we are never alone

 

one human cell

 

This is the most detailed model of one human cell to date, obtained using x-ray, NMR and cryoelectron microscopy datasets by Evan Ingersoll and Gael McGill, here

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[...] we are beginning to encounter ourselves—not always comfortably or pleasantly—as multi-species beings already partaking in timescales that are fabulously more complex than the onwards-driving version of history many of us still imagine ourselves to inhabit. 

The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase.


—Robert Macfarlane
Underland: A Deep Time Journey

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"You are mostly not you,” microbial ecologist Rob Knight wrote in his fascinating exploration of the human biome, in which he pointed out that only 1% of the genes in our bodies are human and the remaining 99% are microbial.

—from Maria Popova's review of Nicola Davies' Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes, here

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Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis — a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. Some animals are colonised by microbes while they are still unfertilised eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right — a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collective. An entire world. 

[…] 

All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them. And we cannot fully appreciate our own microbiome without appreciating how those of our fellow species enrich and influence their lives. We need to zoom out to the entire animal kingdom, while zooming in to see the hidden ecosystems that exist in every creature. 

When we look at beetles and elephants, sea urchins and earthworms, parents and friends, we see individuals, working their way through life as a bunch of cells in a single body, driven by a single brain, and operating with a single genome. 

This is a pleasant fiction. In fact, we are legion, each and every one of us. Always a “we” and never a “me.”


—Ed Yong

I Contain Multiudes

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