Our bacteria are more personal than we thought, new study shows

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-bacteria-personal-thought.html

by wglb • 2 years ago

53 22 2 years ago

phys.org

a_gnostic• 2 years ago

Isn't this one of the reasons kissing evolved; To develop resistance to each others' microbiome, and not allergies?

shermantanktop2• 2 years ago

That wasn’t in my copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”

A little more seriously, that sounds like a behavior that would be beneficial for many creatures, and yet only a few do anything like that. If it were effective, it’d be common.

selfsimilar• 2 years ago

Dogs eat other dogs' excrement in part to keep a healthy and diverse gut culture. I prefer kissing.

pushedx• 2 years ago

Dogs sniffing butts?

JoshTko2• 2 years ago

Don't nearly all mammal parents extensively lick their offspring's faces?

LargoLasskhyfv• 2 years ago

But they lick each other.

yieldcrv2• 2 years ago

applying intention to evolution is a bad habit

there are only accidents or happenstance that might turn out to be sex linked traits and not end life before a viable offspring is created

if it sounds nihilistic, that’s also accurate

ysofunny• 2 years ago

applying intention to evolution is a bad habit

I think it boils down to the directionality of time. let me explain

applying intention to evolution does mean re-imagining what may have happened, but I put that it's an extremely natural thing to do. when I reimagine some historical sequence of events as if it had intention I am making it easier to remember for me.

but this is only realistic in retrospective. this whole argument is also applicable to conpiranoic thinking.

what one does in a conspiracy mindset is exactly to attribute agency and intention into events; this is very easily done in retrospect, when we know what the outcome actually was. doing this for future events is difficult and always comes with a risk of guessing wrong (this is why I say this has got to do with time-directionality: looking backwards into the past in contrast with guessing the future)

but does this even mean that historical people (the participants of the historical events) knew what would happen in the end? maybe or maybe not. that is not the point. I'm saying that projecting non-existing agency into historical evens is a memorization technique

this all becomes really funky whenever anybody assumes the memorization technique (what I say/do to remember) is the same thing as that which I'm actually remembering

65103• 2 years ago

I've been wondering about that since early child hood. While it seems like it I don't think there is a good answer.

One fun experiment I did was ask first and final years students why they chose that particular field. In the final years all but few alternative studies are part of the answer. They mostly explain coping or what they enjoy about their field. Some of the first year students provide an elaborate examination of many fields.

I [jokingly] ask if they chose the study only because they didn't like the other things. Or I accuse them of post purchase rationalization.

We like to think some logical process/choice is going on when we are simply doing what we are used to doing.

There is also something to be said for any process that arrives at logical conclusions to be some kind of reasoning.

What is free will?

swingingFlyFish• 2 years ago

I think the "intent" to evolution is reproduction. Thus, it makes sense to look at these traits as chosen or adaptive to further this cause. Everything is based on reproducing a species, it's the only reason we know now of even the purpose of life. Everything else is superfluous or constructs towards that purpose. So yes, apparently there is intent to evolution. To live and produce offspring. Otherwise why are we so afraid to die and fight to live.

pengaru• 2 years ago

I can't think of a more effective means of determining if a potential mate is deathly ill than smelling and tasting their mouth, before diving in downstairs.

InfoSecErik• 2 years ago

I remember hearing about this sort of thing from a grad student a few years back. She pointed out that there were interesting privacy concerns with these microbiomes, given how we leave traces of it.

samstave• 2 years ago

isnt this the basics behind stool microbiome transplants (basically you take gut material from A and put it in B, B then has their gut micro enhanced by donor A....

So - we should find the healthiest of people against a particular disease A and then transplant gut micros to B and determine outcomes sans medicine.

bluGill2• 2 years ago

That is the idea, but does it work in practice or do the transplanted microbs cause problems?

agos• 2 years ago

it has like 90% success rate against clostridium difficile, usually with just one transplant, and it's becoming a more standard treatment (as opposed to the "last resort" definition it has had until recently). It will likely turn out useful for other diseases, but the data is not there yet. Adverse effects are, broadly speaking, the ones that you might expect from putting bacteria in your GI tract.

JoshTko2• 2 years ago

Kind of intuitive. Bacteria evolve rapidly, the ones that are most fine tuned to an individual's specific body will be the one that persist the longest. PH, temp, diet, and variance of these by month going to be unique person to person. Takeaway seems to be that antibiotics should not be used unless absolutely necessary.

Our bacteria are more personal than we thought, new study shows

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