Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 19

There Is More To Life Than Meets The Eye

Regular readers know that the know-it-all scientists who work for Big Pharma have had some surprises lately.

For years they have been mass-murdering microbes and viruses as if 100% of them had to be destroyed.

They used typical propaganda scare tactics to scare the consumer world into buying anti-biotic and anti-viral pills by the truckload, shipload, and planeload.

That is the way it is in the land of the mother of the "super bugs", where little bugs are fed antibiotics like athletes being fed steroids, then those bugs say "yummy, give me some more."

Then finally they go on to become immune to the "treatments" we spread indiscriminately like propaganda on the nightly snooze report (Deadly 'Superbugs' Invade U.S. Health Care Facilities).

But what happens to the virus world that we depend on for health and survival?

What happens to the microbes that make up most of the cell count in and on our human body, and which make up 98-99% of our genetic material (The Human Microbiome Congress)?

And what happens to those that have an effect on the climate and ecosystems --those we discussed in last week's Dredd Blog post:

A major question in ecology has centered on the role of microbes in regulating ecosystem function. Now, in research published ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Brajesh Singh of the University of Western Sydney, Australia, and collaborators show how changes in the populations of methanotrophic bacteria can have consequences for methane mitigation at ecosystem levels.
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The selection hypothesis states that a small number of key species, rather than all species present determine key functions in ecosystems.
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There are an estimated 10³¹ viruses on Earth. That is to say: there may be a hundred million times more viruses on Earth than there are stars in the universe. The majority of these viruses infect microbes, including bacteria, archaea, and microeukaryotes, all of which are vital players in the global fixation and cycling of key elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. These two facts combined—the sheer number of viruses and their intimate relationship with microbial life—suggest that viruses, too, play a critical role in the planet’s biosphere.
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Furthermore, researchers analyzing oceanic life have discovered many novel viruses that defy much of the conventional wisdom about what a virus is and what a virus does.

(Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 18). The scientists working for the killing factories of Big Pharma have the same philosophy as the warmongers in the kill anything that moves holy war.

They have the same cultural amygdala as those who fire indiscriminately into a crowd without knowing who is in that crowd or who or what they will harm.

All that being said, let's take a look at some new scientific discoveries that indicate that some of these entities we have called a virus should have a new name, because some 93% of their genetic material was unknown on Earth until recently:

The organism was initially called NLF, for “new life form”.
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Later, after the researchers discovered a similar organism in a pond in Australia, they realized that both are viruses — the largest yet found.
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But these viruses, described today in Science, are more than mere record-breakers — they also hint at unknown parts of the tree of life. Just 7% of their genes match those in existing databases.

“What the hell is going on with the other genes?” asks Claverie. “This opens a Pandora’s box. What kinds of discoveries are going to come from studying the contents?” The researchers call these giants Pandoraviruses.
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“This is a major discovery that substantially expands the complexity of the giant viruses and confirms that viral diversity is still largely underexplored,” says Christelle Desnues, a virologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles, who was not involved in the study.

(Nature, 18 July 2013). The dynamic behavior of these Padoraviruses is another interesting aspect of the discovery:

The researchers are now trying to determine the viruses’ origins by characterizing the unknown genes and the proteins they encode. They have long suspected that giant viruses evolved from cells; if they are right, the ancestors of Pandoraviruses must have been very different from the bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes we have today. “We think that at some point, the dynasty on Earth was much bigger than those three domains,” says Abergel. Some cells gave rise to modern life, and others survived by parasitizing them and evolving into viruses.

(ibid, emphasis added). This sounds like the suspected catastrophe induced evolution or morph we wondered about in a previous post:

Recently, scientists discovered that even humans and microbes are symbionts, and in fact humans can not reproduce without them.

One can surmise that the K-T boundary extinction event was globally traumatic, since ~90% of land species, including dinosaurs, bit the extinction dust, as did perhaps ~50% of ocean species.

How did the remaining microbes react?

Since the utter destruction and catastrophe caused by the K-T boundary extinction was globally extreme, the microbes that survived would have been extremist types for the most part, otherwise they would have been unable to exist in those new extreme conditions.

The subsequent extreme events of taking over control of mammalian female placenta, establishing a virgin species, or perhaps engendering the adaptability of newts, may have been microbial reactions to the extreme trauma of the K-T boundary extinction event.

The spurious activity caused by any such trauma may explain why not all mammals, for example the rabbit, need those microbes to reproduce.

Evidence, in the form of the oldest rabbit fossil yet found, shows that it originated after the time of the K-T extinction event.

The rabbit, and species close to it, are not like other mammals such as the gorilla, monkey, orangutan, or human, which must have microbe (viral) help in order to reproduce via a functional placenta.

(Are Microbes The Origin of PTSD?, emphasis added). It may be that this never-before-discovered genetic material in the never-before-discovered Pandoravirus realm could be the result of one or more of the five past catastrophic mass extinction events.

If life forms, including microbes and viruses, react to mass extinctions some of those reactions are likely to be panic, delusion, degeneration, and loss of behavioral identity as the environment around them suddenly and/or violently changes.

Now they face The Anthropogenic Sixth Mass Extinction event currently underway and being conducted by human civilization.

When will we ever get rid of the loser meme "we have to destroy it in order to save it?"

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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