Self And The Phenomenon Of Life: A Biologist Examines Life From Molecules To Humanity

The Microbial Self 91

“9x6” b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity

question is answered in the affirmative, as the facts seem to require, and

if we further hold, as is commonly held, that man and the lower organ-

isms are subdivisions of the same substance, then it may perhaps be

said that objective investigation is as favorable to the view of the general

distribution of consciousness throughout animals as it could well be.

But the problem as to the actual existence of consciousness outside of

the self is an indeterminate one; no increase of objective knowledge can

ever solve it. Opinions on this subject must then be largely dominated

by general philosophical considerations, drawn from other fields.”^16

Did Jennings go too far in anthropomorphizing these tiny
creatures? I have no clear-cut answer, but I shall touch on this issue in
Chapter 13: Self from Within: The Introspective Self. Should you need
more food for thought, please look at the following statement from a
prominent neuro-anatomist, Ramon y Cajal, as quoted by an equally
prominent neurophysiologist, Charles Sherrington: “I remember that
once I spent twenty hours continuously at the microscope watching the
movements of a sluggish leukocyte in its laborious efforts (emphasis
mine) to escape from a blood capillary.”^17 Leukocytes are animal white
blood cells, but their microscopic size and show of apparent “effort”
make them behave much like free living microbes.

Notes and References

1. The reader may wonder why I do not include viruses in the topic of
   microbial self. The reason is that whether or not viruses are living things
   is controversial, as they do not carry on an independent subsistence. They
   “hijack” the cellular machinery of other living things to survive.


2. Horvath P, Barrangou R. (2010) CRISPR/Cas, The immune system of bac-
   teria and archaea. Science 327: 167–170.


3. Ochman H, Lawrence JG, Groisman EA. (2000) Lateral gene transfer and
   the nature of bacterial innovation. Nature 405: 299–304.


4. Navarre WW, Porwollik S, Wang Y, et al. (2006) Selective silencing of
   foreign DNA with low GC content by the H-NS protein in salmonella.
   Science 313: 236–238.