Every cell in your body (there are about 10 times as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way) is an individual unit working in its own local ecosystem, like a bunny-rabbit grazing and pooping on a field, on an island, on a planet. Only 10% of the cells in your body share your DNA. Much of the rest are bacteria, and most of those live in your gut.
The non-human cells living inside you have evolved alongside you, and you have evolved alongside them. They alter your mood and personality, they give you some diseases and disorders and protect you from others, and they can greatly affect your propensity to put on weight (New Yorker article).
Although the mind is a kind-of cohesive, self-aware network, we are really compound beings, like an ant-nest, rather than isolated individuals. I think that individuals in society should see that community is like that, too. We are little microbes within this cosmos. We should be cool with that. A little cell that tries to take over the whole body is a cancer-cell, and it eventually kills its own environment and itself.
Tags: health, microbiology, Science
June 5, 2010 at 8:52 pm |
You only need to look at the wars, politics and economic today to see the cancer is rife. The question now is if the patient can be saved or is it terminal?
June 5, 2010 at 9:06 pm |
Sometimes an animal get sick – sometimes it gets better, sometimes it dies. No one has the vision required to know our future. It would require some greater-than-human perspective; that of a god or alien super-being. So we can only try. To live well is worthwhile in the present moment; one only loses by giving up hope, regardless of whether humans are doomed in the future.
We all eventually die anyway. The universe goes on.