In memory of an old giant: the great oak of Fiesole.

 

The Great Oak of Fiesole, in Tuscany, grew close to where I lived for most of my life. I can't say how old it may have been, surely at least one century, perhaps more. In the picture (of a few years ago), you see how large it was in comparison with Cristina. 

The oak was a feature of my world. I have been living in that area for nearly 50 years, and I don't remember when exactly I discovered this giant tree, but I can tell you that it was the target of many attempts of mine to speak with trees. I must admit that, despite my efforts, the Great Oak never spoke back to me in intelligible words. But I often had the sensation that we were communicating with each other in ways that didn't imply words. 

I moved to a different location in 2019, on the other side of the town. But I went back a few times to visit the Great Oak. Unfortunately, last summer, I discovered that it was no more. Still standing, but dead.  

I don't know what killed the great tree. There were clear signs of fungal infection: black spots on the bark. That doesn't mean that the tree was killed by a fungus -- fungi are opportunistic creatures, they may have attacked the bark when the tree was already dead or sick. One possibility was the drought that struck the area near Florence last summer. But other oaks near the Great Oak survived, so it is not likely. 

We'll probably never know what killed the Great Oak, but it is a reminder that no holobiont on this planet is immortal. This tree went through its cycle, and now new trees will grow in its place. It is the way things are and have to be. 

One curious thing, though, near the dead tree I noted a plastic tube that went all the way to the nearest house, a hundred meters away. My explanation is that someone noted that the tree was sick, maybe they noted the yellow leaves, and so they tried to save it by irrigating it. Clearly, I was not the only one who appreciated that tree. It didn't work, but it shows that sometimes people truly love trees. So, there is some hope that trees and humans can live together in harmony on this planet!

Here is a picture of my wife, Grazia, hugging another large tree, a cypress, not far from where the Great Oak stood. I think she can speak to trees better than me!

 

 

Rain is Life, and Holobionts Create it

 

Buying vegetables at a stall in Florence on a rainy day. My wife, Grazia, is the one with the pink umbrella. 

By Ugo Bardi

After three months of drought during the summer, Florence is now drenched in rain. It has been raining for two months and people are complaining that it is too much! But it is how things have to be: I recently discovered that rain is an "autocatalytic" phenomenon. A more humid atmosphere creates more rain, and rain creates a more humid atmosphere. And that creates long periods of static weather -- too little rain and then too much. 

I learned that from the work of Anastassia Makarieva, Mara Baudena, and several others who have studied the relationship between atmospheric humidity and rain. Look at this figure, from a paper by Makarieva et al., to be published.

The y-axis is the amount of rain, in mm/hour. The x-axis is the amount of water vapor in the "air column." Note the strongly non-linear relationship. It is a typical power law: a small increase in atmospheric humidity causes a large change in rainfall. The three red points indicate the boundary of the "abiotic regime" (no rain) and the power law region.  

As I said, it is an autocatalytic phenomenon, Rain tends to generate more rain, at least as long as it wets the land and it generates moisture transpiration, which increases the water vapor content in the atmosphere. This has very practical consequences in many senses. One is the role of forests in weather and climate. Forests generate strong evapotranspiration, that is they pump water from the soil to the atmosphere. And, also, forests tend to keep water in the soil, slowing down the runoff.

So, not only do forests generate rain, but they also tend to maintain the rain pattern. Without forests, and with the land covered with buildings, you have the typical desert climate: dry most of the time, then with short periods of heavy rain. Disasters ensue, now a common pattern in areas such as California or Italy, where deforestation has taken place. 

So, we need our fellow holobionts, the trees. Onward, fellow holobionts!

