Necessary Noise
Why symbiosis is the best thing since sliced bread
Nature is often touted to be red in tooth and claw.
Cooperation is, therefore, hardly ever thought of as a primary force of evolution.
Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, is famous for voraciously arguing in favour of competition as the force driving the fittest. Back then, the lovers of microbes, such as myself, would have had a hard time convincing people and even more, scientists that symbiosis is very much as relevant as brutal competition.
But what is symbiosis?
It’s not that complex
Symbiosis is the long-term intimate biological relationship between organisms. Ever heard of the egret and the rhino? Let me paint this relationship for you.
The egret feeds on insects that crawl all over the back of the rhino. Unlike the cow, the rhino does not have a long tail to whisk away such insects.
This shortcoming (no pun intended) benefits the egret as it gets food from the rhino and also eliminates the insects that might parasitize the rhino.
The role of the egret benefits the rhino (biological pest control?) and the role of the rhino benefits the egret (ready-made food on bareback).
Even more, the rhino is near-sighted. It cannot tell if a predator lurks. The warning is given by the egret, who would rather fly away than continue having its meal before it becomes one. Alerted, the rhino then has to be aware of its surrounding.
The vigilant role of the egret serves the rhino, and the role of the rhino, in now exercising vigilance, serves the egret by avoiding, chasing, or scaring predators who might have banked on the element of surprise.
What is important to note is how the role of one organism benefits another.
But Symbiosis stretches further — there are dark sides too
Symbiosis stretches beyond such a mutualistic relationship.
It can also be parasitic or commensalism. It is parasitic if one group of organisms hurts another, and commensalistic if the organism neither harms nor benefits. An example of such relationships can be seen in the story of malaria.
The causative agent of malaria, the plasmodium parasite has gotten such a label only because it causes so many deaths in different parts of the world.
With respect to humans, plasmodium is a parasite. Because it involves us, it is the dark side of such a partnership.
What of mosquitoes? As far as we know, they are called vectors but they neither convey beneficial nor harmful effects to the mosquitoes. This is an example of commensalism.
In my book, I argue that symbiosis is just one type of merger.
One organism can merge with another to create a hierarchical relationship. Such a relationship is seen when the role of one organism serves another and vice versa creating a stable type of hierarchical structure. Unstable ones often result in collapse.
If we are to consider mergers in general as vital to survival, then we can see:
- how genes merged to form genomes
- how genomes merged with proteins to form pivotal enzymatic reactions
- how, ironically, cytoplasmic components merge to divide
- how cells merge with tissue surfaces for you to have stable skin
- how cardiac cells create channels for there to be synergistic heartbeats. In the absence of such mergers, you can get heart conditions such as arrhythmias.
The role of the heart then serves the brain, supplying it with nutrients. The role of the brain serves the heart in controlling its heart rate.
Organs have symbiotic relationships with each other. So does cancer, which tends to have a parasitic relationship with the host. Again, the dark side.
We have mergers and destroy them ever so often.
Symbiotic relationships are everywhere if you so wish to see them. I prefer the term mergers, which is not too constraining.
The necessary noise we all need to hear
Thus, when Nazizi raps:
Nilikutana naye, nikipanda 23, kwenye bus stop akinicheki secretly’, (I met him when boarding the no.23 bus, at the bus stop where he was secretly checking me out), she echoes a strong evolutionary force. She tells us a story of her mergers begin.
She echoes a necessary noise in the field of biology.
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