The Myth of Human Supremacy Page 15
Watson also says, “For creatures of such superherolike ability, microscopic bdelloids—which [sic] are distantly related to flatworms—are happy in humble surroundings. The roughly 400 species of bdelloids live in fresh and brackish water, including puddles, sewage-treatment tanks, and drops of moisture adhering to soil. They have a handy ability to survive the sudden disappearance of their aquatic homes; the desiccation-survival record is nine years.
“What’s even stranger, from an evolutionary biologist’s point of view, is the bdelloid’s long-term asexuality. For perhaps 80 million years, all bdelloids have been shes, contentedly reproducing without males—and defying biologists’ ideas about the centrality of sex. Sexual reproduction, the thinking goes, introduces genetic variation and so allows a species to adapt to a changing environment and to genetic degradation. It’s commonly thought that animals that [sic] forgo sex eventually go extinct, but the bdelloid provides a glaring exception to the rule. Legendary biologist John Maynard Smith was so flummoxed by the bdelloids that he called them an ‘evolutionary scandal.’
“In 2008, a separate group of researchers found that bdelloids contain some foreign DNA in a small region of their genomes. Tunnacliffe and his colleagues decided to find out the extent of that foreign genetic material. So they turned to the bdelloid Adineta ricciae, which was discovered in a small Australian billabong, or lake. When the scientists sequenced the bdelloid DNA that provides the blueprints for active genes, they found that roughly 10% of that DNA had been borrowed from some other creature. All told, the bdelloid had adopted DNA from more than 500 different species.
“By comparing the foreign sequences to genetic databases, the researchers learned that many of the sequences are responsible for directing the production of enzymes found in simple organisms but unknown in complex animals. Two genes, for example, give rise to bacterial enzymes that help break down the toxic chemical benzyl cyanide. Two more genes, these from parasitic protozoa, direct the manufacture of a compound that can ward off cellular damage. Nearly 40% of the animal’s enzymatic activity includes a foreign component, Tunnacliffe says.”79
I get so tired of human supremacists, who perceive us as superior because we can make toasters, protein shakes, and unicycles. Every being has its own gifts.
The next “immortal” creatures are planarians, who are tiny, non-parasitic flatworms. Like the others we’re mentioning, they can certainly die. But part of their “immortality” claim comes from their ability to regenerate. If you cut off a flatworm’s head, the body will grow a new head and the head will grow a new body. If you cut it down the middle, it will grow into two flatworms. If you cut a flatworm into pieces as small as 1/279th of the original body size, the pieces will regenerate into new flatworms.
Another part of their “immortality” claim comes from being, well, immortal. Basically, part of the reason we age is that as our cells reproduce, the ends of the chromosomes can become, to use a completely non-scientific term, frayed. Or, to be more precise, whenever your chromosomes reproduce, there are reasons that are functional to this reproduction that make it so the chromosome cannot be duplicated to the very end. The (highly intelligent, in my estimation) response by bodies to this problem is to create “telomeres,” which some people call “disposable buffers,” at the ends of chromosomes. Each time the chromosome is duplicated, you lose a little of the telomeres, which means the telomeres can only protect the chromosomes (and you) for so long. Once the chromosomes themselves start suffering damage, the cells can no longer properly reproduce. In practical terms, what this means for humans is that as we get older, we can no longer run as fast as we used to, we can’t heal so quickly, we have less supple skin, we lose interest in sex, perhaps we gain an interest in either Bingo or watching Judge Judy, and eventually we suffer organ failure and death (which might, now that I think about it, have been caused by watching Judge Judy). Creatures who reproduce sexually deal with this reality by having babies, who have brand spanking new chromosomes, at some point after which the parents—and their aging, damaged chromosomes—die. Bacteria deal with this reality, as we’ve said, by dilution. Well, when you cut a planarian, the part that was cut off is replaced with cells that are as good as new, in part because they actually are new. As long ago as 1814, this caused one scientist to say that flatworms can “almost be called immortal under the edge of the knife.”80
But flatworms are even more amazing than this. If you teach flatworms to be frightened of bright lights, by flashing lights just before you shock them, and then you cut these flatworms in two, the resulting flatworms are still terrified of bright lights. That of course makes sense, because these are the same flatworms you already traumatized. It also means that these regenerated worms remember their experiences from before, which means, as with bacteria, that there can be an unbroken line of self-ness and memory back to the beginning of that string of regenerated flatworm.
If you grind up these flatworms and feed the mash to more flatworms, the new flatworms learn to associate bright lights with shocks far faster than would be otherwise expected. The new flatworms somehow metabolize or take in the memories of the flatworms they ate.
When I read that, I wondered at the complexity of the real world and also what sort of mindset might lead someone to not only terrorize and torture someone, but then come up with the idea of killing the beings he’d previously terrorized, grinding them up, and feeding them to a new batch of victims.
The next creature I want to talk about are hydras, who are immortal in the old-fashioned sense that they don’t age, and they don’t die of old age.