(below, some rain-loving holobionts pictured together)

Learning from plants: how to become a forest

 

The Boboli Garden in Florence, which Andrea Battiata cites as an example of harmony and connectedness. Battiata is an agronomist living in Florence who set up a vegetable garden called "ortobioattivo" where he cultivates vegetables using only natural methods. Here, he does not directly mention holobionts but makes a fundamental point on how the network of a forest is organized as a holobiont, and how we, humans, could learn a lot from forests. Even to the point of "becoming" a forest. It is a deep, deep point. You can compare Battiata's considerations with those of Blair Fix, a Canadian physicist. We have a big problem with an entity we created, perhaps unwillingly, the human social hierarchy, which may be the ultimate origin of the economic inequality in the world. The ways of holobionts are many, but all are worth following.  

by Andrea Battiata 

Over the past decade, in which I have begun to produce food that is good for people and at the same time does not deplete the fertility of the earth, I have felt fortunate to have co-created meaningful relationships that are deeply connected.  I realize now that the intense training to become a co-evolutionary agronomist was, more than anything else, a prelude to receiving lessons from plants and from how plants are virtuous.

Beautiful are the gatherings at my garden, "Ortobioattivo" where people get together with others who understand their concern for the future and share the enormous range of emotional intensity surrounding their lifestyle. These things matter, because loneliness is a disease in and of itself. There is much research to support this: one scientific study showed that people who had weaker social ties were 50 percent more likely to die early than those with stronger ties. Being disconnected, in fact, poses a danger comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and was more predictive of early death than the effects of air pollution or physical inactivity.

It is the sense of belonging to something greater than one's existential loneliness and the tangible support derived from this sense that makes us feel vital; connection is so important to us, humans, that without it we wither and may even die. In our first months of life, we are cradled, kissed, and hugged, and, along with eye contact, we receive loving touch and hear our names spoken to us.

We are programmed for this. We are evolving to relate to each other. The search for models and ideas for building communities that relate to and improve their existence with food has become a way of life for me. 

I think that if we can create places and spaces that give what we are looking for such as connection with nature, interaction or physical proximity to each other, a structure that provides opportunities for community building, services, and learning appropriate lifestyles to make us feel good by feeding well, we can be a "forest", helping each other just like plants that stay together and help each other.

The nature of plants shows us the way how communities grow and thrive despite, overcoming the challenges of finding space, light, and fertile soil. 

Nature does this. Every day, from an evolutionary perspective. 

I think we can do it too.

Plant communities are constantly adapting to their environments: growing deep tap roots when water is scarce, flowering at night to prevent dehydration and growing bright and colorful flowers to attract pollinators. Together they create ingenious ways to survive and thrive even in harsh deserts and tropical forests. Humans, too, can find a connection with the Earth. We long for membership in a community and constantly work to adapt to the negative factors of isolation and separation that we face and often create. As scientific research and experience show, as our social ties weaken and our sense of belonging diminishes, we lose one of the great possibilities for resilience to the negative factors of daily life.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed to us, through the difficulties of our continued isolation and estrangement, that we are a species with a deep need for connection. Exactly like the mycelium of fungi that communicates in an uinderground network, good human community functions as a huge underground support system, allowing us to live well above ground in our individual bodies. We are attached to the Earth, physically and metaphorically. Looking to Nature for healthy living patterns makes sense, and it is there that wisdom can be found in times of trouble.

Many of the most successful health models are literally outside our windows and based in communities. Here in Florence, in early fall, I look out the window at the Boboli Gardens, a large city park in the center of the city. The trees are in various states of change; many are already bare and some are clinging to a few multicolored leaves. They are alive, but the pulse of energy is not visible as they head into winter. Trees, of course, do not die in winter but become dormant. It is a semi-hibernation that cause everything inside the tree to slow down: metabolism, energy consumption, growth. Since they do not produce photosynthesis and thus energy in winter, they release their leaves, which require a great deal of energy to maintain. In these autumn days, trees transfer water into their cells and, when the temperature drops, move that water from inside the cell to the tiny spaces outside, between the cells. This prevents tree cells from freezing.

Even in this dormant state, trees communicate through their root structure, sending nourishment to smaller trees around them that need it, and protecting each other by sending chemical communication messages. They work in a community. Nature is literally showing us the way to health. Communicate and be close to those you care about. Some of the answers are right there, outside the window, in our parks rich of hedges and trees, everywhere in Florence. All we have to do is look away from our computers, television screens, and cell phones to stop, listen and absorb it all.

