I Contain Multitudes

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes WIthin Us and a Grander View of Life

© 2016 Ed Yong

268 pages

For much of the 20th century, microbes were equivalent with germs – invisible threats that needed to eradicated.  As we move further into a new century ,however, there is some small and growing popular appreciation that microbes play  important roles in human biology.  Microbes aren’t bit players, though, they’re the actors, the support staff, the conductors, and even the orchestra.  That has been amply illustrated by books like 10% Human, which  demonstrated how thoroughly vital microbes are to ordinary physiology.   I Contain Multitudes looks more generally at microbes and their hosts as dynamic ecosystems that are constantly changing.

Microbes had the planet entirely to themselves for most of Earth history, and long after plants and animals have seemingly taken over, they’re still in control.  Microbes are present in the oceans,  allowing coral to flourish and fish to find their way in the dark; they’re within insects,  often a vital part of their maturation process; they’re in human babies from the word go, receiving them with their mother’s milk. (Actually, a lot of human milk seems to feed not the baby, but microbes inside the baby, which then secrete something that the baby digests. Thus even breast-feeding mothers employ bacterial wet-nurses…)   That’s only part of the story, though.

Previously,  people thought of the immune system in military terms: our white blood cells were soldiers on guard, watching out for any intruders. Yong suggests we appreciate our immune system more as a park ranger, one that monitors the status of its microbial wards,  encouraging and protecting some and weeding out or barring others.  He suggests further that our immune system in doing this is working more on the ward-microbes’ behalf than on ours, for microbes too contend with one another.  They’re constantly jostling for space, and humans unwittingly participate in the battle:   with every meal, we alter our micro-biome.  In the name of healing, w occasionally carpet-bomb our bodies -- but the body is its own ecosystem, so dependent on microbes that many illnesses  should be viewed as a mismatch of populations than an invasion.

It is as grave a mistake to regard microbes as an easily-manipulated friend, says Ed Yong, as it was to regard them as an implacable enemy who must be hunted down and killed.  Although symbiotic associations are rife in nature, and abound in our own bodies,  they are not relationships.  Many microbes live inside us, and we depend on many of them as they do on us – but we are not ‘friends’. Instead, like nation-states working together, we merely enjoy a collusion of interests, and occasionally that collusion lapses.   In the macro world, for instance, tickbirds that ride on large mammals and groom them for ticks occasionally nip their rides, too. Further, no one has 'a' population of microbes; the pool of microbes in our guts and in our orifices fluctuates widely from hour to hour,  depending on our activities.

Reading this book made me marvel, literally. The image Yong conveyed of the dynanism of our bodies made me think of the sun -- an ongoing nuclear explosion that is maintained by the sheer weight of its ingredients. The contests inside us for dominance, the side effect of these material struggles on our brains and feelings, boggles the mind.


Note:  I read this book much earlier in the year, but never posted my review for reasons which escape me. I decided to publish this week given that I've been in a science mood.

Spring Cleaning

The wind is blowing, the trees are in leaf, and I sense spring is on the way. Well, good! Not that this winter has been particularly bad, but spring has far better scenery.  I spent this past weekend cleaning while listening to an audio version of The Importance of Being Earnest, and then took in a local play at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The play was "White Lightning", and celebrated the moonshine-running origins of stockcar racing. The closest I've come to watching NASCAR is watching Cars, but I enjoyed the play enormously, featuring as it did one of my favorite ASF actors, Rodney Clark.

There's actually a book on this subject called Driving with the Devil that -- so help me -- I might actually go for. Not that I'm suddenly all afire about racing, but who can't appreciate a history of rescuing ardent spirits from the law?

Continuing and completing the spree of science books lately was E.O. Wilson's  The Social Conquest of Earth.  The book examines 'eusociality' as practiced by both humans and insects.  Eusociality involves a trascendent social order that is sustained by passing generations, with a high degree of specialization.   Wilson is one of the grand old men of biology, the effective founder of the sociobiological discipline. After dealing with the whole of natural human history in chapter one, Wilson uses his extensive insect experience to explain what eusociality is and how it might have evolved. He then speculates on what biological basis culture, art, etc. might be derived from.  I found parts of the book, like the extended debate between inclusive fitness and kin selection as evolutionary drivers, a touch esoteric, and probably would have enjoyed the book more if I'd hadn't gone into it expecting to read more than about humans and termites.