Hydras are small—from a few millimeters up to a maximum of about thirty millimeters long—tube-shaped fresh water animals. Picture tiny versions of their close relatives, the sea anemones: a barrel-shaped body with a mouth on top surrounded by stinging tentacles. And in both cases the tentacles are used for the same reasons: sea anemones use them to paralyze and kill fish, then bring the fish to their mouths, and hydras do the same to microscopic invertebrates like daphnia or cyclops.
Hydras can either reproduce asexually, by “budding” baby hydras out of their body walls (in which case each baby is identical to its parent); or sexually, with females growing eggs in their body walls, then hoping that sperm released into the water by males will encounter their eggs and together create little hydra bundles of joy.
Frankly, our means of conception sounds more fun.
But now that I think of it, how do we have the information to disparage the lovemaking of other species? How do we know what ecstasy hydras do or do not feel at the intercourse of body and water and water and body? How do we know that not every being—plant, fungi, animal, rock, river, mountain, virus, bacteria—perceives its own method of reproduction as the best or most pleasurable or fun? How do we know that bacteria do not feel sorry for those who do not divide, and huckleberries do not feel bad for those whose love does not include ecstatic associations with pollinators?
Back to hydras. Hydras do not age. Their stem cells have a capacity for more or less perpetual renewal. Or, to use a term created by Caleb Finch, gerontologist and author of The Biology of Human Longevity, hydras have “negligible sensescence.” They have no measurable reductions in reproductive capacity with age. They have no measurable functional decline in strength, mobility, and so on, with age. They have no increased death rate with age.81
Once again, they can still be eaten or get some disease, or they can be captured by scientists and cut up into small pieces.
Oops. That last one won’t kill them. Like planarians, hydras can, when cut up, regenerate. Not only that, if put through a sieve, the cells reform into their original shape and function.
By now I’m sure you don’t need me to point out how extraordinary these creatures are. I’m sure you also don’t need me to ask what sort of sadist would kill and pulp someone, then pass their victim through a sieve, purely to satisfy his own curiosity a
s to whether this other would be able to re-form?
The next immortal creatures I want to talk about are Turritopsis dohrnii, called “immortal jellyfish” because, having grown to sexual maturity, they can, when exposed to environmental stresses or physical damage, or when sick or old, revert to the jellyfish equivalent of infancy. Then they can mature again, revert again, and so on, forever.
As evolutionary biologist and all around fan of coral and jellyfish Maria Pia Miglietta puts it, “instead of sure death, [Turritopsis] transforms all of its existing cells into a younger state.” National Geographic describes the process: “The jellyfish turns itself into a bloblike cyst, which then develops into a polyp colony, essentially the first stage in jellyfish life. The jellyfish’s cells are often completely transformed in the process. Muscle cells can become nerve cells or even sperm or eggs.”82
And then they can mature again. And then revert. And then mature.
So, if you get mangled in a car wreck, or if your kidneys fail, or if you get Crohn’s or leukemia, or if you get old and tired, no big deal. You just revert to infancy and grow up again.
Of course they can still be eaten by predators and so on. And also of course industrial humans have made a mess associated with these creatures. This species originated in the Mediterranean, but global shipping has caused it to spread around the world in what Miglietta calls a “silent invasion,” an invasion that was only recently noticed. Gosh, we have a biologically immortal invasive species, spread by the global industrial economy, with for the longest time no one even noticing. What could possibly go wrong?
It gets worse. There is, according to James Carlton, a marine scientist at Williams College in Massachusetts, a “growing fleet” of unrecognized, invasive invertebrates.
Carlton also noted that this new discovery that the immortal jellyfish has overspread the globe highlights “our remarkable underestimation of the extent to which the ocean has been reorganized.”83
“Reorganized.” I guess that’s one word for it. And I guess understatement sometimes has its virtues.
I’m not sure, however, if this is the language most of us would use were we the victims of this “reorganization.” Then we might say “theft,” “murder,” “extirpation,” “genocide,” “ecocide.”
Stolid scientists are saying that salt water fish could be extinct in thirty years. Reorganized is not the word I would use to describe what is being done to the oceans.
Note also his use of passive voice, instead of active voice, with the latter’s subject/verb/object assignment of causal responsibility. Who is causing the oceans to be “reorganized”? The oceans aren’t being “reorganized” by the actions of some random entity. They aren’t being “reorganized” by the actions of the sun, or God, or Martians, or malevolent aliens, or whales. This culture of human supremacists is causing the oceans to be “reorganized,” read “causing them to die.”
So, members of this human supremacist culture are materially benefitting from actions—read, theft and murder—leading to the “reorganization” of the oceans. And, what do you know, it is members of this human supremacist culture who are consistently underestimating the extent of the harm caused by this theft and murder. Remarkable. Who’d a’ thunk that thieves and murderers who consider themselves superior to those they steal from and murder, and indeed who perceive these others they are stealing from and murdering as not even having subjective existence, but rather being either resources to be exploited or competitors to be ruthlessly destroyed (or sometimes both at the same time), would underestimate the harm caused by the thefts and murders they perpetrate?