Without dormancy, energy conservation, leaf fall, rest, restoration, a different appearance throughout the seasons, and the added benefit of a community of trees nearby, a tree may not survive for long and will not have the much-needed energy to thrive and gather sun from the sky and nutrients from the earth. With these adaptations, a tree can survive several challenging seasons.

The simplicity of this lesson is lost in the complexity of human life. There are people who are burning their energy on all fronts: work, family, conflict, poverty, violence, wars, and stress from multiple sources.

And while the narrative may be different for each person, the message of becoming like a tree may be the same. This unhealthy living condition is creating a winter, and inner health and strength must be preserved by limiting emotional expenditure in every way possible. Having a community to lean on when winter is upon us can make a significant difference in healing, mental health and spiritual stability. In the end, like trees and mushrooms.

Ultimately, the way of being in connection with other people and being of use, or at least listening and empathizing, is life-giving and makes us feel that we are in connection with Nature. We don't have to do anything so naturally different or unique or special to create communities to which we can all belong. Exactly like plants!

The Krebs Cycle: The Origin of Life?

 

You probably know Nick Lane for his books, such as the rather famous (among some slightly nerdy people, I read it twice!!) "The Vital Question." An older, but still interesting, book by Lane is "Oxygen, the Molecule that made the World."

Nick Lane was recently interviewed on "Nautilus" about his new book, "Transformer: the Deep Chemistry of Life." It is about the Krebs cycle, the engine that powers all the holobionts on this planet. Here, Lane describes how we may be finally cracking the mystery of the origins of life: an epochal discovery. You probably remember how, in the 1950s, it was discovered that the so-called "primordial soup" could generate aminoacids when exposed to ultraviolet rays or electrical discharges. Then, it became fashionable to think that life could have developed on Earth as the result of the assembling of aminoacids to form DNA or RNA molecules. It also became fashionable to think in terms of the "RNA world" that may have preceded the current molecular structure of cells.

Alas, it didn't work. Aminoacids stubbornly refused to assemble themselves into anything more than short-chain peptides, molecules akin to proteins, but much simpler and smaller. This field was gradually abandoned for lack of success in obtaining any useful results about the origin of life. . But now, Lane is reconsidering the idea with a new take: trying to see if it is possible to self-assemble the Krebs cycle or at least something that resembles the Krebs cycle. (Image from Wikipedia)

Fascinating story. I am going to order Lane's new book, even though I don't guarantee that I am nerdy enough to read it twice (maybe not even once), but I'll try.

And, as usual, onward, fellow holobionts!!

Holobionts: a new Paradigm to Understand the Role of Humankind in the Ecosystem

You are a holobiont, I am a holobiont, we are all holobionts.

"Holobiont" means, literally, "whole living creature." It is a concept known in biology at least from the 1930s, but that was rediscovered and diffused by Lynn Margulis in the 1990s, to emphasize how life is more than all a question of collaboration. Everything in life is an exchange of matter, energy, or information: holobionts are the building blocks of everything in the ecosystem, and also of human-made systems: families, companies, associations, markets, and more. The concept of holobiont gives us a new paradigm to rebuild our relationship with the ecosystem and with our fellow human beings.

Onward, fellow holobionts!

Searching for Our Ancestresses: A Travel to the Origin of Time

 

Emma Ardinghi, my great-grandmother, animated by deep-fake technologies. She was born in the 1860s and died in the 1930s. Not many of us have images of their ancestors of more than a century ago. But what if some ultra-advanced technology could show your ancestors all the way to back to the creation of the world? (image created on this site. To know more about Emma, see here.)

Let's imagine a magic trick, or maybe a time machine, or a DNA-reconstructing technology, or some unknown laws of physics. Something, anyway, that shows you your ancestresses, all of them, one by one in a long, long string of mothers that leads you far, far back in time, all the way to the beginning of life on Earth. You are looking maybe into a screen, maybe into a crystal ball, or maybe into the clear waters of a stream in the light of the Moon. Just imagine.

