to replace a light bulb? None, it is done by the invisible hand!). But the idea is good if it is applied with a grain of salt.

Ugo Bardi (yours truly) and his coworker Ilaria Perissi discussed this issue in a paper that they titled “The Sixth Law of Stupidity,” where we argued that the opposite of stupidity is when human beings enter in a condition of symbiosis with other people. We also argued that stupidity is temporary while intelligence is long term, which means that people tend to learn from their mistakes. Even creatures not especially known for their large brains (say, bacteria) tend to learn from their mistakes – and those who don’t learn are eliminated by natural selection.

So, humans in a crowd are in a symbiotic relationship even though they may not recognize that. The crowd offers a certain refuge to its members. Maybe for humans it is not a general rule: when you are being shelled or shot, the worst possible idea would be to form a crowd that would attract the enemy fire. But, if you look at crowds in the animal kingdom, their utility is evident. Have you ever observed the behavior of a storm of birds? You may see them landing on a patch of grass to feed. If you get close, one of the birds may see you, be scared, and fly off. Immediately, the nearby birds will be alerted and fly off, too. In a moment, the whole storm will be flying away. In this case, the crowd (the storm) offers a danger-detection service that a single bird cannot have. 

More in general, a storm/flock/herd/crowd offers statistical protection. A predator is not interested in destroying the whole flock, only at capturing as many individuals as it needs. So, if the flock is large, the probability for an individual to be captured is low. Of course, humans tend to destroy even things they don’t need, but this is part of the 6^th law of stupidity .

We have now a definition of how a holobiont is structured according to the network theory. We may want to represent it as a triangle and, thinking about that, there could be a relation with the triangular symbol “the eye of God.”

And, indeed, a triangle can be seen as the icon for both a holobiont and God (or the Goddess Gaia). But let's not go into theology, this introduction should be enough to understand what a holobiont is. The next step is the concept of hierobiont, a network partly or completely structured in a hierarchical manner. But we'll see that in another post.

The Word for "Forest" is "Holobiont:" Reviewing a few Books on the Subject

 

The idea of "holobionts" is making inroads just about everywhere, although sometimes people describe the concept without using the term. But we are learning from what we see around us, and the best example from which to learn about holobionts is the forest. 

Just like no man is an island, a single tree doesn't make a holobiont. Not even several trees planted together make a good holobiont. They are a plantation, a completely different thing. And the naive faith that planting trees will solve all our climate problems is just that: a naive idea that plays straight into the hands of the logging companies which get to be paid twice: once for planting trees (to save the environment) and once for cutting the trees (selling the wood on the market). 

A true holobiont is not a single tree, not many trees stuck together in nice rows. It is a forest. And a forest needs to be born, to live, to grow, to mature, and to become a full-fledged holobiont. A living being. A creature of the planetary ecosystem that lives with it and gives life to much more than itself. Forests are part of the "biotic regulation" of the whole system, which includes controlling climate and managing the atmospheric rivers by means of the biotic pump mechanism. We cut forests at our own risk. Forests may not survive humans, but humans will surely not survive without forests. 

So, a quick review of 4 books about the forest as a holobiont, none of them mentions the term, but all of them are infused with it. 

The Hidden Life of Trees. Peter Wohlleben.(2016). A popular science book that had a remarkable success. It deserves it. It is timely, well done, and overall understandable, although at times a little too long. Wohlleben cites the biotic pump and one of its discoverers, Anastassia Makarieva, although, curiously, he doesn't use the term, always saying "water pump." But it is a fine book, by all means recommended. 

Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard, (2021). I had big expectations for this book, but I must say I was disappointed. There is nothing wrong with enlivening a text with personal stories about the author but, if one exaggerates, the book is no more a scientific text, but an autobiography of the author. This book should have been titled "An Autobiography of Suzanne Simard." Some people like biographies, personally I found this one completely flat. The stories about discovering the way trees communicate with each other are interspersed in a mass of uninteresting details about Simard's personal life told in a style that reminds that of a second-rate novel. Too bad, because Simard surely has interesting things to say. But, here, the idea just didn't work. 

The word for world is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1972). Not the best novel by Ursula Le Guin, it has an ideological overtone that harms the story, but it is still a gem -- as just about everything that Le Guin wrote. The Forest in the book is a metaphor for human consciousness: truly an anticipation of the concept of holobiont that came much later, but that Le Guin clearly had in mind. This novel also was at the basis of the later movie "Avatar" which also used some concepts by Suzanne Simard in describing inter-tree communication in forests.

Il Segreto del Bosco Vecchio, (The Secret of the Old Woods). By Dino Buzzati (1935). This is not a science book, it is a novel. But if you want to read about a true holobiont, do read it. The story of someone who inherits a wood and plans to cut it to make some money. Then, he discovers that the forest is inhabited by invisible spirits. In my modest opinion, it is one of the best novels ever written in the world. Too bad it doesn't seem to have been ever translated into English. A splendid movie was made out of it but, again, only in Italian.

 

And if you have some time, take a walk in the woods and discover the great holobiont yourself! Humans can be friends with trees even in difficult conditions. Here is a photo taken in Florence a few months ago, this lady made a little garden for herself and for everybody out of a small patch around a tree growing in front of her house, near a busy avenue. 

The Descent of Man: How Collaboration Made us What we are

 

 

 

150 years ago, Darwin published "The Descent of Man" -- another great intuition by one of the greatest scientists in history. Today, we understand how humans are what they are because they collaborate with each other -- something that we tend to forget in our current views that emphasize cutthroat competition. Here is how Richerson, Gavrilets, and De Waal comment on this point in their recent article on "Science"

"What makes us different is that our ancestors evolved greatly enhanced abilities for (and reliance on) cooperation, social learning, and cumulative culture—traits emphasized already by Darwin. Cooperation allowed for environmental risk buffering, cost reduction, and the access to new resources and benefits through the “economy of scale.” Learning and cumulative culture allowed for the accumulation and rapid spread of beneficial innovations between individuals and groups. The enhanced abilities to learn from and cooperate with others became a universal tool, removing the need to evolve specific biological organs for specific environmental challenges. These human traits likely evolved as a response to increasing high-frequency climate changes on the millennial and submillennial scales during the Pleistocene. Once the abilities for cumulative culture and extended cooperation were in place, a suite of subsequent evolutionary changes became possible and likely unavoidable."

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?

On the Role of Viruses in the Human Holobiont

 

This text is from Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride's book “Gut and Psychology Syndrome" I understand that it is not just heretic, but completely incomprehensible in the current debate. But is it possible that viruses are not our enemies but our friends? At least, to be carefully considered.