A billion years after the earth formed and cooled sufficiently, organisms appeared, single-celled UCLA, from which we all derive. And from that they evolved into primitive bacteria or archaea, feeding on sulphurous compounds and hydrogen. They were extremophiles because there was little or no oxygen, some have taken up residence in our gut and are still in other environments. Then cyanobacteria and they themselves began to use sunlight as their energy source. They excreted oxygen which polluted the earth and with it made today's oxygen and carbon-based life possible. Then "modern" bacteria inhabited the planet alone for two billion years.
600 million years ago, simple marine animals that extracted oxygen from the water, then sponges. 570 million ago, arthropods that invented half of our immune system. Although in reality, the innate immune system appeared in primitive eukaryotic cells, all animals since amoebas have it, and the immune system that learns through vaccines, that can be trained, is adaptive, appeared in vertebrates. 500 million years ago, the octopus. If we waited another hundred million, insects would come and 50 million more, amphibians.
Modern humans and mice diverged from a common mammal 96 million years ago: from an ancestor that lived 145 million years ago; and humans from Old World monkeys, such as macaques, 23 million years ago.
But the important thing is to know that our brain, all our cells, our organism, has been accumulating all that molecular machinery, experience of adaptation, survival and decision-making mechanisms, which we share with the rest of nature. Although it seems that they are human. We are a component of the whole system of life on the planet. From the immense family of mammals.
From unicellular beings, who are our Adam and Eve, since everything living is descended from them, we have incorporated the mechanisms of sensitivity to certain nutrients, toxins and teamwork. They also invented for us chemoreceptors and mechano-receptors; the cilia we have in our ears, lungs or intestine and their complex metabolic chain of reactions to environmental stimuli, which I will expand on later.
Bacteria left us the mechanisms of sensitivity to the environment in the face of like and unlike and invented communication, defence and collaboration. They also have the memory to compare new information with the information they already know, which is essential for their complex tasks of adaptation and survival. When nutrients are lacking, they are able to nourish the very deficient one, by puncturing another bacterium with nanotubes and injecting it with methionine, in an example of extreme aid, nourishing the needy one. The origin of charity and empathy. They invented memory, community life and defence against the anti-system, which did not collaborate three billion years ago, but were not tolerated by the community. They deciphered the chemical communication of other neighbouring bacterial cultures, to defend themselves against possible attacks, by copying their chemical formulas of internal communication. The first spies. Trees do something similar through their roots.
A team of researchers led by Jordi García-Ojalvo, director of the Biological Systems Dynamics Laboratory at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, has identified a new dynamic behaviour in bacterial communities, similar to that of other complex systems that have brains or social communities (Published in PNAS).
Recent research in Proceedings of The Royal Society B by scientists at Julius Maximilians University in Würzburg has found that matabele ants are insects that provide medical care for their companions injured in combat. They suck out wounds to treat them and carry fallen ones back to the nest to recover. They are always faithful, even to the point of death. Our best behaviours are already built into our genes. Those who do not feel them, practice them or develop them are deficient beings. The best of us as a species is a set of dispositions that those primitive beings had to invent in order to evolve, to survive in terrible climatic environments and competition for space. It was collaboration that made life possible, not competition.
Therefore, help, solidarity and all these things that some groups display with an air of superiority and a vindictive tone are in biology; if they are not in some humans, it is because they are half-baked or because they are childish, egocentric or narcissistic. These qualities are not an invention of ideologues, they are an essential ethic for the survival of the species itself. The "progressives" have lost their patent on solidarity and help for the underprivileged... we have just seen it. It also exists in the trees of the forest. They are genetic programmes.
The turf war they invented for us is solved with these same nanotube punctures by injecting toxins into the membranes of competitors or by inhibiting the growth of the competition through molecular mechanisms. Chemical warfare now in humans. We are already beginning to see the complexity of our origin. Bees with quorun-sensing put all their synchronised genes to work which is the origin and cause of their actions in common. (Nature Communications 8, Article number: 315 (2017). In a community, there are subpopulations that express their genes differently, which results in their specialisation to do a particular job. Infections of the dreaded pathogen Staphylococcus aureus organise subpopulations among themselves, specialised in breaking down tissues, some subpopulations are dedicated to secreting toxins, others to adhering to organs while others fight the immune system... All coordinated with each other in order to generate a successful infection; as if they were "cities of microbes", where each one has a job, explained the director of the study, Daniel López, a researcher at the Spanish Biotechnology Centre.
This brushstroke of bacterial life is to affirm that we would be better off if we understood how life on earth works, of which we are just another organism. And the political ideologues and educators who want to model us, to overwhelm and silence us for their models, which, like the books of chivalry, come from the previous century and are called progressivism, would cover their mouths and dry their pens.
They should have complex training, because our rationalist delirium has distanced us from what we are, and because it is not in any programme to feel that we are an organism within the complex programme of life on the Planet. In that case we would enjoy nature, our common bed, we would feel its fragility. We would take away the arrogance, arrogance and fanaticism of revolutionaries and social engineers, and many of them, people with neurotic, emotional problems, with deficient personal development, with conflicts with authority, would become leaders, and they would tell us where we have to walk as a society. They want to solve their emotional problems by using us and they usually call it political, educational programmes, cultural changes, perhaps progress.
All these archaic biological mechanisms are in our body-mind, they are part of our programming.
The cilia we see moving in unicellular organisms have left us complex mechanisms based on ion channels for their functioning. When they are altered, in human medicine we call them channelopathies, producing arrhythmias, epilepsy and 25 other diseases; our inheritance from bacteria. They needed entry or exit channels for calcium, potassium and other ions to go or come to the food and other various functions already developed by them. And with this, our nature, we treat hypertension, or prostate dysfunction. In short: we have incorporated from all of them and they are part of our body-mind, the basic components of adaptive decisions, from the sensory, motor and behavioural system. Even the halobacterium invented little light-sensitive discs, prototype of the eyes, because they discovered that food was in the direction of the light.
Plants, bacteria and other unicellular beings have invented the membrane potential, the source of information for synapses, nervous, cardiac and muscular activity.
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José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in psychiatry, and in management training, group and couple therapy and