To Whom?

[degringolade]

 

Now, in my mental peregrinations, I have chosen to sit down on the idea of the primary organism being the Holobiont.  Now, this makes a couple of big assumptions that folks don't really like.  The most prominent of these little bits of social awkwardness is that the individual isn't really all that important in the grand scheme of things.   

I guess that it where I am thinking about going with this little foray into the nature of things.  Rather than starting out with the idea of an individual member as H. Sapiens being the starting point, the way that I want to approach it is what is the nature of the relationship between the cognition and consciousness of the individual and the holobiont of which we are a part.  Tough bit of work this.  None of the standard tools offered us in our education seem to be of any particular use.  The relationship is easy within the smaller holobiont that accounts for we individuals currently called humans, but for right now lets say the the holobiont problem just doesn't seem to scale well.

But only a minimum time has been applied to the problem.  Like most ideas the big issue seems pretty good, but the devil lies in the details.  I think that i Need to set up a formal thesis here in the none to distant future.  

So, per the requirements and the training that I received in my youth I have been reading a lot of things that weren't fashionable in the long ago.  So today I am reviewing the netherworld of symbiogenesis and going to lunch with the family

Comments

Symbiogenesis - Sounds like "Symbiogenmyass"

[mschmidt]

Symbiogenesis, or endosymbiotic theory, is the leading evolutionary theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic organisms. The theory holds that mitochondria, plastids such as chloroplasts, and possibly other organelles of eukaryotic cells are descended from formerly free-living prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) taken one inside the other in endosymbiosis. Mitochondria appear to be phylogenetically related to Rickettsiales proteobacteria, and chloroplasts to nitrogen-fixing filamentous cyanobacteria.

Right.

I may sound like a simpleton, but it seems to me that every living thing, is what it is, because of hunger – either the living thing’s, or whatever living thing eats them. If something is alive, it eats something to remain alive.

I suspect that all that technical language above says the same thing somehow. I imagine all those entities that science has named are what they are because of what they eat, and what eats them – but the explanation for how it all happens is probably unknowingly complex.

Humans get fancy when solving the hunger problem; we feed animals special food just to make them taste a certain way that humans like. This is a benefit that comes with being at the good end of the food chain – at least the length of chain that we know about. It seems to me that your project is to stand back and see if there is more to the food chain than shown.

So, science says that the role for something is to feed X, but the thing’s role is to be attractive to X while it is doing something else that has nothing to do with feeding X.

The laborers that built a great nation were not working to build a great nation, they were working for a good paycheck. The slaves who helped build a great nation, were not working to build a great nation, they were working to help white people who took them in and gave them work. The point is, nothing that produces the significant result, has any idea that it is producing the significant result.

Likewise, no living thing on earth is trying to survive, except maybe a human who understands the concept and is about to experience pain. “Living” is what all living things do, not surviving. Survival is something that science makes up.

As soon as there is a system in place where every member knows what is going on, what the system does not realize, is that their system is only a small factor in a bigger operation, and no member of the their system has a clue what is going on in the big operation.

Where does it end? Nobody can possibly know, so everybody should just keep doing their job.

Re: Symbiogenesis - Sounds like "Symbiogenmyass"

[degringolade]

Probably right here:

But things connect and the nature of the way the world works is convoluted and knowledge of such a thing somehow has to pieced together out of scraps and hints.

I am not going to take everything that I learn out of cell biology to the eventual concept of the way things roll. Just starting where I know how to start.

Starting lines aren't endpoints