How human are we?
I recently read a fascinating article in the November 05 National Geographic Magazine. It stated that we are no more than the life-support machinery for a gaggle of genes that have their own selfish needs. “Most of our cells aren’t even human”.
It went on to say that if we were to count every single cell in our body, the vast majority, possibly by a factor of ten, would be microbes. There are microbes in your eyeballs, nose, mouth, and ears and all over your skin.
These non-human organisms resemble microscopic creatures that when magnified can look like monsters from horror-movies. There are up to a hundred trillion microorganisms in the human intestine.
The writer Joel Achenbach raised the question of what it means to be “human”.
The water molecules in our body are not. The DNA is human but that too reminds us that we have many of the same genes as other animals, so therefore most of the genetic information that we carry in and around our bodies is
nonhuman.
Scientists grow snippets of DNA and have come to the conclusion that each one of us hosts between 500 and 1000 species of microbes, which represents about 8,000 sub-species.
Thankfully, what is clear is that these microbes are not a bunch of invaders. Our human body is like a complex eco-system and we co-evolved. Gut microbes perform necessary functions such as digest food, produce vitamins and help to ward off disease. A symbiosis exists between mammals and microbes that goes back millions of years.
So it seems that we can probably learn a lot from these microbes in their microbial society.
What if we simply evolved as hosts, that over time, modifications were made to suit these organisms. Perhaps we needed to become more efficient at finding food for them.
On that note I will end. It certainly is food for thought.
