I was reading an article the other day about a woman who died as a consequence of flesh eating bacterium, and it made me think a few things which prompted this article.
Firstly, I will guarantee you that the world will continue to take the wrong approach to this unless they think in the way I’m about to suggest — hence the motivation to educate them before they make matters worse as they’ve been continuing to do so far … secondly I’ll bet a lot of people will deny what I’m about to say, and then it will later be proven correct.
OK here’s the thing about the bacterial evolution causing superbugs and flesh eating bacterium:
For the majority of the history of the planet, neither of these things were issues; plants and animals thrived in an abundance of genetically biodiverse ecosystems around the planet — yet for some mysterious reason it all turns to shit now … why might that be? Well, the simple answer is that we took an idiotic domination approach to nature, we attacked it, so it effectively attacks back. Everything wants to survive, why would you think bacterium are any different.
Also we misinterpreted the actions of natural ecosystems and their species — everything we didn’t like was interpreted as an attack, and the automatic response was “let’s teach those fuckers a lesson!” << ie: the fucking idiots approach to everything.
But why do flesh eating bacterium exist at all? Well in order for something to evolutionarily specialise in eating flesh, it has to be an advantageous position to take up;
— but imagine this:
- an animal dies, and it’s corpse lays there rotting;
- many bacterium can break down the flesh without specialising;
- in order to specialise however, certain genetic compromises must be made;
- once that body is consumed, the specialist flesh eating bacterium isn’t as well suited to other food sources, and is out competed unless by some miracle another dead body is within range;
- otherwise such bacterium would need to go into some kind of stasis mode waiting for the next food source;
- let’s say for a second they can get into a cut, so ok, they kill the host, and they’re back in the same boat;
— so the simple fact is, it’s just not an efficient choice when you don’t need to specialise in order to enjoy that food source.
Nature is very efficient, and while it does experiment through random mutation, the probability of a new mutation gaining dominance is almost entirely dependent on its efficiency and the ubiquity of the circumstances in which that efficiency gains significant advantage — so we see extremophiles in extreme conditions, but we don’t see them elsewhere, as they’re not efficient for elsewhere.
Let’s say you start a war, and that war goes on and on and on for years — what have you now done? You’ve created the circumstances where a flesh eating bacterium might actually thrive on an ongoing basis. How else could you do it? Well how about you create a meat industry which spans every continent, killing trillions of animals annually, and you just allow those abattoirs to pour blood into sewers and rivers and soil without thought for consequences.
Go take a walk in a National Park somewhere, do you see dead animals all over the place? No. No matter how much wildlife is there, you will not ever see a proliferation of corpses, it doesn’t happen outside of extreme natural disasters or human intervention — hence we do not find the regular circumstances for a proliferation of flesh eating bacterium.
What about superbugs? Well they’re caused by our insane overuse of antibiotics, so they exist in hospitals and in the livestock industry where such insane practices are commonplace enough to provide the circumstances required for such evolved traits, and when people consume animal flesh, they occasionally consume such superbugs in the process.
But let’s ask an important question:
Are these forms of bacterium otherwise efficient?
The clear answer is no they are not, because if they were, they’d have dominated the planet long ago. They’re efficient for a limited set of circumstances, but otherwise they’re self destructive and self defeating — because if they dominated, they would lead to the circumstances where animals die out, in which case plant species that rely on symbiosis with animal species in ecosystems could more easily die out too, and thus they remove the more stable biosphere on which they depend for far greater advantage to themselves. Bacterium are far better off living in our gut and providing ecological services to us in symbiosis, versus attacking the host that provides this nice safe secure environment with a constantly replenished food supply.
Cooperation and mutually beneficial symbiosis dominates evolution, because it is the path that leads to more stable conditions for all — bacterium are no more capable of doing everything themselves than are plants or animals or fungi, we all need each other. Plants want animals to spread pollen and seeds, and to fertilise the soil, animals want plants to feed them ( even carnivores require this, since without plants there exists no food for prey species ), fungi require plants for food and shade, plants need fungi for food supply chains in the soil, and on it goes.
So the simple answer is this:
What happens when we stop creating the circumstances whereby being a superbug or being a flesh eating bacterium is advantageous?
Well bacterium evolve extremely quickly, so without the circumstances to justify such evolutionary adaptations, those adaptations become an inefficient disadvantage, because they require the sacrifice of other genetic possibilities, and as such, they are gradually dropped and discarded for better advantage, until all that’s left are remnants of genetic memory, which eventually fade to nothing. In the timeline of bacterial life and evolution, this can happen very quickly, as many generations can pass within days or weeks, and bacterium can also pass genetic information to each other to speed up the process ( a kind of instant evolution, which they’re able to do because they’re such simple organisms ).
But instead of stopping causing the problem, what do humans do? We escalate the conflict, and we give nature no choice but to adapt to that escalation. If we would instead simplify our approach — ie: instead of feeding people antibiotics when they get a cut, just wash the cut, give them a big injection of vitamin C and other immune supports, and then monitor them so that IF ( and only if ) things get out of hand, THEN we might apply some antibiotics, which means that with such lesser use, there’s no consistency of circumstance to warrant the evolutionary pathway to becoming a superbug — then we might actually get somewhere.
How is a superbug strain or flesh eating bacterium going to respond to a lack of consistent availability of the circumstances to which they have specialised? They have 2 choices:
- revert to something better adapted;
- go into hibernation;
— and option 2 probably has limited benefit if those circumstances rarely come again, so the hibernated mode would eventually die out, being deposited deeper and deeper in the soil, until it becomes new rocks and the bacterium are destroyed by heat and mineral chemistry under enormous pressure deep in the Earth ( OK that’s millions of years away, but you get the idea, and they only have to be a few feet or metres deep in the soil in an inactive state before their probability of being revived is minimal ).
Maybe they’ll never be completely wiped out, but by simply changing our behaviour, we can remove the circumstances that are favourable to the problem.
So what we need to do is this:
- have holistic natural hospitals which do not over use antibiotics, instead simply supporting the immune system, and cleaning with water and saline solution;
- stop selling antibiotics to the uneducated general public as if they weren’t dangerous;
- stop having wars;
- stop burying all our dead in 1 place to supply a concentrated source of mammal flesh;
- stop killing trillions of animals annually, and close the abattoirs;
- stop eating so much meat and thus breeding flesh eating bacterium in our guts.
If we do that, these problems will go away in time, because there’s no reason for them to stay.
Go have a look at the lifespan of carnivores versus herbivores, and if you can’t see a connection between health and a vegetarian diet, then you really haven’t been looking.