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Comment by nzgrover | Hacker News Reader

When are we going to accept that we are just a life support system for a bacterial colony?

Also trees are just farming us to create the CO2 that they crave. It's dangerous to look at the world with a human-first lens.

Also dogs at some point decided they'd stop looking for food themselves and instead focus on taking advantage of how insanely industrious humans are

And wheat domesticated us, not the other way around.

Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan is a great book / documentary that explores this view.

And cows, so they could greatly increase their numbers and outcompete other herbivores.

Given that there are organisms that can literally effect human and animal behavior, in a way the system itself is partly controlled by the organisms inside it.

The big ones are toxoplasma, rabies, etc but there's a theory that many viruses and bacteria seek to control the behaviour of the host to enable successful spread. Perhaps flu makes people more social before they get too ill? Perhaps some sexually transmitted diseases change behaviour to make the host more promiscuous? Almost impossible to perform any studies on humans, but for fish...

This sounds like the premise for a good zombie movie.

Aliens movies are similar!

I guess skynet is just another "Johnny come lately", late to the party and not biologically diverse enough to be original :)

Funniest comment tree I've read all day. Faith in humanity restored from a floppy :p

Or, for the really old folks - "...restored from a paper tapeworm. :p"

If you listen closely, you can hear an ameoba laugh.

If the ameobas didn't have the guts to fix all the worlds problems, what chance does that leave boffins? Tri low bite as they might :p

I mean, if you dig a bit deeper you'll find all life is just elaborate Rube Goldberg machines comprised of chemical interactions.

We are a system with them, instead.

Then why didn't they stop up from developing antibiotics?

Have to sacrifice some of the colony so the host doesn't die. Previously they would have been wiped out by the invading bacteria army anyway

Because there are different types of bacteria that are vying for domination. The "good" bacteria are fine with antibiotics because they usually only get used when there are too many "harmful" bacteria that threaten the life support system.

Some say it's a symbiosis

The bacteria developed antibiotics! We just took them from the bacteria.

Wasn't it mostly fungi where humans found antibiotics?

Penicillin did, but I think a lot of the newer ones were derived from bacteria. But doing a quick web search right now I'm mostly getting potential new antibiotics that came from bacteria, rather than proven antibiotics, so now I'm wondering about the actual bacterial contribution...

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