Ten Generations (250 years). This stream of ten generations lasts ten minutes, one minute for each ancestress. The first face is our mother, of course. You know her well. You see her as a young woman, as you saw her in many old photos. Then, there appears your Grandmother, again as a young woman. Maybe you met her, maybe you remember her only from some faded pictures. She looks a little like you, same skin color and same eyes. As new images appear, you see faces you had never seen. The parade stops with the face of a woman who is your ancestor of 10 generations ago. She was born around 250 years before you, in a century when almost everyone was a peasant and there existed no such things as electricity, cars, or radio and TV. She has the same skin color as you, the same shape of eyes and nose, and probably a similar hair color. Let's assume that she is from Europe or North America and, in this case, she is most likely white. She wears a long cotton skirt and a shirt under a wool corset. She also wears a head cap and wooden sandals, no makeup on her face, her only ornament is a hairpin that she uses to keep her hair in a bun. She looks strong, in good physical shape, not a trace of fat on her body. Her husband appears behind her, a peasant wearing simple clothes and wooden sandals. In the background, you see the brick walls of the house. The windows are small and have wooden shutters. In a corner, a large fireplace. Although she is linked to you by a series of ten generations, her genetic imprint on you has been so diluted that she doesn't look very much like you. Still, if you look into her eyes, you feel a certain kindness, a certain sensation of familiarity. From wherever the image comes from, she locks her eyes into yours and smiles before fading. 

100 Generations (2000 years). Now the images change on the screen every six seconds. In ten minutes you see a hundred ancestresses, one after the other, separated by about 20 years from each other. Tall and not so tall, with long hair, short hair, sturdy, thin, lean, smiling, or maybe sad. There is a certain continuity with these images, the skin color remains about the same as yours: if you are black, they are black, and if you are white, they are white. And if you have slant eyes, they have slant eyes, too. But if you are blond, or you have clear-colored eyes, you'll see this feature disappearing: the eyes of your ancestresses gradually becoming brown, and their hair turns dark brown or black. When you arrive at the end of the sequence, you see someone who lived around 2000 years ago, at the time of the highest glory of the Roman Empire. She looks sturdy, but a little worn out by work and fatigue. She may wear a linen tunic under a heavy woolen cape. She may be a citizen of a large city, or someone living in a small village.  Behind her, her husband shows up. He is wearing similar clothes, a tunic, and a woolen mantle. Behind them, a brick wall with no windows, a fireplace in a corner. You have a glimpse of a simple wooden bed and a door. She doesn't look very much like you but, as you look into her face, you note a certain fire in her dark eyes. She is proud to be a citizen of the city or of the village where she lives. She smiles with an air of satisfaction at seeing that remote descendant of hers. For a moment, you are lost in those black eyes of her, then she fades away, and the parade restarts.

1000 generations (15 thousand years). Now the faces flash even faster, less than one second after each other. You see flickering faces, giving you just a quick glance of a few details: a hairpin, earrings, and an especially bright smile. These women maintain the same skin color you have and the same eye shape. But they look robust and sturdy, in good physical shape. The flickering stops with a woman appearing in front of you, looking straight at you. Let's assume that she is white. She wears a jacket and a gown in tanned skin. Around her neck, a leather necklace with hanging ivory teeth, maybe of a shark. Her hair is black, kept together by a leather lace at the back. Around her, you perceive a hut made of animal skin, mammoth tusks planted vertically in the soil are holding the skins together and a fire is burning at the center. Behind her, you see her husband. He wears the same kind of leather clothes. You see a stone-tipped lance leaning against the leather wall, and you can almost smell the burned fat of the animals in the hut. You look at her face. She doesn't look like you, not at all. But she has a certain air of pride that you recognize as universal among humans. She smiles at you, she seems to be happy to see this descendant of hers that she sees for such a short time. Then, she fades away.

