“More than half your body is not human”
That’s the clickbait headline for this BBC article.
I thought it might be something about Neanderthal genes, or perhaps mitochondria.
But no; it’s about bacteria, mainly gut bacteria:
Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.
Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s.
The field is even asking questions of what it means to be “human” and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.
“They are essential to your health,” says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, “your body isn’t just you”.
No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures.
This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels.
We’ve been hearing an awful lot about those gut bacteria lately, haven’t we? But the question here is whether they are a part of our bodies. I say no; they’re residents with benefits, and they also can confer benefits and/or cause problems. We have what I believe is called a symbiotic relationship with them, but that doesn’t make them an integral part of our bodies.
This is perhaps more a philosophical question than a physiological one. But when we transfer bacteria from one person to another (through the rather repulsive but often-helpful mode of fecal transplants, for example), there is no host rejection problem, at least not as far as I know. Nor is there one when we take probiotics, as I do (for what it’s worth).
You also have to consider epigenetics, in which our own gene expression can be altered by other factors. We are just at the beginning of understanding how complicated we are. Apparently epigenetic changes in how genes are expressed can be passed on and even affect evolution.
Epigenetics and microbiome were concepts that the Doctor Class and credentialed sorts before 2008, considered something only internet keyboard warriors would claim to know existed.
Every 10 years, 50% of the knowledge of the credentialed sort, becomes obsolete.
Later, they will then use probiotics and recommend it, while never mentioning that they had originally made fun of these keyboard warrior Know Nothing theories people had brought up decades and years ago to them.
In this fashion, human science and knowledge progresses and loses the original memory of how these breakthroughs were really treated as by the scientific consensus.
Apparently epigenetic changes in how genes are expressed can be passed on and even affect evolution.
The things geneticists said about how traits were passed down, was wrong.
It’s a kind of scientific consensus stuck on stupid that happens every once in awhile for the Old Guard that won’t die out.
What geneticists think they know about the DNA code isn’t even 1% of the totality.
Everyone is a jungle.
Well, also notice they say cell *count*. That is a little misleading. Bacteria are prokaryotic cells whereas plants and animals are made of eukaryotic cells. The individual cells that make up our bodies are far more complex and much larger than the bacterial cells. The average cell in our bodies probably has around 100 times the mass of a typical bacterium. So, our bodies would then be around 4-5% bacteria *by mass*, still more than most people would expect but certainly nothing like “half”. Mass media articles about scientific topics tend not to be very good. You always get the impression they are written by people who don’t have much understanding of the topic but they sure THINK they do.
This explains a lot of things.
And if you are of western European descent your genes are about 3 to 4% Neanderthal. Unless that info in obsolete.
I would once have been disposed to agree with Neo that the bacteria within us are companions rather than intrinsic parts of our being. But then I read “I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life,” by Ed Yong. Now, I’m not nearly so sure. By the time you’ve read about, say, the way toxoplasmosis bacteria shape the behavior of mice to make them easier prey for cats — by shutting down their aversion to cat urine, to be precise — in order to get the mice eaten by more cats and thus spread themselves more thoroughly into the feline population, along with many more such improbable astonishments, it’s hard to be sure of anything.
Strongly recommended to any curious layperson, and available, through Neo’s Amazon portal, of course, here:
https://preview.tinyurl.com/yd966bg6
The eastern martial cultivation and medicine has long postulated that the dantian, the gut specifically, is the source of human vitality and energy.
To the West, this might seem obvious as without food from the digestion track, we would all eventually starve and die.
To the East, they don’t place such high priority on isolating it to the exact mechanism but merely the general area. Because there are things in the gut that people don’t normally know about nor will know about.
Nor is this the end of these “discoveries”. There is also fascia and chi.
There are 72+ anomalies in H20 unexplained. H20 makes up about 70% of the human body volume. Are scientists such esteemed high priests yet they don’t know what 70% of us is made out of or what it does or why it does it?
Such a huge amount of ignorance for those claiming to be socially awarded, well credentialed, respectable sorts.
Oh, they say, the human body is just like a car, we open it up with surgery and scan it and we know everything. Doctors have a severe deficiency in knowledge concerning the human body.
It would be like finding a car that runs on orange juice, with no idea how the engine works or why it runs on juice, yet they can tweak the brakes, interior furnishings, and twack on the engine to make it run, to proclaim “they know”. This is why “water research” is crazy to modern scientists. Not because it lacks credence but because it makes no sense to modernists. What you have in your blood and body, humanity, makes no sense to scientists.
Yet they “know” because of their Doctor Class credentials… yeah right. Here’s your transfat, that may be good or not. Here’s your diet coke that may be good or not. Here’s your proteins and carbs that may be good now but not later.
