August/September 2019 ●Philosophy Now 19Science
stantly changing. Evolution is
the process of the change of
the composites.
How would this work?
Well, life began with microbes
almost four billion years ago.
Microbes built a giant system,
a living planetary network of
microbes, that altered plane-
tary chemistry, for instance by
oxygenating the atmosphere.
Microbes also have their own
precursor of biological com-
munication. Eshel Ben-Jakob,
physicist and microbiologist,
was among the first to use the
term ‘bacterial linguistics’ in
such a context.
At least one billion years
ago, the microbial planetary
network produced the first
symbiotic organisms, such as
amoeba: eukaryotic cells,
which are cells with a nucleus.
These types of cells, which
include most of the cells in
human bodies, are formed
from the combination of two
types of microbes – bacteria
and archea – when one type of
cell swallowed the other but
the other stayed alive inside it.
Amoeba and her relatives,
known as the protists, playing
games with bacteria, learned
the crafts of construction with
and communication amongst
many cells. This merging of
protist cells gradually pro-
duced multi-celled organisms
from once free-living individ-
ual cells. Microbes immedi-
ately joined in to help gener-
ate super-symbiotic collec-
tives called holobionts, which
means a complex individual
organism living with all its
individual bacteria etc. All the
organisms we see around us -
humans, dogs, trees, fish - are
holobionts. There are no
plants or animals on the planet
without associated micro-
biota. If you removed
microbes from the biosphere
it would collapse. Holobionts
themselves formed social
communities – societies of
present in our digestive tract and on our skin.
For symbiotic biology, life is a constantly
changing and transitional complex form, and
all organisms except the most basic microbes
are types of chimeras – composite ecological
systems thrown out into the biosphere by the
thermodynamic storm of life, in the same sort
of way that Arcimboldo painted human faces
by merging seemingly incompatible images
projected by the storm of his artistic mind onto
his canvases.
© DR PREDRAG SLIJEPCEVIC 2019
Predrag Slijepcevic is a Senior Lecturer in Biology
at Brunel University, London.insects, plants, people... In this way, some social
communities turned into what have been called
‘superorganisms’. The whole biosphere is a col-
lage of diverse ecosystems: just like Arcim-
boldo’s group portraits.
At the heart of symbiotic biology is the prin-
ciple of biological coexistence. Whether we like
it or not, we are microbial partners. Our bodies
are ecological systems that comprise forty tril-
lion cells, each one containing tens, hundreds,
or even thousands of integrated bacteria-mito-
chondria; and biologists estimate between forty
and four hundred trillion more microbes which
are not strictly speaking part of our bodies are