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from the hey-baby-wanna-join-my-biomolecular-network dept.
A series of groundbreaking studies have revealed that what we have always thought of as individuals are actually "biomolecular networks" that consist of visible hosts plus millions of invisible microbes that have a significant effect on how the host develops, the diseases it catches, how it behaves and possibly even its social interactions.
...
In this case, the parts are the host and its genome plus the thousands of different species of bacteria living in or on the host, along with all their genomes, collectively known as the microbiome. (The host is something like the tip of the iceberg while the bacteria are like the part of the iceberg that is underwater: Nine out of every 10 cells in plant and animal bodies are bacterial. But bacterial cells are so much smaller than host cells that they have generally gone unnoticed.)Microbiologists have coined new terms for these collective entities -- holobiont -- and for their genomes -- hologenome. "These terms are needed to define the assemblage of organisms that makes up the so-called individual," said Bordenstein.
There may really be something to this. Other recent research has focused on the role that microflora play in obesity and other aspects of human health. What do you fellow "holobionts" say, does it disturb or comfort you to think of yourselves as a walking constellation of bacteria?
(Score: 4, Touché) by penguinoid on Friday August 21 2015, @08:43PM
I don't think so.
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday August 21 2015, @08:50PM
They don't literally mean the word. It's a (stupid-as-fuck) metaphor for broadening senses of identity that modern biology is providing.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday August 21 2015, @09:29PM
Identity and consciousness are illusions, along with categorization.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday August 21 2015, @10:11PM
Whose illusions?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Daiv on Friday August 21 2015, @10:45PM
Mine apparently, since I can only know I exist. Thanks Descartes!!! ...I mean, me?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @11:07PM
God's. He's hallucinating all of us.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @11:36PM
Cogito ergo sum
(Score: 2) by Bytram on Saturday August 22 2015, @02:52AM
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum!
;)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @08:50PM
This is as ridiculous as the idea of the singularity. Just because an idea is edgy or mind boggling doesn't mean we should accept it, especially when it is a philosophical idea only.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday August 21 2015, @09:31PM
Just because an idea is edgy or mind boggling doesn't mean we should accept it,
Yes it does.
The next thing you know you will be lobbying for civil rights for gut bacteria, and demonstrating on the supreme court steps for the right of bacterial mitosis.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Friday August 21 2015, @09:41PM
> This is as ridiculous as the idea of the singularity.
You're just saying that because wonkey_monkey's sig has doomed us all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:19PM
Singularity is a fact, not an idea. It's already happening.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @12:28AM
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday August 21 2015, @09:25PM
I invoke Betteridge.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Funny) by unzombied on Friday August 21 2015, @09:37PM
We think you all are wrong.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @09:04PM
We are quite pleased that they have finally uncovered what we have always known.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @09:34PM
Speak for yourselves.
Fags.
-- Signed, the loner e-coli trapped in your lower intestine.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @09:09PM
We Are Not Amused [wikipedia.org] by this article!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday August 21 2015, @09:29PM
"Crowd" exists and it's a useful term, and we hopefully all agree a crowd is made of different independent individuals.
The biological perspective doesn't make "Crowd" less useful, so why should do something different to "I"? Language uses abstractions and conventions, and challenging them is more often a case of newspeak enforcement than a case of optimization.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by drpylons on Friday August 21 2015, @09:30PM
This is very, very silly.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday August 21 2015, @09:44PM
The man as a network influenced by different independent entities, now where did I see that before...
"And they were casting out many evil spirits" (Mark,6)
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:33PM
> Does Betteridge Law ever fail?
No.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday August 22 2015, @12:17PM
At least someone noticed :)
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @09:50PM
what do bacteria have to do with pronouns?!
are they implying some sort of reverse lingistic relativity* might happen by itself?
What for? *shakes head*
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Benjamin_Lee_Whorf
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Archon V2.0 on Friday August 21 2015, @09:56PM
> what do bacteria have to do with pronouns?!
I'll have you know that I'm a bacteria-kin and only respond to the third-person pronouns "", "", and "" because bacteria don't make noise.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday August 22 2015, @12:58AM
The thing is, you are not a singular individual. You're a collection of different organisms, working together. So you shouldn't use any singular pronouns to refer to yourself or other people; you should only use plural ones.
It's just like companies. Decades ago, we used to refer to a company as a singular entity: "Ford is an car company", etc. However, these days, everyone nows refers to corporations as a collective and uses plural pronouns: "Ford are a car company".
If we're going to refer to a single corporation with a plural pronoun, then we might as well refer to a single human with a plural pronoun too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @03:57AM
You're trying to teach us grammar and you use 'an car', now where did I leave that pinch of salt...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:15PM
The thing is, you are not a singular individual. You're a collection of different organisms, working together. So you shouldn't use any singular pronouns to refer to yourself or other people; you should only use plural ones.
No, I *am* a singular individual.
I control my body; I don't control all these other things living inside me. They don't share my consciousness; they're just along for the ride.