You people are just basically experimental subjects for nutritionists and scientists to figure out how the body actually works. That’s why they seesaw all over the place once new studies come out. You are the new study. When they introduce some junk science outcome on nutrition, the food producers test it out on the consumers first, because they aren’t going to wait for a 50 year study before going by government HEALTH laws. They are corporations that need to make a profit.
GMO free now!
I dare say they have more problems with nutritional science than quantum physicists have with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in predicting the Standard Model of QM.
TommyJay Says:
April 11th, 2018 at 9:00 pm
And if you are of western European descent your genes are about 3 to 4% Neanderthal. Unless that info in obsolete.
Depends on how the source data calculated the match. For humans and monkeys, the reason why they said we were 97% or whatever match was because they threw out about 35% of the DNA that mismatched as “junk dna”. We barely match 68% with monkeys. In some circumstances, mice are closer to our neurology and thinking. Why else would so many studies use mice and drugs? It’s not because they are cheap and small.
There used to be a popular theory floating around in evolutionary biology: that our brains evolved bigger and better as time went on due to better nutrition. Ever hear the sneer that some people were “bird brains”? It meant “really stupid”, as in even worse than sub human intelligence.
Now we have found out that parrots and crows, those with bird brains, are smarter than apes and monkeys. Including some humans.
Now who is the bird brain, science?
Late Edit: up to 73% for new borns by water weight. Adult makes seem to hover around the 60% of their weight being H20 based. Females seem lower by about 10%, on average.
The volume equations are a little bit more complicated from what I had seen.
I had to check these numbers because I’m using memory normally. It’s a lot easier to remember figures if one derived them personally.
Mass media articles about scientific topics tend not to be very good. You always get the impression they are written by people who don’t have much understanding of the topic but they sure THINK they do.
They do the same thing as Jordan Peterson: dumbing it down for the masses.
That merely annoys some people, depending on how dumbed down it gets.
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2018/04/08/problem-practice-science/
In other news.
Ymar Sakar wrote:
“Mass media articles about ANY TOPIC tend not to be very good.”
FIFY
“You people.”
Somehow a doctor (a Japanese one) and science (say it ain’t so) figured out that thiamine deficiency was killing so many warriors in Japan in the late 1800s. Polished white rice had become a diet staple of status. Who would have guessed that? Must have been a gut instinct.
http://thiamine.dnr.cornell.edu/
Good job with the red herring there. Dogs can bark at people, but it has nothing to do with the current status quo.
Interwebs let you down? Confound those Doctors and scientists who know nothing, except when they do. Reality bites sometimes.
Reality doesn’t change, no matter what the experts say, nor what the morons say. Actual experts are supposed to know this, but it’s ever so profitable for con artists posing as “experts” to pretend reality is subjective and will change for the better if morons just give the con artist enough money.
That exerts what Darwin called “selection pressure” upon the morons… not to learn “everything,” which is impossible even were the morons not restricted, by definition, from learning anything important, but instead to instantly start rejecting anything a supposed “expert’ says the moment he/she starts treating reality as subjective, usually by contradicting their own previous claims without any explanation beyond “because I’M THE EXPERT SO SHUT UP.”
Even morons adapt when preyed upon, with the savage hunger the modern left now has for political power.
The experts have let down all of humanity, especially the self proclaimed ones. As a mirror, I can play that game too, better than they can even.
The problem of people with huge differences in verbal intelligence talking to each other is that they don’t make any sense to each other. It’s a foreign language problem.
If a red herring is raised and the response is “so what you are really saying is that you don’t know how to look at the internet”.
No, what I am really saying is that a red herring is a distraction people use to cover up their ignorance and problems, not that I have problems using the internet to look things up. This is like JordanP all over again.
No it’s about people making broad generalized statements of “fact” and when shown to be a poser, throwing up further distractions. A fun house mirror I suppose.
From what I’ve read, they shape us (like the mice mentioned above). They influence our hormones, our hunger, etc. Kinda’ scary. Almost like we were all created from the same ‘dust of the ground’ as Genesis puts it.
Speaking of bacteria, there is an article out today saying that Microbiologists have found that those bathroom hand dryers actually suck up bacteria floating around bathrooms–and guess where that bacteria comes from, with all those toilets flushing, throwing droplets containing fecal bacteria into the air–and then blow that bacteria all over your hands.
Time to head for the hand towels.
Could be much worse; some countries and cultures practice open defecation (no indoor plumbing, no latrines,…), and then there is in San Francisco.
In the “olden days” some bathrooms used to have a machine with a continuous loop of cotton towel that you could pull out, use, and then the next person pulled out a little bit more to wipe his hands on, but these loops of cotton toweling, used over and over again, were usually pretty grimy.
In fact, I was astonished when I ran across one of these old timey machines in a public bathroom somewhere in the last year or so.
I can’t imagine these grimy communal towels were any more sanitary than the electric hand dryers of today.
Snow – I always thought the towels would not keep looping, but rather come to an end when they were used up.