10,000 generations (150,000 years). It is a whirl of faces that you see dancing on the screen. What you notice most is how the skin of your ancestresses is becoming darker and darker. As the movement stops, you are looking into the face of a black woman. She has curly brown hair, black eyes looking straight into yours. She is tall, she looks athletic. She wears a necklace made with seashells and a leather belt around her waist as she stands in the bright sun. You know that she is living somewhere in Africa and, behind her, you see the blue of the Ocean. In the distance, the Savannah extends all the way to the horizon. Around her, you see stones arranged in circles, traces of a campground where she lives, together with her group. You see her man standing behind her. Like her, he is black, tall and athletic, wearing only a leather belt around his waist. He holds a stone-tipped spear in his hands. An abyss of time separates you from her, and yet, somehow you recognize each other. You look into her eyes, she looks into yours. She smiles, although she looks a little perplexed at seeing this weird descendant of hers, so remote from her. But she seems to know that her descendants will cross that vast desert, spreading in the Northern forests and everywhere on Earth. She smiles at you as she says something that you don't understand, but that may be a charm of good luck. You smile back as she fades away.

100,000 generations. (one million years). What you see now is a continuous transformation, a morphing. The faces of your ancestresses change, shrink, their bones shift, they develop a pronounced brow ridge. Their skin remains dark, and when the sequence stops, you are in front of the face of this remote ancestress of yours, separated from you by one million years.  You see her standing in the open, among rocks and animal bones. She is completely naked, her skin mostly hairless. She is not tall, but not so much shorter than you. Behind her, a flat Savannah's landscape with shrubs and isolated trees. She is different, alien, with her broad nose, her flat skull under her black, long hair. You know that she is a member of the species called "homo erectus," not the same species you belong to, and you are tempted to call her "female," rather than "woman."  And yet, she partakes something of the human nature, you can't miss that. She has round breasts, and rounded buttocks, a human trait that other primates do not share. Nearby, you see her man, holding a hand axe in his hands. She is linked to you by an incredibly long series of motherhoods, each one an improbable event, and yet that chain led exactly to you.  You think for a moment at how a hundred thousand times a man and a woman, your ancestors, mated to generate the unlikely series of creatures that led to what you are. You look at each other in the eyes. Across a huge chasm of millennia, she nods at you, smiling, a gesture unchanged over such a long time. Then, she fades away.

One million generations (10 million years). Now you are rushing to the remote origins of the creatures we call "hominina." As the face morphs in front of you, gradually it becomes something not fully human. The sequence stops as you are in front of a face. Still a face, yes, but not the face of a sapiens. You are looking at a female of a different species. She is hairy, small, and sitting in a forested area together with other members of her group. The male, behind her, is bigger than her, and he looks suspiciously in your direction. You know that these creatures are common ancestors not just to you, but also to chimpanzees and gorillas. She looks at you, tilting her head a little as if she were surprised. You smile at her, she does not respond in kind, but she smacks her lips in your direction. A kiss from an ancestress of you who lived 10 million years ago. Then, the image fades away.

Ten million generations (100 million years). Now the creatures you see morphing on the screen rapidly cease having a face, they now have a snout. You see furry creatures quivering on the screen. The sequence stops to give you a glimpse of a four-footed creature that looks at you, puzzled, for a moment, before scuttling away, disappearing among the vegetation. Was that your ancestress? Yes, she was.  

A hundred million generations (400 million years). Creatures smaller and smaller appear on the screen, they rapidly lose their fur, they become flat, lizard-like animals. Smaller and smaller, until they disappear and you are facing the seashore from an empty beach in the sun. You know that somewhere, under the surface, a female creature is swimming. An extremely remote ancestress of yours. 

A billion generations (one billion years ago). You are still looking at the sea. An ocean of time goes by and nothing happens. You only know that, down there, there is something alive, quivering, changing. Microscopic unicellular creatures are busy reproducing themselves by mitosis, splitting themselves in two. They are no more males and females, yet they are the origin of what you are, there, below the surface of that remote ocean. 