If and when it becomes practical to communicate with said gut flora or whatever I'll concede your point. Until then, no.
It's just like companies. Decades ago, we used to refer to a company as a singular entity: "Ford is a car company", etc. However, these days, everyone nows refers to corporations as a collective and uses plural pronouns: "Ford are a car company".
FTFY.
Do you hang out with a lot of English majors or something? Because I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "Ford are a car company" before.
P.S: Or is this whole post a joke. I'm not sure.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday August 23 2015, @03:33AM
Um yes, the post was supposed to be sarcasm (with a couple of typos).
No, I don't hang out with English majors, I just read the internet a lot, and I've seen a lot of people writing that way. According to another responder here, it's British English usage. Whatever it is, it's fucking annoying and stupid.
(Score: 1) by Pino P on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:50PM
It's just like companies. Decades ago, we used to refer to a company as a singular entity: "Ford is an car company", etc.
"Ford is an car company"? The last time I heard "an" used before a consonant sound was the "an hero" meme [knowyourmeme.com] of someone driven to suicide. In the 2008 US auto industry crisis, that arguably described GM and Chrysler, but not Ford, which didn't need to take a dime of U.S. Government bridge loans.
However, these days, everyone nows refers to corporations as a collective and uses plural pronouns: "Ford are a car company".
"nows"?
It appears to be a usage difference between American English, Australian English, and New Zealand English [onlinegrammar.com.au], which use "Ford is", and British English [stackexchange.com], which uses "Ford are".
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:11PM
We're bacteria, you insensitive clod!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:20PM
This is a bullshit story. Good bit of phenix666's submissions are crap. They get posted because ...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:27PM
To cause such wonderfully and elegantly worded retorts obviously... could try POSTING SOMETHING yourself instead...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday August 22 2015, @01:27PM
Fair enough. What's your standard for stories that you think Soylent should aspire to, Digg? Reddit? Slashdot? Or do you have something entirely different in mind, like an academic journal? These stories I submit are all gleaned from "reputable" sources, so you can't mean them--they must be crap, too:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology [bbc.com]
http://www.popularmechanics.com/ [popularmechanics.com]
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ [scientificamerican.com]
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/ [spiegel.de]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/ [theregister.co.uk]
http://www.bloomberg.com/technology [bloomberg.com]
http://www.theguardian.com/us/technology [theguardian.com]
http://spectrum.ieee.org/ [ieee.org]
http://cleantechnica.com/ [cleantechnica.com]
http://www.livescience.com/ [livescience.com]
http://www.sciencedaily.com/ [sciencedaily.com]
http://www.treehugger.com/ [treehugger.com]
http://www.actinnovation.com/ [actinnovation.com]
Perhaps you could suggest better sources. Or, better yet, maybe you could submit stories from them.
I submit some things that are serious, some things that are a bit silly, like this story, and a range in between, because at a community site like this discussion's the thing. It's a "tech" site, but some of the most-discussed stories have been things like "What fountain pen do you use?" So the range of what people here find interesting and like to learn & talk about is perhaps broader than some think. But, suggest a better way. If you don't, or don't step up, you're just being a troll.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:22PM
If you don't want to do this, bow out. At this point, I am suspecting you're slashdot's samzempus trying to ruin this site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:46PM
"What do you fellow "holobionts" say, does it disturb or comfort you to think of yourselves as a walking constellation of bacteria?"
The human side of me says to kill all the bacteria inside me but the bacteria side says the human side is the infection and it wants my human side killed. So as a holobionts we mutually agree to just leave each other alone.
See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYFcT9sDSBs [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:53PM
Mr Burns *
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @11:32PM
You could have at least linked to a version that wasn't audio over a still shot.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday August 21 2015, @11:38PM
We think this is a bad move. How else do we distinguish the commoner from our greatness?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @11:51PM
I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a while and my current understanding is that our concept of identity is really a vast over-simplification - we are essentially a system of both related and distinct organisms. For a clear-cut example, consider microchimerism [wikipedia.org] which is the phenomenon by which nearly every mother ends up with cells circulating through her bloodstream that contain the DNA of her child - decades after the child is born.
And now, here's something even more controversial - in a sort of fractal way, our society is a system of both related and distinct organisms too - you, me, etc. We are related in a variety of ways - biologically, functionally, etc. And we are organized to create something greater than any of us individually. We can contract diseases that, if they spread enough, like a cancer, can kill society too.
Something to think about while stoned, but also kind of sobering.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @12:56AM
I thought the voices in my head were due to schizophrenia. Turns out I was just arguing with my inner bacteria. We always get into arguments over what to eat.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday August 22 2015, @02:57AM
"We" are just a strong community! And the voices I hear are a normal part of our inner dialogue.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:20AM
Will the Pronoun "I" Become Obsolete?
Nope
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:25PM
My inner bacteria would beg to differ.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:27AM
stinky-feet and tooth-decay I prefer to kick out of my "holobiont-ness"