> Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms

I believe that we were well-organized colonies of bacteria was proven long time ago.

We are literally a unified collective of cells.

Prokaryotes, not bacteria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-domain_system

Evaluates to the same concept of we being collectives.

Wow that was awesome to read. Biology keeps blowing its old theories out of the water. All of the excitement about rapid genome sequencing is being borne out, even tho you don’t read about bioinformatics so much. So bacteria are an offshoot from our lineage. We really are learning a lot so quickly.

I think you’re thinking of a Philip K. Dick short story. I’ll see if I can find it.

Reminded me of The Electric Ant https://archive.org/details/PhilipK.DickTheElectricAnt

I have a hypothesis that commenters sometime interpret recommendations in this format ("I think you're thinking of X") as being presumptive, because it implies someone made a mistake in their thinking. I'm not trying to say it is or isn't, just that I've seen a pattern of similar posts downvoted, and this is my hypothesis as to why.

I'm the poster the parent replied to and I appreciated the comment, and yours. I don't know why it would be modded down

I've just been trying to remember the movie Prometheus, the discussion between David and Weyland at the beginning where Weyland explains he is David's creator - this, I believe, sort of touches on the same idea - learning someone created you, maybe not very deeply; I'll need to watch it again

There's also a short story by Stephen Baxter in Phase Space (a very excellent collection) called Dante Dreams where a researcher becomes aware of the dreaming consciousness of her own organelles.

I mean it's a matter of perspective but... we are aren't we?

Basically agree.

There is an important part in what is meant by "machine".

Mechanics, strictly speaking, is pervasive in but not sufficient to account for the life process.

There's something else going on that looks like classical teleos and both the cells and the organism have it.

There's interesting work to get teleos out of mechanics in far from equilibrium thermodynamics.. Prigogine, Kauffman, Wolfram, Deacon, England even Dennet.

In a sense that’s very true. However the biggest wrinkle is that most of your cells share a single common ancestor cell. If your body is a community of microbes, it’s mostly a village of close relatives, not a symbiote like coral.

Ah, I heard quite differently when including microbiome.

For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270 "More than half your body is not human"

I believe that's incidental. There are abiotic mice which seem basically the same but require smth like 20% more calories in their diet for same metabolic level.

> most of your cells share a single common ancestor cell

We call her LUCA, last universal common ancestor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor

> Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms.

Wait 'til you find out that those "microorganisms" are themselves machines...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_machine#Biological

Yes, but a twist: this giant machine worries about its future, its kids, its wealth, its financial assets.

Or tricked into worrying about that as a control signal to perform its main task in service of its microorganism operators ;)

Nobody in this thread has read Selfish Gene, apparently. That's the whole point of the book: That genes may as well have invented all of life to propagate themselves.

In this context, species conflict is like fleets of world-ships fighting total war.

That’s an interesting SciFi idea: the real world is digital, and digital beings have created a physical world to fight battle via genetic biological machines, which are effectively concrete data structures.

like the scene in Jurassic park

"It's a Unix system. I know this!"?

Genes are effectively biological computer programs.

Somehow akin to a fork-bomb

> That genes may as well have invented all of life to propagate themselves.

I think the point of the book was, that genes didn't invent anything. They were just the first self-replicating molecules. Everything else had to happen, because they were forced to exist and compete with clones and mutating clones of themselve – a game which we call life today.

Which is all subservient to its actual main task of increasing entropy. I've found myself cycling down the street wondering if my actions were all just an elaborate way of increasing entropy more quickly.

my machine just worries about food, and work to get food

All those are just for satisfying the urge to reproduce.

Reminded me:

> Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. (Terence McKenna)

Animals evolved long before plants. What's crazy is that plants were arguably evolved by fungi using alga to farm sunlight

> Animals evolved long before plants

No

underwater: algae 3500MY vs sponges, worms, shells 800MY-485MY

out of water: plants 4705MY vs millipedes, tetrapod 420MY-400MY

quora says animals https://www.quora.com/Which-evolved-first-plants-or-animals

It would be good to confront this UCL professor with the fact algae existed long before animals

And even on land, he seems to be wrong (or at least not up to date): https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/plant-life..., https://www.science.org/content/article/land-plants-arose-ea...

This is precisely my point - algae are not plants, they evolved a long time before

reversed evolution theory

You probably know, but the process was natural selection and random mutations, plants with tasty seeds developped more

What about underwater plants? Life started in the water first didn't it?

> What about underwater plants? Life started in the water first didn't it?

They played the long game?

...except we didn't evolve from plants.

While animals and plants share mitochondria, they do not share plastids (chloroplast, chromoplast, etc.).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastid

"Invented by plants" does not necessitate "evolved from plants". Your TV doesn't contain mitochondria :)

Well i think invented is probably the wrong word moulded is probably better when you consider the fact that trees could be hundreds of years old before humanity proliferated and destroyed so many forests in last 1-200 years. It is not out of the question that animals could have evolved to serve trees as a 2-300 year old tree could see 100 generations of an animal

An interesting fact that I learned from the book Metazoa is that biological diversity was greater in the seas than on land, until about 130 million years ago, and then the explosion of diversity on land, at that time and still now, was because of a feedback loop that developed between plants and insects, with the insects allowing greater specialization among the plants, and the greater diversity among plants allowing greater diversity among insects. This was a true feedback loop, in that it would be impossible to say what the starting point was, the insects or the plants.

https://www.amazon.com/Metazoa-Animal-Minds-Birth-Consciousn...

until trees with their wood laid waste to this balance?

at least until fungi figured hoe to break lingin?

Your dates are off by 100 million years. You're confusing the late Paleozoic for the late Mesozoic. Trees came first, the explosion of land-based bio-diversity happened more than 100 million years later.

Life is just is a way for water to transport itself.

Life is, after all, what happens when you put together a bunch of hydrogen and wait a while.

We are all servants of the selfish gene.

Well, we are biological machines that would not survive without a spectrum of microbes (e.g., gut bacteria). And to your point, kinda, I sometimes wonder if they exist for us, or we exist for them.

Just ask yourself, who was first?

Asimov did a story “Hostess” that’s kind of along those lines.

that whole nanomachines sci fi, e.g. nanobots making grey goo or whatever is not as exciting if you consider cells are alreay microbits made out of protein nanobots

I recommend Stanislav Lem’s The Futurological Congress. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733473.The_Futurological...

Beyond fascinating

Like the Extended Phenotype thing explored by Dawkins.