HGT a model for humanity's survival ?

Incredibly small, usually immobile, fragile bags of mostly water : they hardly sounds like creatures capable of giving advanced human civilization, circa the 21st century, a vital formula for surviving the worst the Cosmos can throw at us.

But for almost four billion years, the supposedly 'stupid' and 'unfit' tiny microbes have not just survived but dominated life on Earth.

I follow people like Dr Martin Henry Dawson and *Dr Lois Almon who, way back before WWII, believed that much of the credit for this unlikely survival success lies in something that these small and the weak creatures have that we big and smart people do not have.

And that is a process we now call HGT, but which Dawson first established under the name of 'bacterial transformation'.

HGT stands for Horizontal Gene Transfers --- 'the genetics of inclusion'.

It usually involves the release of bits of an individual microbe's personal DNA genome into the environment, to be taken up potentially by any other type of microbe near by, who can then pass it on to other species of microbes who are both physically and genetically far more remote from the original individual microbe.

(By contrast, most big creatures can only have access to the DNA genome of their mother and father - not trillions times trillions of other individual microbe genomes.)

The net result is a vast global lending library of survival ideas, with the key concept that every single microbe is both a borrower and an author : "With help from all, there is hope for all".

"What's the Gen ?"

I have a weakness for WWII ER (enlisted ranks) slang and one of the best was the constant question at a time when rumours rather than hard facts dominated life.

ERs from all services generally greeted each other not with "how you doing?" but rather with an urgent "what's the Gen?".

North Americans today in peacetime might re-phrase it as "what's the scoop?", "what's the score?" or "what's the buzz?".

'Gen' was short for information that might be vital for survival, whether merely surviving the chickenshit of daily military life at the rear bases or surviving bad assignments out on the frontlines.

While we humans sometimes pass valuable "Gen" from person to person, microbes have always passed valuable "Genes" from one to another.

Over almost four billion years, microbes have excelled at producing endless numbers of seemingly 'unfit' and useless gene mutations and at allowing microbes with these oddball genes to survive and reproduce - albeit often at less than optimal population levels.

These genes, like all microbe genes, are routinely released into the environment, for all other microbes to potentially take up with HGT.

Most of the time, there is no point to either the mutated new genes or to their takeup by microbe species genetically far away from the species and strain that first produced them.

Antibiotic resistance is merely the best known example of HGT

But when a new crisis suddenly emerges anywhere in the world - say a new deadly antibiotic produced for the benefit of humanity - in only a handful of years all microbe populations around the world have taken up and then 'expressed' a hitherto obscure (but ancient) gene that offers sturdy resistance to this human antibiotic.

But the weird useless/unfit genes can vary all over the map - why bother with a gene that allows microbes to go into a suspended state of existence when the environment freezes over for thousands of years ?

But that turns out to be very useful when the Earth has become a frozen solid iceball, almost overnight, several times in its history.

And so on and so - no environmental crisis in four billion years (and there has been some real hellish ones) has yet succeeded in wiping the microbes out.

By contrast, evolutionary history suggests that big creatures, practising 'the genetics of exclusion', have had no luck surviving even a small environmental crisis.

We aren't going to survive the latest environmental crisis, not unless we give up the dogwhistle scientific politics of first giving everyone offering to help a blood test to find out if they are WASP enough to be taken seriously.

We need a global coalition of all possible talents, need to make the biggest of all possible Big tents, to get us through this crisis.

This blog is all about creating a human equivalent to microbial HGT...

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*Dr Almon thought HGT might account for sudden variations in the nitrogen fixing abilities of bacteria and since almost all life would cease without these efforts, she thought it was well worth looking into.

As a blogger who loves his grub, I fully agree .

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The days when we can afford to let the WASP males, perhaps 1% of the world's population, rule (and ruin) this planet are over.

The crisis we face is such way too big, way to existential.

And the WASPs are fading fast - it sometime seems easier to get two Pandas to breed than to get two WASPs to breed.

Instead  of relying exclusively upon their fading numbers, we need the biggest possible of Big Tents, a coalition of 'all the possible talents', 'all hands on deck', if we are to come up with the creative solutions we so desperately need.

What we don't need is blood tests at every frontier guard post to determine if a person is "Pure Laine" enough, Aryan enough, WASP enough, before being allowed in to make their case.

Good ideas that will let humanity survive for a few more thousand years can emerge just as well from under niqabs as those that leisurely filter out from the gated communities and exclusive country clubs.

the WHY of eugenics : enough with the 'what' already

Scientific discoveries can happen anytime anywhere and be announced  (be made public) anytime anywhere.

But scientific discoveries are only in turn "discovered" by the most powerful scientific, political, economic, media elites (ie made popular) when it suits the spirit of their particular place and time.

So we have Eugenics (controlling the gene pool) - universally popular in 1928 and universally denigrated in 1998 --- while the anti-eugentics of uncontrollable HGT (horizontal gene transfer) was universally ignored in 1928 and universally supported in 1998.

Eugenics did not emerge into the popular domain simply because Galton announced it, but only when the elites of his time and place took it up with enthusiasm instead of ignoring it - as they later did HGT.

Galton's scientific discovery soothed their deepest emotional fear about all the intermingling thrown up by the same Modernization processes they were leading (and cheering on).

But the later scientific discovery of HGT ( promoted most ardently by Martin Henry Dawson) only fuelled that deep fear and revulsion.

For Modernity/Eugenics ( the two basically mean the same thing) was the shiny public - daytime - face of their deepest darkest nighttime fears.

It was their way of trying to control the processes they had unwittingly unleashed --- their attempt to put the modernization genie back in the bottle while still enjoying all the fruits of its successes.