Shortly before that, I read Unnatural Selection, comments for which are forthcoming. This week I'm finishing up a social history of the Scotch-Irish, called....The Scotch-Irish: A Social History.    It was part of an intended nod toward St. Patrick's day, though there's no way in blazes I'm finishing The Year of the French in time for tomorrow.

The Wild Weird World of Biology

So, it turns out The Lives of a Cell has little to do with cells.  I checked it out figuring to learn something about how cells work, since I'm a ways removed from fifth-grade life science, or even freshman bio.  I wasn't just judging the book by its cover -- when I peeked in, there was a paragraph about mitochondria!  As it turns out, though, Lives is a collection of essays sharing the theme of sociobiology. As our cells are a collection of organisms working together for mutual benefit, and our cells themselves work together with other cells again for mutual benefit, and bacteria within us work with us for our mutual benefit, the author attempts to apply this to the human race as as a whole, likening language and other constructs to the vast structures that insects build together. No insect is conscious of what it is doing, but it does it, and it creates something wondrous and vast.  I enjoyed the author's voice enormously, but the actual science is probably dated. It has a seventies charm about it, though,  bringing to mind the fanciful idea that the Earth is one big organism.

(This cover is...fun.)

That was polished off on Friday, and over the weekend I roared through the utterly eye-opening book Unnatural Selection, on how medicine, pesticides, and such are forcing rapid evolutionary change all around us.  Expect a review for it in the next couple of days. I'll be following that up with E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth, and after that..golly, I might just give biology a slight break.   There are all sorts of rabbits I might chase next, though I'm laying off new purchases for a little while, so I'll mostly be working from my little stack of unread nonfiction or from my monthly bag-o-books from the uni library.

Here's to wrapping up February with a bang!

Genome

 Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
© 1999 Matt Ridley
317 pages

  The human genome is a recipe book, divided into 23 chapters, but considerably larger than Matt Ridley’s Genome. Were it to scale, he writes, a genuine version of the genome in book form would be closer to the size of a stack of bibles.  Genome visits each of the human cell’s 23 chromosomes in turn to learn a little something about human nature. This is not An Ancestor’s Tale in miniature, as Ridley addresses the entire natural history of human kind in the first chapter.   Subsequent chapters cover subjects as diverse as the genetic basis for language and sex differentiation, and as ambitious as free will.  Health and disease occupy much of Ridley’s attention; after genetic disease is covered by itself,  these diseases  are used to illustrate other subjects.    One oft-used example is that of the prevalence of sickle-cell anemia among people of immediate African ancestry;   carrying one allele for it greatly reduces exposure to malaria, a scourge of the continent.  For the genes, losing a few carriers to sickle-cell anemia is a better bargain than losing a greater number to malaria. In evolution, as in economics, there are no solutions – only trade-offs.  Nothing is simple; many conditions like asthma are caused not by one gene flubbing, but by different genes in different populations. Genetics is a subject that can quickly get too detailed for lay readers to enjoy, but Ridley finds the right balance between narrative and specifics, and he has an sly wit.  In a chapter on the sinister history of eugenics, he notes that the Soviet Union never adopted a eugenics program; they were more interested in murdering clever people than limited ones.  The take-home lesson is the human body is not one thing with a becraniumed control tower;   even our flesh is dynamic,  our genes warring with one another and vying for control between themselves and the brain they forged and maintain.   Though it may lose something in being slightly dated, Genome is an eye-opening bit of popular science that offers plenty of insight into history, as well. There was a reprint in 2006 that may have more current information.