And now we come to lobsters. Lobsters can’t claim any of the fancy forms of immortality: they don’t regenerate if you cut them in two, they can’t survive in outer space, they can’t survive extremely cold temperatures. They sure as hell can’t survive boiling water. They just don’t get old. To reuse Caleb Finch’s delightful phrase, they undergo “negligible senescence.” If you recall, as our cells reproduce, the ends of the chromosomes can become frayed, leading to many of the problems of old age (although I’m not sure frayed chromosomes are responsible for all the problems of old age, like that young neighbor who just moved in and who blasts that lousy music that all sounds the same—boom, boom, boom—and why don’t kids these days have any manners? When I was a kid . . .). There exists an enzyme called telomerase that repairs the telomeres that protect the ends of our chromosomes. Most vertebrates express this enzyme in the embryonic stage, when their cells have to reproduce quickly. But then most of us stop expressing this enzyme (which is a good thing, in general; expression of telomerase in damaged or old cells can lead to cancer), which means our cells become damaged as they reproduce. Which means we age. Lobsters and a few others continue to express telomerase throughout their lives. This means that lobsters don’t slow down, weaken, or become less fertile as they get older. In fact, older lobsters may reproduce more easily than younger ones.
Perhaps lobsters say, “Viagra? We don’t need no stinking Viagra.”
The standard caveat applies: immortality, in this case, means they don’t die of old age. They can still get sick. They can still die from exposure to pollution. They can still be eaten by predators, although by the time lobsters get to be pretty big, only humans, cod, or seals among megafauna can still generally kill them.
We could go through a list as long as the world, with words as tiny as nanobes or viruses, and still never come to the end of different ways that different beings are extraordinary. Many turtles resemble lobsters when it comes to aging. Autopsies reveal that the internal organs of many types of elder turtles have not degraded; inside, they’re still teenagers. They died, but not of old age. Or there are pythons, whose hearts expand by 40 percent in the days after they eat a large meal; a human heart expanding similarly would be a precursor to death. Naked mole rats (who look scary but are evidently kind and gentle) are impervious to pain caused by acid.84 And we all know that grizzly bears hibernate, but did we all know that when they’re gorging in preparation, they may consume 50,000 calories and gain sixteen pounds per day? And did we know that when they hibernate for up to seven months, they don’t eat, drink, urinate, or defecate? When they hibernate, they turn off their insulin receptors, becoming diabetic. Likewise, through their hibernation, these bears shut down the functioning of their kidneys. As a result, their kidneys scar and their blood toxifies. But come spring, their insulin response returns to normal, as does their kidney function. Their kidneys suffer no lasting damage. And to bring us back to forms of immortality, there is the Leach’s storm petrel, a tiny bird who lives more than thirty years, and who is the only known animal whose telomeres grow longer with age. And of course there are those glass sea sponges I mentioned, whose lifespan can exceed ten thousand years.
And we haven’t even talked about long-living coral (such as the black coral off Hawaii who is more than 4,000 years old), fungi (such as the honey mushroom in Michigan who is 1,500 to 10,000 year old) or plants (such as the Neptune grass in the Mediterranean who is 100,000 to 250,000 years old) . . .
•••
My mother is getting old. Someday she will die. I don’t know how I will survive that. I don’t know how any of us survive the death of a beloved parent. And many of us—human and nonhuman—do. The death of a parent, and ultimately the death of this parent’s child, too—that is, all of us—is one of the costs of entry to this wonderful thing called life through sexual reproduction.
And the knowledge that we all die is one of the primary causes of all monotheistic religions,85 with their gates of various heavens standing open and waiting for their respective adherents to shuffle off this mortal coil, after which, if these adherents followed the rules of that particular religion while they were on earth, they will receive the blessing of immortality normally reserved for planarians, lobsters, bacteria, and others of the evidently spiritually pure.86 A fear of death and a y
earning for immortality is also a primary motivator of much human supremacist science, not only in its desire to assume the omnipotence, omniscience, and immortality of the Abrahmic God, but more prosaically, in its attempts to mine all of the immortal nonhumans I just mentioned to see how we can steal their immortality for our own. Rare indeed is the article about any immortal or even long-lived nonhuman that does not conclude with descriptions of scientific attempts to create human immortality.87
When my mother’s grandmother was dying, my mother, fairly young at the time, comforted her by saying, “You’ll just go to sleep, and when you wake up Grandpa will be there with you.”
I do not know if when the time comes I can comfort my mother in this same way, telling her that she will sleep, then wake to find herself with her parents and others whom she loved and loves dearly. I do not know that I have that faith. I do not know what happens when we die. The lights may simply go out, and we sleep dreamlessly forever. Or we may dream, and as our bodies decompose our dreams may more and more resemble the dreams of the land, until ours and theirs are all the same. Or for all I know, human supremacists come back as their victims, and spend their short miserable lives unsuccessfully trying to communicate to their boneheaded former-comrades-in-superiority that mice or lizards or pigs or soy beans really do have subjective existence, before they are tortured to death. I don’t know.