Philosophy Wire: Resurrection… Of dinosaurs. Or Christians?

How do we decide which species to resurrect? The resurrection of vanished species - through cutting-edge technologies such as gene-editing - should be targeted towards recently extinct species rather than ancient ones, according to a conservation biologist. He suggests that long-gone species such as the woolly mammoth would not be the best focus for de-extinction efforts. [1] We want to bring back extinct species. We want to become gods. Just to show that we can. But we do not want to bring dinosaurs back. We are afraid of their screams. We are intimidated by their strength. Because it is a strength we cannot control. Frightened gods. Ask a bacterium. It is not afraid that the dinosaurs will come. It really does not care. We are afraid that real power is not hidden in what we do but in what we do not. We are afraid that God is hiding in our very existence and not in how we interpret it. Look at the dirty soil. God is hiding in the mud. Just as a Christian who does not fear whether he dies or not, a bacterium does not fear whether a dinosaur will come or not. The power of being is raw. And all you can do is accept it. This was done by the dinosaurs, as well as the Christians. That's why they both still scare us, even though they are long dead…

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Philosophy Wire: The whole world inside a bacterium...

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2014-12-25]: Bacteria become 'genomic tape recorders', recording chemical exposures in their DNA. [1] But everything interacts with everything. Everything is stored as information into everything. The whole cosmos has memory of everything. Everywhere. It is as if everything just Is. Still in time. For ever. Inside a bacterium.

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Philosophy Wire: Sulfur eating bacteria. Rocks. Humans. Life.

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2014-12-20]: Biochemical traces in 2.5-billion-year-old carbonate rocks from Brazil reveal that sulfur-consuming bacteria were active at a time when ocean sulfur levels were low. The sulfur was not in the atmosphere. But in the rocks these creatures lived in. [1]

From dirt we came from.
And to that we must return.
Not water. Not air. Not space.
But to simple, dirty ground.
The most gifted children,
have the humblest parents...

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Philosophy Wire: Impossible games. Attractive games.

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2014-12-19]:

Video games which are impossible to win seem to be attracting more and more gamers. [1]
Because deeply inside we know...
that the impossible is the father of the possible...
In a world where everything is possible,
everything is impossible.
It sound impossible, huh?

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Philosophy Wire: Resistant bacteria. Arrogant humans.

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2014-12-18]: Ernest Cable was a British soldier who died in 1915 from dysentery caught in the trenches of northern France during the first world war. Even if penicillin had been available to treat him, he would still have died because the bacterium that made him sick, Shigella flexneri, was already resistant to the world's first antibiotic. That was years before Alexander Fleming discovered it in 1928. Nor would he have been saved by erythromycin, which was discovered later, in 1949. The bacterium was found to be resistant to that too.

These historical insights into antibiotic resistance, now described as a global epidemic, come from DNA sequencing of the bacterial strain that killed Cable.

"Cable is almost like the unknown soldier in that he has no known relatives, but now everyone will remember him, so he's been immortalized in a sense," says Kate Baker of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, Cambridge.

Baker says that the resistance they found is the result of an evolutionary arms race between rival microbes. [1]

We believe we find new things. But everything is old.
We believe everything evolves around us. But everything existed before we existed.
We believe we are special.
And we can be. Only if we understand that we are not...

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Philosophy Wire: Bacteria, synchronization, light...

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2014-08-29]: Bacteria synchronizing themselves. Either with the help of light or without it. [1] From bacteria to humans, we are all dancing in the same tune. And as something unites organisms of the same species together, there must be something which unites all species together. Because after all, the boundaries between species are only in our mind. Let go. Try to hear the music...

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Philosophy Wire: Iron, manganese, life...

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2013-03-24]:

Scientists have confirmed that the pathogen that causes Lyme Disease - unlike any other known organism -- can exist without iron, a metal that all other life needs to make proteins and enzymes. Instead of iron, the bacteria substitute manganese to make an essential enzyme (and in fact this helps the pathogen elude our immune system defenses that protect the body by starving pathogens of iron). [source: Science News] If you ask me, I believe this does not stop at manganese. If organisms did not have access to either iron or manganese, they would surely use some other metal or even non-metal substance. Life seems to be an inherent characterisric of the cosmos and nothing so mundane as iron or manganese is "essential" for it...

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Philosophy Wire: Microbes, humans, dust in the air...

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2012-12-19]: Microbes and bacteria are discovered to fly in the air for days travelling from continent to continent. [source: web news] It took thousands of years for humans to understand that they are just... "dust in the air". A knowledge which seems to just be a way of living for some other organisms...

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Philosophy Wire: Self healing cement, cracks, bacteria, humans…

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2012-10-30]: Scientists discovered the self-healing cement: small bacteria residing in hypnosis inside the material, are activated with water (pouring through micro cracks in the cement body) and generate limestone [source: BBC News]. Nature has many mechanisms to self-heal and it is good that humans have started learning they exist. We just now have to make sure we are the cement and not the cracks… Bacteria in their humility have many ways to help maintain harmony in the cosmos. What can we do to achieve the same?

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Philosophy Wire: The "ecological" extermination of a species...

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-05-27]: The international community is divided on whether to destroy the last specimens of the smallpox virus [source: web news]. Strange... When it comes to butterflies, we spend millions of dollars to save their species. But when it comes to a deadly virus that can kill us, then the "need for ecosystems harmony" goes away and suddently the elimination of a species looks tempting...

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