We are used to hearing that bacteria are the cause of infections, diseases and contamination.
However, the work of bacteria is essential for the life of organisms.
Bacteria are the first form of life and the most abundant beings on the planet.
They adapt amazingly to their environment and bring enormous benefits to many areas of life.
In this article we explain a different way of understanding what bacteria are and why they are so important to our lives.
Your body speaks – Enric Closer
In this podcast Enric Corbera explains the particular language that the body uses to communicate with us. Although we identify with the so-called “thinking self”, each part of us is alive and, as such, is continuously expressed.
What are bacteria?
Bacteria are living beings that maintain our physiological balance.
“There are hundreds of ways in which our bodies could not function without bacteria. Between the toes is a jungle, under the arms is a jungle. There are them in the mouth and also in the intestine. According to “We do not give importance to its influence” and speaks of an evolved intelligence of bacteria.
We start from the basis that “la is a property of all living cells”.
A cell is essential to have a sense of smell, to detect light, to detect chemicals, both from food and poisons, and so on, its importance for life is revealed.
The truth is that only a small number of bacteria are involved in diseases and the list of benefits resulting from the action of bacteria is very long.
Still, its bad reputation persists.
What your body expresses and how to take advantage of it to reduce your stress 🔆
In this fragment taken from the course “”, David Corbera explains how listening to our body leads us to become aware of this information, transforming how we perceive what happens to us.
The benefits of bacteria
Each bacterium has something to offer to life
Currently, we know that there are some bacteria capable of putting an end to deforestation, others of reducing the emission of polluting elements, many are present in food, they allow the production of cheese, yogurt, sausages, and a long list of other benefits.
In addition, recently, a group of Japanese scientists has just found a bacterium that digests plastic.
But beyond this, for our body bacteria are also essential.
In our body there are ten times more bacteria than human cells, each of us carries a hundred billion bacteria in our intestines and a billion on our skin. Bacteria are ecological and form an active part of biological cycles.
Bacteria are living beings that, for example, help us to properly digest food, making the most of all the nutrients found in it.
And they also serve to maintain a neutral Ph so that the dermis and different organs are protected against the invasion of microorganisms that may be harmful.
We are a system of systems
In our body we have millions of bacteria that benefit our health in an essential way, helping to maintain the correct balance of our body.
Just like we form families, societies and systems through which to develop and collaborate for a purpose greater than our own life.
We are the fruit of the life of the bacteria that accompany us, we are the fruit of a living system in the same way that systems much larger than us are nourished and affected through our own lives.
“More bacteria (over 100 trillion) work in a single centimeter of a colon than all human beings who have ever existed combined. Yet many people claim that we are in charge of the world.”
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
The theory of symbiogenesis
Evolution arises from union
the biologist lynn margulis (1938-2011) was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences since 1983 and also of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In 2008 he received the Darwin-Wallace Medal, among many other awards.
And his career stood out for many aspects in the field of evolutionary biologywhere he developed the theory of symbiogenesis, which subtracts power from chance in the evolution of living beings and offers a new look at the origin of life: “The beginning of living beings had its origin in the symbiosis of two types of different bacteria”.
Symbiogenesis is a mechanism by which two organisms living in symbiosis develop a permanent associationin such a way that they cannot survive one without the other and they integrate forming a new organism.
Competition or collaboration?
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution focuses on competition between individuals of a population within the same species for survival.
Those with the most favorable adaptations would be better able to compete for food, shelter, and mates to breed with and thus form the next generation of offspring that would carry those traits in their DNA.
However, other evolutionary scientists claim that in reality it is cooperation between individuals and not competition that drives evolution.
This hypothesis is known as symbiogenesis.
The best known example of symbiogenesis is the endosymbiotic theory popularized precisely by Lynn Margulis.
Instead of competition, various prokaryotic organisms worked together to create a more stable life for all involved.
For the American biologist, the true evolutionary engine, more than genetic mutations, is symbiogenesis, and the protagonists are not genes, but bacteria.
They are the true architects of biodiversity and biological complexity.
In one of his main arguments, Margulis distinguishes between bacteria and everything else to say that the fusion between different bacteria resulted in the eukaryotic cells that make up fungi, plants and animals, including humans.
Conclution
Like bacteria, we are a system of systems.
Each one of us has a certain function within the social or family system to which we belong.
Understand that somehow we are connected and we are the reflection and the solution to the needs of the system will allow us to understand ourselves betteraccept our difference and begin to give our gift to the world.