Bacteria Barbie

  Humans do not dominate the planet because of our clever tools or our art and science but because we have been able to enslave one another and build relentlessly on this control over our own species. - JB

Each human harbors ninety trillion bacteria. This is ten times the total number of human cells present in a body.  There are 7.4 billion humans on Earth, 7.4 billion times seventy trillion is a large population. The total human population is a rounding error in relation to the total number of individual bacteria. The total population of all multi-cell animals including insects, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fishes and birds is a rounding error in the face of this colossal microbe population. The majority of Earth’s biomass comprises microbes.

Think of a naked Barbie doll as the kingdom of bacteria and each of 8 million  species of animals as one of her outfits. One costume per occasion / ecosystem. Humans are only one of these 8 million. The signal feature of the human costume for Bacteria Barbie is our multi-folded neocortex. The complexity ( number of folds)  of our neocortex is the only physical characteristic distinguishing humans from most of the hundreds of other mammal species,  all of which have elaborate nervous systems-brains. You can find every brain area possessed by humans in a killer whale, dolphin, chimp or a mouse. Our neocortex has more neurons packed into six layers and a multitude of folds, though total mass of the human neocortex is smaller than in several large mammals. Sperm whale brain: 8,000 cc, human brain: 1,300 cc. Human brain surface area: 2,275 cm squared  bottlenose dolphin brain surface area: 3,745 cm squared. Human neocortex has six layers of neurons, dolphin and other large mammals only five thus the greater brainpower in the realm of society-building, social interaction.

JB Theory: Our human bacteriome has a consciousness that has evolved over three billion years that has directed its evolution and all higher animal evolution for the past 1.5 billion years.

Example: Each of us has 45 trillion bacteria in our gut, some of them initiate the feeding cascade. Bacteria get hungry, sending signals to ghrelin and glucagon molecules in the stomach causing pangs of hunger signaling afferent neurons through the spinal cord to our thalamus and hypothalamus in the brainstem. The hypothalamus sends an array of hormones through the brain, head and body that prepare for eating. When gut bacteria are sated they initiate the leptin cascade and we stop eating.  All animals are either eating or making plans to secure food ( working 9 to 5 at office, pumping iron at the gym) every waking hour. Not much animal behavior is more than one “Kevin Bacon” degree from eating. For the first 4.5 million years of human existence we spent all day hunting and gathering (gathering is hunting for nuts and berries). Today hunting takes myriad forms but it’s all hunting. Humans are directed by our voracious bacteria to hunt all day and into the night.

To do: Identify the chemical and or electrical signals  and inter-bacterial electrical networks using membrane filaments as pathways and antennae between gut bacteria and ghrelin hormone ( eat) and for signals between leptin and gut bacteria (stop eating-you’re full).

JB Questions and observations: ( reading: “Empire of Cotton” - Beckert)