10 billion generations (5 billion years ago). Now the view moves underwater. In the darkness, you dimly perceive submarine mountains spewing gas bubbles everywhere. You know that those mounds are the factories where organic life is being created. It is strange to think that your so-remote ancestor is not anymore a living creature, but an organic molecule. As you watch, the sea boils in a great turmoil as you enter the Hadean, the age of hell. Then, everything fades into darkness. Before the scene goes away, you have a glimpse of large, bright eyes looking at you. The Goddess herself is there, dancing in the emptiness of space while she creates the world. Gaia, the mother of us all. 

_______________________________________________________________________

Some images. None of them refers to a specific description in the text of this post, but they can give us some idea of what our ancestresses may have been looking like. 

This woman lived in Tuscany probably during the 2nd century BC, more than 2000 years ago. We know her name, "Larthia Seianti." She was Etruscan, a rich woman (note the armilla bracelet on her arm) who could afford an elaborate sculpture over her sarcophagus. It is a realistic portrait, at least in part. And, curiously, she looks a lot like a Tuscan friend of mine, living in Tuscany nowadays. She is likely one of her ancestress, just as an ancestress of mine. 

The reconstruction of the face of a Neolithic woman who lived about 7,500 years ago in the area that is now called Gibraltar. She has been nicknamed "Calpeia" from the ancient name of the Gibraltar mountain, "Mons Calpe." DNA analysis shows that she, or her immediate ancestors, came to the Iberian Peninsula most likely from Anatolia by boat. (source)

The "Venus of Brassenpouy," discovered in 1894 in Southern France. It is a  portrait of someone who lived more than 20,000 years ago. We cannot say whether it is realistic or not, just as we cannot be completely sure that it is a woman's face. But it is perhaps the earliest recognizable portrait ever made in human history.  

An impression of how a Paleolithic woman could have looked like, living maybe 20,000-50,000 years ago in Europe. Note her dark skin: it is a remnant of her African ancestry. (source)

 

A reconstruction of the face of a Neanderthal woman (from Earth Archives). She might have lived a few hundred thousand years ago. Several things in this image are uncertain, but note her heavy brow ridges, a typical Neanderthal characteristic. Note her eyes and her skin: the light color is a characteristic of people living in Northern regions. Is she an ancestor of some of us? It is not completely certain but, yes, many of us have Neanderthal genes in their DNA.

The reconstruction of a female Australopithecus who could have been living in Africa some 2 million years ago. If she had the typical human metabolism, she must have been capable of cooling by sweating. It is a feature incompatible with a thick body hair. And, indeed, she is shown with sparse hair, although she may well have had none. Note also her human-like round breasts. It is a likely secondary sexual characteristics of hominins which tend to stand upright most of the time. An ancestress of ours? Maybe. (source)

 

  

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 March of the Holobots

I am just back from a scientific meeting held in a small city in the mountains, you know, like things were.... when? Was it the Pleistocene, when people met in person to discuss things? Or was it before the PETM, during the Paleocene? Anyway, you learn things while having discussions at dinner with the other attendees. And I had a very interesting dinner with a group of roboticists. Many, many ideas. One I came up with is that of the "Holobot" -- the solid state equivalent of the holobiont! 

Bots are not based on cells, and they have no genetic code, either. So they are born holobionts.We are witnessing the birth of a new ecosystem that we might describe with the words of a recent article on Quanta Magazine (h/t Chuck Pezeshky): 

"Within this theory, individuals can be cells, tissues, organisms, colonies, companies, political institutions, online groups, artificial intelligence or cities — even ideas or theories, according to Krakauer. “What we’re trying to do is discover a whole zoo of life forms that extend far beyond what we have conventionally called living,”

So, the bots we are building can be seen as individuals and they do fulfill this extended definition of "life" -- a dynamic phenomenon that extends in time, not being just limited in space. It is just that they are not the same kind of life as ours. And so, onward, fellow holobots!

This subject is also being discussed on the Facebook group "The Proud Holobionts"