Welcome to my blog!
I am a professional scientist with over 25 years of working experience at Leiden, St Andrews, Cambridge and Brunel universities.
I’m interested in biomolecules, cells, organisms, how organisms form societies, and how organisms and societies interact with their environments. In the blog I want to expose what I think is the false belief. Namely, that man is special in relation to the rest of nature.
Belief in our special status may be flawed because our historical experience is limited. When viewed on the evolutionary scale our presence borders on the insignificant. Our evolutionary imprint reaches only 0.005% of the evolutionary time. Can we trust our self-judgment from such a dubious evolutionary perspective? May the self-proclaimed age of man’s planetary dominance, summed up in the popular term Anthropocne, be the result of naïve anthropocentrism or even naïve triumphalism?
My argument is that we can learn important lessons from microbes, plants and many animal species – organisms with far greater evolutionary experiences than ours. It is important to remember that the biosphere is an intelligent system, which existed >99.99% of the time without us.
We must not forget that the microbes (bacteria and archaea) are “founders” of the biosphere. They still dominate it. There is no single plant or animal on this planet without accompanying microbiome living inside and outside multi-cellular bodies and deep inside cells forming the bodies. Are we puppets controlled by microbial strings? Take the microbes out and the rest of nature would die within minutes. By contrast, take us out and nothing of significance will happen.
One of the topics I will explore is our intelligence in light of microbial, plant and intelligences of other animals. Do microbes, plants, and animals exercise collective behaviour that leads to the emergence of technologies and civilizations? I believe they do.
I will argue that we are not first practitioners of civilized behavior in biological sense. Regardless of what the historians think, insects – ants, termites and bees – founded the first animal civilizations millions of years before us. I will call them the Insectocene to contrast the Antropocene.
Plants exercise collective behaviour and show intelligence. We tend to ignore plant intelligence due to a prejudice which may be called “brain chauvinism” – a term used by a leading botanist. I will look for evidence of intelligence in the plant analogue of civilization that can be termed Florocene.
But most importantly, I will argue that microbes are the genuine founders of technologies and the biocivilization. If we imagine the nature as the giant and hierarchical biocivilization we may depict it as the series of Russian dolls.
The biggest doll represents civilization of microbes or Microcene which houses all other hierarchies of biocivilization. I also call it the Internet of Living Things. (Writer Dorion Sagan uses the term Cyanocene). The Anthropocene doll is the smallest and the most insignificant one in the series.
I will also search for evidence of technical and even artistic intelligence in biocivilizations. The puffer fish, for example, is called the “nature’s greatest artist” in a recent BBC series (see video; thanks to my colleague Dr Aleksandra Fučić for spotting the video).
David Attenborough commented that “Nowhere else in nature does an animal constructs something as complex and perfect as this.” But you have to see the complexity of the bacterial film formed by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, for example, to realize that the puffer fish may not be the only artist in nature.
As part of the blog I will occasionally write essays to acknowledge unique contribution of individuals who shaped my thinking. One name deserves special recognition: Lynn Margulis. She was a revolutionary scientist promoting the idea of symbiogenesis – cooperative mergers of different organisms – which is at the heart of biocivilization. Another name that springs to mind is Arthur Koestler. Similarly to Margulis, he was a non-conformist and thought of nature as a series of holons or holarchy glued together by the principles of cooperation rather than competition.
All members of biocivilization are “riders on the storm” as in the memorable song of Jim Morrison and Doors:
Riders on the storm
Into this house we’re born
Into this world we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone…
We are all the riders on the thermodynamic storm. We ride on the cosmic solar energy converted for us by the Cyanocene and Florocene. The “killer on the road” (from the song) for us is our fragility, caused by the inability of multicellular corporate bodies to withstand the thermodynamic storm for long. Microbes, by contrast, are much more free from those corporate constraints. I will argue that this freedom allows them to dominate the planet in the manner fundamentally different from our perceived domination.
Thank you for reading the introductory text. I hope you will continue reading and visiting my blog.
Interesting Predrage bua as always it is a question of scales. For example microbiology is a localised effect and millions of generations, extending over billions of years can pass in the calendar of microbiology before their life cycles changes the local environment sufficiently to promote conditions for change. As an example the Cyanobacteria took billions of years to change the environment sufficiently for oxygen consuming microbiology to evolve but man can remove all the oxygen in a given volume to change the environment instantly.
Edward Lorenze’s Butterfly Effect can and does occur in carefully balanced thermodynamically unstable systems but not on the microbiological scale. Microbiology is dominant but remains a discordant localised effect that has little impact on a robust stable global environment. The Chaos Theory only works in species that can cause an effect distally.
Thank you for your comment Branko. I am a humble biologist trying to look at the biosphere through the eyes of symbiontic biology (see: https://theconversation.com/microbes-have-their-own-version-of-the-internet-75642). Agree that the scale is important. But the anthropocentric scale is also biased.