1. Both South Asians and Native americans were colonized by Western Europeans. why were Native Americans obliterated and South Asians not?  Was destruction-causation all microbial?
2. Does ethanol ( Whiskey, vodka, gin etc.) damage survivin molecules in the human gut epithelial cells thus exposing intestinal tissue to microbial harm? “Survivin is a key regulator of gut tissue integrity as it regulates epithelial homeostasis in the stem cell niche.” - Martini et al
3. Britain and Boston financed and manufactured cloth made from cotton grown by one million American slaves they so vigorously lobbied to “liberate”  “Lords of the loom and lords of the lash were tightly linked.”see: “Empire of Cotton” by Sven Beckert
4. Did slaves build the railroads of the American south between 1830 and 1861?
5. Andrew Jackson is to global capitalism what Isaac Newton is to classical physics. Jackson was the “Key Man” as he initiated the core capitalist cascade of 1.  Land appropriation by coercion at American South  2. Cotton growers moving into this incredibly fertile-suitable land, displacing Native Americans, to grow high quality cotton. 3. USA cotton grown by slaves fuels the Industrial Revolution in Britain and across the globe with high quality cotton for distribution to European textile mills at ever lower prices. Andrew Jackson was the paradigm shifter from War Capitalism to Industrial Capitalism. He should not only remain on the twenty dollar bill, his portrait ought to be enlarged and printed in four colors.
6. Was there a strong relationship between the French blockade of British trade from 1806-1814 and the War of 1812 in USA?
7. What were the health effects of calico printing dyes-inks on Europeans during the 19th century rer: ink-immune system integrity-gene damage via skin absorption?
8. If a liver cell ( hepatocyte) was the size of a football field in height-width and depth, a protein molecule would be the size of a snowflake.
9. Proteins are synthesized at ribosomes dotted around the rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER) that surrounds the cell nuclear membrane.
10. Does a cell nucleus migrate within the cell volume so that it is nearest the zone of outer cell membrane that is closest to the nearest capillary for the transport of this cell’s protein products to other areas of the body? It seems that the vacuoles transporting these proteins from the RER to the outer membrane would want to traverse the shortest distance across the volume of the cell and avoid dodging unnecessary organelles and vacuole traffic.
11. How does a cell nucleus detect the nearest capillary so that it can shift toward it? Electromagnetic signal via iron-rich proteinic “wires” extending from outer surface of cell membrane-nanostructures?, wireless chemical signal?, smell, taste, touch?
12. Sven Beckert, in his book covering the roots of global capitalism asserts that there are two phases to Capitalism: War Capitalism where European absolutist states conquered indigenous people and one another to expand and control markets followed by Industrial Capitalism characterized by harnessing steam power, economically and legally coercing proletarian labor  and enacting laws that shifted land from difficult to manage communal ownership to private ownership enforced by law. 1.  Kill-’em ( “others”) -steal their land, 2. Enslave your own people literally or figuratively with backbreaking, mind-stunting, soul-killing factory work and one-sided credit schemes.  Beckert asserts that War Capitalism occurred first and paved the way for Industrial Capitalism which has thrived from the late 18th century until the present. These have been occurring simultaneously all along. The two capitalisms are an ongoing duality - subparts of the overarching capitalist project.
13. What is the smallest box of Crayolas that will deliver an orange crayon? Twelve. what is the smallest box of Crayolas that will deliver a chartreuse” Sixty-four.
14. Individual freedom implies a gradient between the individual and his / her nation. Global capitalism, over the past 250 years has burgeoned because it has been and continues to be an extremely efficient gradient reduction engine. Capitalism reduces all things. It has reduced the inherent-latent and expressed power of the free individual as all of those in a capitalist culture are enmeshed in its machinery of work-debt-spectacle-myth-habit. Capitalism is a gradient reduction engine. Capitalism’s great convection sucks free young people into the abyss of capitalist wage-slavery-credit-workaholism where they try to remain afloat in its unrelenting, faceless turbulence.
15. One of the larger failings of Christianity was to remain silent  during the 19th century as three generations of European and American children were lost to brutal work in textile mills. And adding to this cowardice is a toxic ecumenical ethos centered around a work ethic, the inevitability of work, as if any animal would think otherwise about slaving from dawn to dusk for subsistence. Christian apologists who watched this unfold remind me of the American doctors who gave their stamp of approval to continue deadly below surface work on The Brooklyn bridge as hundreds of men died agonizing deaths from nitrogen narcosis after shovelling mud and sand deep under the river within 60’ x 60’ caissons.
16. Regarding networks - power lies at intersections not at the terminals.
17. The entire Industrializing-colonializing world was dependent upon American Slavery in the 19th century prior to The Civil War: England, France, German Lands, Belgium, Switzerland, Greece, Egypt, Turkey and India
18. Capitalists have lobbied with vigor over centuries for government intervention, for wars against indigenous people, railways, highways, port facilities, land laws, contract laws, shipping protection and tariffs. They shout whenever the government spends money for social well being for the other 95%. They aggrandize themselves as independent, self-made, prudent, ad nauseum. Capitalism has always been a one-way spending street whose motto is: remove, enslave, suppress, coerce, dominate.
19. Multicell life evolves as a more ferocious entropic gradient reduction system whose greater complexity ( than single cell prokaryotes) enables quicker solar energy dissipation.
20. What role have microbes had in evolution? The symbiosis of energy producing mitochondria with early bacteria was a significant breakthrough opening the door to multicell life able to burn a lot of energy.
21. Do gut microbes use the central nervous system pathways to communicate with the brain?
22. Do gut microbes exist in a caste system with long-term resident species electrically interconnected with nanowires that can signal within an entire population of bacteria and that can also signal the brain? Are lower-caste microbes ones who ride out by the billions on every turd? Is microbial life democratic or absolutist?
23. Might a person contain bacteria that were also present in medieval ancestors?
24. If gut bacteria grow electrical filaments, how long does it take for a next generation to grow its new filaments?
25. Are there bacterial filament electrical networks that live as long as the person and that expand as the person ages and the microbe population grows?
26. Might one’s internal organs get tangled up over time with bacterial filaments like an overgrown, clotted root system in a small flower pot?
27. One word: Electromicrobiology

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February 23, 2016    9:22 AM