The Art of Communication Has A Long Tradition

Collections of cells working together as a unified body, producing specialized behaviors that lend adaptive advantage on a group scale which include some sacrificial acts that benefit that larger community is not unique to complex multicellular organisms like ourselves. It is more of a relationship theme that that has been threaded into biology long before multicellularity as we know it emerged. It involves perceiving necessities, and communicating these necessities across a biological domain so that effective behavioral responses can take place. This community principle, complete with communication across a wide biological landscape has been present, and conserved throughout our biological history – a unified purpose among different biological entities that arose out of necessity long before multicellular (metazoic) creatures emerged. Here is an example of how this takes place among microbes:

How Microbes Communicate Over Long Distances

“…Percolation is familiar to anyone who brews coffee, and it helped researchers at the University of California San Diego understand how bacteria communicate with one another over long distances. Communities of bacteria, sometimes called biofilms, aren’t just a clump of bacterial cells. It seems they can send signals to one another with ion channels, promoting the survival of the community and protecting it from attacks. New findings on that communication have been reported in Cell Systems.”

 

Link to full article:

https://www.labroots.com/trending/microbiology/12216/microbes-communicate-distance

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The Ties that Bind Us

There are any number of relationships, which transcend species lines, that are nonetheless vital for the proper functioning of the individual organisms within that biological relational field. These groups of organisms, or sometimes specific processes within these organisms, can form obligate (necessary) bonds that have the same characteristics as the relationships between the collection of vital organs in a singular body.

 

The relationships that define the integrity and continuing function of any single organism extends far beyond that singular organism’s membrane. Each organism exists by way of an extended network of mutually nourishing and defensive relationships that collectively nourish and defend the integrity of that community. This relational lens is far more useful to see the foundational principles of biology than is a reductionist, organism-centric lens.

 

The same community principle is what defines the strength and integrity of any complex adaptive system from a single cell, to organ, to the larger relationship economy we see expressed through ecosystems is also true of interpersonal relationships, families, groups, society and civilization itself. This is the underlying message communicated through the processes that define the biological economy – that forging mutualistic nourishing bonds, and by extension, a common defense, defines the level of adaptation any complex adaptive system will have to negotiate the environment.

 

Here is an example of one such inter-species relational bond that illustrates the type of bond that nourishes and protects a body of life, the same way organs in a multicellular creature relate to each other:

 

𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝘆𝗺𝗯𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗹𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗲𝗻-𝗳𝗶𝘅𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗵𝗶𝘇𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗮 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗲𝗱

 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180705100421.htm

The Biological Community Defines Our Experience of Life

If we unpack the implications of the fact that a single celled parasite like Toxoplasma gondii can develop a strategy to modify mammalian neurophysiology and behaviors to suit its own biological ends, we can begin to appreciate the fact that the community of friends and foes in our local biological relationship field set the tone for what we experience as life.

There is a full spectrum of relationships that is possible in any given biological community that can span the spectrum from obligate (necessary) mutualism to parasitic and predatory relationship dynamics where seizing the fruit produced by other organisms is the core behavioral property of the organism.

Depending on the biological community’s bias toward cooperation involving mutual nourishment and common defense, or toward parasitic and predatory relational dynamics, the organism based community will tend toward homeostasis (balance), or instability. This makes whether or not we learn about, and act to appropriately tend the many organisms from which our local biology is composed is a key factor in whether balance or imbalance (health or disease) will happen. It also plays a key role in defining our identity and shaping experience of life. This makes understanding and cultivating the biological relational system we are part of a critical factor in effectively steering our experience of life.

Here is an article outlining how a number of parasitic and predatory organisms press their agenda within the larger biological community. It is important to remember that there is a full spectrum of relationship possibilities, some of which bring nourishment, strength and health or defense of the integrity of the system against disruptive agents.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/31536/title/Animal-Mind-Control/

Nature Echoes Nourish and Defend Behaviors on Many Scales

When our immune system sees a pathogen, something it perceives as harmful, it establishes ways to effectively neutralize or destroy that destructive agent. In doing this, it uses weapons (destructive agents), and vectors (vehicles) to carry the weapons it uses in defend to their appropriate location.

On a broader scale, this same defense of integrity through an “immune response strategy” may be what is going on at a larger scale in biological ecosystems. Since nature establishes defenses (things which destroy perceived pathogens) by establishing defensive weapons and looking for vectors to carry these destructive agents to their appropriate location in order to effect the “immune response”, why would we not expect to see this happening on different scales, from cell to body, to larger bodies of life?

The only difference in this relational dynamic that happens in a cell or single multicellular organisms that also may be happening in ecosystems may be the scale. This “immune response” may be also happening between larger bodies of life – bodies of life which transcend single organisms, and are constructed of networked metabolic structures that are stitched together through a vast array of species and subsystems within species – bodies of life that, although composed of many kinds of organisms, have a need to nourish itself, as well as protective skins and other defenses to protect itself, in addition to porous biological boundaries, the same way an individual cell or a larger organism does.

These larger bodies of life, which sometimes clash as a result of the existential debt nature demands for any coherent biological body – to nourish and protect itself, and to mount defenses against antagonists to that coherency. This may be the legend of the map that defines relationship landscape we see in biological ecosystems. It may also explain why, when there is less need for these defensive weapons to be carried to and fro to perceived pathogens in these larger bodies of life, that we also see these vectors less populated with these transgenic weapons, as we see in the case of mosquitoes in the rain forest, which tend to be less populated with the weapons of defense. Just a thought…

Disease-carrying mosquitoes rare in undisturbed tropical forests

From the article: “We found that fewer mosquito species known to carry disease-causing pathogens live in forested areas compared to disturbed ones… Mosquito species from altered forest sites are more likely to transmit disease than mosquitoes native to an area of mature tropical forest.”

