TheNamelessThing.com

I wrote the following paragraph in another blog article very recently, but will reproduce it here for reasons too frightening to express:

There are scientists who've determined that certain macromolecules present on human neurons are only found in one other species, and that species is a prokaryote, a form of archaea, a primitive bacteria-like organism which lived on the earth billions of years ago. Why would our neurons share such a property with such an unlikely candidate? Neurons compose an extensive web in the body, a network of individuals which communicate via neurotransmitters, chemical armadas whose molecules traverse the gulfs between individual neurons and provide information to each other, not unlike the cells in a colony of prokaryotes. The question is this: Is the human neural system a colony of archaea which insinuated itself into our physiology billions, or at least millions, of years ago?

Organisms' cells are beautiful things, minuscule machines which contain multitudinal moving parts, biochemical cogworks, pulleys, fulcrums, and chaperones, all busily making Life with their day's work. Cells contain organelles, which are membrane-bounded compartments evolved to perform specific functions, such as waste disposal (peroxisomes), energy production (mitochondria), replication (nucleus), and storage and protein translation (endoplasmic reticulum). These organelles are part of the cell, but the fact that they are bounded by their own membranes, and some of them have their own DNA, tells us something very important about them: They weren't always part of those cells, meaning they weren't always part of us.

Endosymbiogenesis is partly the means by which scientists have proved multicellular organisms evolved from unicellular organisms on this planet. When a primitive bacteria or archaea fed for millions of years upon the same prey, be it a wriggling mitochondrial thingy, or a linear-shaped critter which possessed a great degree of mobility, it caused a response in that prey. The response consisted of a tendency to be selected for resistance to the predator's vital enzymes, or perhaps a specific wriggling motion which enabled "food" to find its way into less harmful compartments once it had been swallowed. The introduction of the power-packed mitochondria, or the whiplash-rotating flagellae to single-celled organisms conferred enormous benefits to them, enabling them to generate extra energy, or to propell themselves more effectively. The combination of mitochondria for energy plus flagellae or undulopodia, as they are known in eukaryotes, surely resulted in a faster, energy efficient organism which itself became selected for survival on the larger scale. The chloroplasts of plants contain their own DNA, proof of their independent origins, and they are the plant kingdom's parallel to the mitochondria of other living things.

But these things have insinuated themselves into our cells, or, in the case of neurons, have actually become our cells. Which brings me to the subject of immune cells. Our immune systems are massively complex, featuring myriad cell types, all able to perform an astonishing variety of different functions, from replication of cells possessing an affinity for a certain type of bacteria or viral invader, to cells which move by an amoeboid motion similar to independent organisms from other kingdoms or domains...Those killer cells we have, the ones which hunt down their prey and consume them, have they evolved as part of us, or did they enter us much later, and find that animals are continually being infected by numerous types of organisms, and a veritable smörgåsbord was theirs for the taking? There aren't too many independent creatures out there which eat viruses for a living. Is this because viruses cannot maintain their structural integrity outside a host, and that maybe once upon a time viruses were themselves alive (they are non-living biological material, according to present definitions), but their predators had to follow them into the bodies of other organisms when they evolved to the magnificent simplicity they currently possess? Food for thought, but I'll leave you now, for I know you grow weary, preposterous and amused reader...