If I were as scared and revulsed by the loss of hegemonic control as these elites were, I'd ignore HGT too....

Quantum Physics at elementary school, in the 1950s & 1960s

It didn't happen, not in Canada - at least not in my imperfect memory.

The question is why ?

Why was it not introduced to kids in those decades --- or even in this decade more than a hundred years after it first arrived on the scene ?

I myself first read about quantum physics in Time Magazine articles when I was ten or eleven, sometime in 1962 and 1963  - probably when someone got a Nobel prize or yet another puzzling sub-atomic particle had been found in the ever frenetic search for the 'final - simple - explicable - base' of ultimate reality.

It was all totally over my head - not so much the science, as its relevance to ordinary life.

Quantum physics, like space travel,  simply didn't seem that interesting to me, though I could see from the context of the articles all this quantum stuff was considered very important research and at the frontiers of science.

By the time I was about fourteen and in junior high, I had read about it in a good deal more detail in any number of Time-Life books on science subjects.

For a long time my parents passed on giving us access to what most kids took for granted : rock and roll radio, TV and movie going and the right to leave our own property to play with other kids.

Time-Life Book Club to the rescue

But they bought every (educational book) the Time Life Book Club ever shipped out !

So I read a lot of books as a kids - suggested age level and complexity never an issue.

Now the entire Time Life series always did a great job making very complex subjects quite readable.

These were books written by real experts, not cutting edge scholarship perhaps but sharing the consensus of contemporary undergraduate textbooks on these subjects.

But despite all this, quantum physics (as opposed to the exciting new gadgets that understanding quantum was throwing up - like transistors) still made absolutely no impression on my sponge-like mind.

It seemed to have had no moral, intellectual or philosophical impact on me.

This was totally unlike the situation with antibiotics, which we ankle-biters were told all about in elementary school -- and from the earliest of grades.

I don't think my childhood experience (or adult experience) with the teaching of quantum physics was that unique.

It simply doesn't grab us emotionally.

But it should - nevertheless - be paired with the story of antibiotics and taught to grade school kids.

For if quantum physics can be best described as the science of reality's smallest (non-living) objects, the tiny microbe-attacking antibiotics produced by other tiny microbes can be described as the science of reality's smallest living objects.

As very small objects ourselves, we primary kids totally get it in both cases -  its the smallness factor.

Science stuff is usually only presented to small children as something done by big people in big laboratories making big things.

So naturally we are fascinated to be told that little children (like ourselves) were saved from death by medicine made by tiny invisible things found only on dank basement walls or in muddy tropical dirt.

We would have been equally open to an introductory explanation that everything physical in the world was based on really tiny and hyperactive objects (rather like ourselves !) with mysterious almost magical properties.

Instead we were straight out lied to - taught that the simple bland boring stable atoms were the total physical basis of reality.

We were taught Modernity.

Even though all Science had known, at least since the 1920s of thirty years earlier, that it no longer gave an accurate account of reality.

Just as Science had known, also since the 1920s, about the penicillium fungus' unique ability to produce non toxic germ-killing penicillin.

And about the microbes' still unique ability to precisely horizontally recombine gene material from different species, down at the smallest molecular level, (an activity then better known under Dr Henry Dawson's term of Bacterial Transformation).

These new areas of Science (Microbiology's Horizontal Gene Transfer and Quantum Physics' spin and anti-matter et al), precisely because both were occupied with the basement levels of reality, were instantly seen to have the ability to undermine the very foundations of the reductionist intellectual edifice we call Modernity.

In the case of Quantum Physics, this quickly became a journalistic truism said then and repeated ever since - a fact known by all among the quality newspaper reading classes.

Known and ignored - emotionally - by almost all of them.

Indeed I suggest that the very reason why Modernity Science tolerated the theoretically threatening ideas of Quantum Science being so much discussed in the popular media was because modern scientists also knew them to be emotionally impotent.

And thus unlikely to threaten Modernity itself, except among a tiny scientifically and philosophically astute minority.

Because even the largest physical molecules - let alone the smallest sub atomic particles - are not rivals of civilized human modernity.

But even the smallest living beings, the microbes for example, are.

Dawson's monkey wrench

So Dawson's articles about harmless and deadly pneumonia germs madly exchanging genes and outer coats and so confounding fifty years of mainstream serum-based medicine could arouse emotions.

For it won't just stop with Dr Dawson demonstrating that the tiny and supposedly simple-minded, crude, primitive, ancient microbes could easily pull off medical and genetic-altering wonders that the best of modern science could not begin to match.

That, in turn, would soon imply that perhaps the ancient and primitive 'tribes' now be treated as simple children under civilized stewardship by the western imperial powers might also be capable of similar such intellectual surprises.

And that simply won't do.

The research institutions that employed Dawson made no real effort to promote his ideas and nor did he - beyond the conventional journal articles, convention papers and invited lectures he gave.

But can one claim that the institutions employing the quantum physicists did any more ?

No, in both cases, the intellectual seeds were cast out, equally vigorously, and at the same time, but only one fell on fallow journalistic ground.

The harmless one, the one that couldn't be easily explained was explained and the dangerous one, the one that could be too readily explained was studiously ignored.

Ignored until 1945 and 1946.

Then the failure of a few thousand of the smartest chemists in the universe to synthesize penicillin as economically as the humble penicillium could finally opened scientific minds to the new post-modern world created by this sophisticated microbiology of the very weak and very small.

As  not a few chemists on the synthesis project, Ernst Chain and Ronald Bentley for example, readily admitted....