Related:

• Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine,  Randolph Nesse,  George Williams
• The Red Queen, Matt Ridley
• The Ancestors Tale;  The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
© 2013 Jonathan Haidt
528 pages

The Righteous Mind begins with a question, seriously posed: why  can't we all get along? To find the answer, Jonathan Haidt delves into the nature of morality, following the pursuit of it from philosophy to evolutionary psychology. Haidt produces three core ideas: one, David Hume was correct in positing that people are more intuitive than rational; two,  moral concerns don't have a singular source, but fall along six separate axes,  each derived from our natural history, despite being couched in flourished religious and philosophical language; and finally, that morality is double-edged sword, binding us with one another as well as against others. Haidt's work is impressive in its breadth, drawing on sources as diverse as Plato, Emile Durkheim, and E.O. Wilson, and in its delivery. Though he covers a lot of territory in a compact book, Haidt constantly works to keep readers aware of how all of the ideas discussed connect together.

The grand idea underlying all this is that morality is neither an objective truth that can be deduced via logic by anyone old enough to reason, nor is it completely subjective, an artifact of culture that is deposited into a blank slate of our infant minds. It is instead a product of evolution. Our instincts for morality are kin to our sense of taste:  there are different flavors of moral concern, and each of them played a part in our species' development. The natural basis for morality is being eagerly explored by scientists like Frans de Waal, who has demonstrated how chimpanzees can empathize with one another, and sense when others are being treated unfairly.  Caring for one another is a mammalian strength, but there is more to morality than care and fairness. There are also senses of loyalty and deference to authority useful to tribes competing against other tribes, and a sense of 'sanctity' that buds off our natural feeling of disgust that keeps us away from unhealthy influences. Our instincts may be strengthened by rationalistic arguments or ritual, but neither can conceal their source,  nor operate independently from it.

Haidt sees our moral-political instincts as particularly far-developed as compared to other primates, though. Although alphas in chimpanzee troops do have a political role in mediating disputes, they are not kings: they do not command the tribe to go here or there, or make plans for its future well-being. Haidt believes natural selection has favored our 'righteous' (political-religious-moral) instincts in this regard  out of necessity, because for thousands of years we've had to regularly deal  with so many of our own numbers:  instincts which promoted order and cooperation were favored, and those populations which most exhibited them flourished, while populations that didn't disappeared. Religion, too, played a powerful part. In Haidt's view, we are not merely instinctive creatures who one day stumbled upon culture and started happily passing it down to the next generation like a good stick. We have evolved to be dependent on culture, and this is why religion is such a universal and powerful  trait of human kind.  Religion is first and foremost about morality and keeping the tribe together:  ideological religions like Christianity and Islam are fairly novel.  

These instincts are not part of the past; they are present, with us now.  Haidt examines US political parties by this six-taste model and concludes what while liberals depend strongly on the Care and Fairness feelings, and Libertarians are somewhat obsessively fixated on the Liberty-Oppression axis (which is a 'new' taste that developed fully after we'd become tool-users), conservatives draw marginally from each 'taste' equally across the spectrum.Like all products of evolution, our righteous instincts are a trade-off. A dog with long legs runs fast, but loses heat more quickly than a short-legged rival -- and morality which evolved in the atmosphere of inter-population competition is all about Us vs. Them.  When we rally towards an 'us', we draw away from a 'them'.  In light of that, Haidt ends the book by offering ways people of varying political opinions can argue more constructively. He first asks readers to keep in mind that people who disagree with us may simply be drawing on another set of instincts and beliefs:  you are not the center of the universe, and those who are different from you are not the Evil Villain set against you in some colorful psychodrama. We must labor to discern where people are coming from if we intend to communicate. Secondly, he draws on his own experience as an idealist-turned moderate to detail what liberals, conservatives, and libertarians can learn from one another: markets are magic, but not perfect -- and if something isn't  good for the beehive, it can't be good for the bee.

The Righteous Mind is  astonishing:  the argument masterfully organized and sympathetically voiced from an author who distills a wide range of research from across the intellectual spectrum into a reflective, wise work.  This is very much recommended.

Related:

• The Three Languages of Politics, Arnold Kling
• The Evolution of God,  Robert Wright; Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton, both of which look at religion as an evolutionary adapatation
• Virtually anything by Frans de Waal, like Good Natured: the Origins of Right and Wrong or Your Inner Ape.
• Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, Richard Wrangham (which also uses the idea that we evolved culture-dependent)