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How You're Built for Defense—and Why It Matters
Deconstructing illness from the most ancient and simple lifeforms.
Posted February 25, 2021 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
To deconstruct illness we have to go back… way back. The Earth was birthed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. By 4 billion years ago, life began to appear. The planet was different then—violent, hot, and stinky by today’s standards. The atmosphere was thin and contained almost no oxygen. Carbon and sulfur gases were dominant. Solar storms, not weather storms, were the norm. The Earth’s surface was bombarded by cosmic debris and radiation. The Earth’s crust was thin, shifting and cracking under the changing warp of gravity, and with molten lava just below the crust, explosive eruptions of gases and lava were frequent.
Sounds like a terrible place for life, but what the primitive earth was full of was the energy necessary for life. Gravitational warps, cosmic radiations, intense pressures, extreme temperatures, explosive chemical reactions, and electrical currents all contributed to the milieu that eventually organized and spawned simple, small, single-celled organisms—bacteria and archaea. Exactly how this leap occurred remains unclear, but it did happen and life began to flourish on our planet.
This begs the question: What is life? What differentiates inorganic from organic? Fundamentally and primarily, life is the organization of energy for a purpose, that purpose being to sustain life itself. Pretty simple.
Secondarily, life requires a few other things than just organized energy. Life forms require a boundary not only to differentiate themselves as a distinct entity from the random inorganic outside world, but to organize energy, contain the machinery for this organization in close proximity, and protect the machinery from being violated. In primitive life forms, this boundary is a fat-filled cell membrane very similar to the cell membranes in our cells today.
Building and repairing are essential to sustain life and this requires the ability to produce energy and to acquire building materials to run the mechanics and assemble the structures of life. Life adapted and adopted strategies by which these things could be accomplished. Strategies evolved to acquire energy, bring things from the outside to the inside of cells, and for cells to move to locations where resources were abundant.
In addition, reproduction became a valued option to sustain life as there was strength in numbers even in primitive life forms, and reproduction allowed for more rapid improvements in coding and systems—or evolution.
The process of eternal life, immortality, essentially eternal building and repair of a single organism did not evolve. This would require recurrent spontaneous unique life to emerge over and over and over again for life to flourish—unlikely—and would not allow for evolutionary processes—unfortunate. Life did not take this difficult path but chose reproduction cycled with decline and death as a better sustainability strategy.
Today, we tend to think of life in terms of distinct impermanent individual entities with perceived boundaries, organized energy, and reproductive capabilities more than as the big “Life” where the individual functions as a part of a continuum of the eternal. We need to rethink this—not to say the individual isn’t important as without the sum of the individual “Life” does not exist, but the individual cell, the individual organism, the individual human being is a means to the end, not the end. From a biological perspective the primary goal of life must be, perhaps for humans come to be, to successfully propagate our genetic code to the next generation and the next, then the next, etc... Even though individual life forms are temporary, individual life is essential and must not only survive but thrive for Life itself to be sustained.
To survive and thrive, and carry out the mission of successfully propagating their genetic code, life forms need some awareness of threats in their environment and a defense system to protect themselves from these threats. In primitive life forms, the defense strategies may be to engulf and digest a threat, or to destroy the boundary of a threat, or to secrete a toxin to impair the energy system or gum up the machinery of a threat, or to create a barrier from a threat, or to move away from a threat to get to safety and survival.
The most fundamental primitive sensory systems evolved to sense threat versus safety in the environment. Without this awareness, life would not have been sustained, let alone flourished.
Individual defense systems are important, but even in primitive life forms billions of years ago, it could “be better to be together.” Primitive bacteria and archaea use a defense strategy to colonize with others and create a protective barrier to the outer world. Bacteria and archaea billions of years ago are believed to participate in these adaptive social behaviors through a primitive intercellular communication network—the first internet. Within a colony, there was specialization or functions, division of labor and sharing of resources and energy to benefit the group and the species.
We are not so different from our ancestors. In fact, our bodies can be viewed as an archaea colony that is symbiotically colonized by bacteria which thus forms a new entity, an individual, a human being. We, too, need boundaries. We need energy. We need building and repair mechanics. We need to reproduce. We need to survive and thrive as multicellular individual human life forms to do all this. And we need each other—our own colony.
Although we exist as individuals, we are a part of something bigger than ourselves. We are a social species, better together, and part of a continuum of Life. Like other species, even the most primitive, our primary goal as human beings should be to successfully propagate our genetic code, our DNA, our children.
When we are threatened we, too, use our resources in defense to fight or flee. When we are safe, we, too, use our resources to build, bond, reproduce and nurture. Sensing threat allows us to survive. Moving to safety allows us to thrive. Living in chronic threat, unable to find safety, leads to chronic fatigue, degeneration, infertility, and physical, mental and social illness and disease.
What I hope to do here is explore how threats, acute and chronic, are responsible for illness and disease and how safety brings us to a state of health and wellness. The bacteria and archaea and their strategies around threats and defense, as well as safety and socialization, that arose from the bubbling, hot and stinky mud billions of years ago will serve as a foundation and a guide for this process.
We aren’t so different from them. In fact, we are them.
Stay safe and stay tuned,
