Saturday, March 5, 2011

During WWII, the "4Fs of the 4Fs of the 4Fs" were the non-motile bacteria

No head or eyes or ears or nose or mouth, no arms or legs, just incredibly tiny bags of salty water floating about where ever the currents took them.

No wonder that during WWII zoologists and eugenicists (is there a difference?) called the non-motile bacteria living fossils from the childhood of the origins of life.

The stupidest of the stupidest, the unfittest of the unfit.

Sulfa drugs were expected to make short work of them and soon all the infectious hospitals would close for good.

Problem solved.

But it turns out that non-motile bacteria have been on earth for 4 billion years and will be here long after we depart.

They occupy every possible spot on Earth - hottest to the coldest, high in the stratosphere to deep in the bowels of the earth.

They are so numerous and successful that their biomass outweighs us and all the mammals even though we individually outweigh them individually a trillion times over.

Most of the cells in us aren't us at all - they're them.

Now that is a miscegenation nightmare for the latent eugenicist !

They can do things to DNA that we can only dream of - including altering our DNA to better suit them.

No better proof of how off target was the very concept of the unfit than how the educated middle class of WWII viewed the unfit bacteria world....

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