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-disease-carrying-mosquitoes-rare-undisturbed-tropical.html

Powerful Influence from Small Changes

While this article is on *Brain Inflammation and Obesity* specifically, there seems to be a number of deeper implications if we apply a wide angle lens to the fact that certain infections, or microbiome populations, or traumas, etc. in the context of our complex biological system can shift behavioral expressions on more than physical scales. This influence on our relational landscape has a powerful influence on our experience of life. Extrapolated further we might begin to get a glimpse of how our evolution, history, culture and sense of identity might all be far more nebulous and arbitrary than we are used to believing.

https://www.labroots.com/trending/neuroscience/6586/brain-inflammation-obesity

The Language of Biology

Biology is a complex relational economy that produces coherent “meaning” in the form of structures and ongoing relationships that are aimed at specific goal oriented ends. Like verbal language and its capacity to produce the more complicated structures that are possible within its range of expression, like comedy or drama for instance, to accomplish the communication effectively requires certain contexts in order for them to work as intended. We see this same communication requirement in biology. Here’s an example of how that opportunity for a complex communication to convey something constructive or restorative can be destroyed by context:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-08-gut-viruses-tied-potentially-deadly.html

The Strategy Employed by Nature to get Things Done

When it comes to accomplishing tasks in the face of various forms of adversity and an environment that would need to be cultivated or persuaded to move toward a specific goal, one way of breaking down the various strategies that are possible to do this is a concept called destinationist. A destinationist strategy accepts that the current state of affairs is not desirable and that change is necessary, but rather than being a determinist, where the strategy appears to be “all or none”, where arms are flapped or folded folded and scowls are formed and baying at the moon over the current circumstances – how wrong everybody is and how the world is not right is the de facto strategy, the destinationist uses a strategy which accepts the reality of the current landscape, and attempts to move in the correct direction using realistic doable steps, perhaps not knowing if full success is possible or warranted. Nature appears to have this destinationist philosophy as it attempts to do things to move in a certain direction, even though the current solution may not be perfect. One example it the following: “while having diarrhoea might be a nightmare, not having it could be an even worse fate.”

Here is an article detailing how the body uses a destinationist strategy to deal with stomach issues that comes with some pain, but is best given the overall picture.

http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-realised-the-purpose-of-diarrhoea-is-way-more-complicated-than-we-thought

The Social Life of Plants

Plants have any number of methods to communicate both internally and externally in order to keep themselves informed and respond to their environment and developmental needs. They use this vast array of capacities to negotiate their way toward maturity and reproduction among other things. As it turns out, plants have a rich social life. They are for instance able to forge relationships with various benefactors in the plant and animal kingdoms and coordinate their effort, including the recruitment of other creatures, to ward off antagonists. They sense, and think without the means of a brain as we understand brains, yet they have the capacity to perceive and respond on remarkable levels which we are only beginning to understand. Here is a documentary on some of the recently discovered attributes of plants.

On Free Will, Awareness and the Nature of Being

Many of us think we have agency – the capacity as individuals to perceive a certain portion of the local landscape of reality and use that as the basis to act independently, making our own free will choices. It comes as a surprise to some of us to discover that while an element of that perception of reality and corresponding response using a component of agency may be a piece of the puzzle, it is a small piece, if a piece at all.

Most of what we perceive and experience can be more accurately characterized as being “along for the ride” on a wave of relationship dynamics that occur on many scales, including molecular scales which are driven by the trillions of microbial life forms that live in and on us. In other words, we do not experience things due to what’s going on solely in our head, we experience things that stem from any number of sources known and unknown for which we manufacture what is in our mind a plausible explanation for those experiences.

Our capacity to produce plausible explanations is the real talent of our brain – producing things that are useful, but not necessarily things that are accurate. These explanations are inaccurate at best and often miss the mark completely, yet they produce a convincing picture, leaving us embraced in the comforting delusional cocoon of beliefs that may serve us, but do not correspond to the reality of the situation. Here is a small glimpse at the real world we so rarely get a glimpse of with our minds:

http://neurosciencenews.com/gut-bacteria-emotion-7013/

Chemistry is Language

Just because we are not consciously aware of the influence of chemical communication signals that inform and direct our behaviors does not mean they are not present in abundance. The same way chemical signals like hormones within the body inform and direct the behaviors of various cells and organs, chemical signals also do this between us. Pheromones are chemical signals that change the behaviors of other animals of the same species.

Pheromone actions in humans have been investigated, but the evidence thus far is generally considered weak. While the evidence of pheremonic communication among every other organism is staggering, signaling such things as alarm, where food sources are, triggering sexual arousal and behaviors, bonding behaviors, repulsion and attraction and so on, somehow we have resisted acknowledging this same communication channel happening among humans.

My guess is this area of science has been historically stagnated by false assumptions and wishful thinking. Perhaps a desire to keep humans in a special class, perhaps due to the fact that we idolize verbal awareness so much we confuse our meager, error prone , but convincing verbal map with the actual territory, but the evidence that we are just like every other biological organism, the product of a complex tapestry of communication on multiple levels, which we only get to see a fragment of, is now emerging with more convincing vigor. Here is one such study along those lines:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318103.php?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=gplus