The Myth of Human Supremacy

by Derrick Jensen

  One of the strange questions tonight: “If aliens arrived on earth to abduct our most successful inhabitant, where would they look?”

  After some jokes came the host’s response: “By any criteria by which you judge the success of life, bacteria win hands down in terms of profusion, diversity, ability to live under extraordinary conditions. . . . We wouldn’t be alive without them. We entirely depend upon them. . . . If you were to take a gram of soil, there are 40,000 species in that one gram. And each species is as different from each other as a rhinoceros is from a primrose. I want you to fall in love with the bacteria. They are the most marvelous things conceivable. They live in boiling acid, they live in ice, they live in nuclear cooling water. They can live absolutely anywhere, for example under six thousand atmospheres of pressure. They love the human tummy. We reckon that 75 percent of bacteria in the human tummy have not yet been identified by species. They’re fantastic.”72

  •••

  Humans are superior and special because we’re so adaptable? Humans ain’t got nothin’ on bacteria.

  •••

  I’d also add that bacteria essentially made life on this planet. Without bacteria there would be no life here. Without humans, life would go on very well, thank you very much. In fact, given how Homo sapiens sapiens are acting, there is some doubt as to whether life on this planet will continue.

  Now who is superior?

  There’s that question that always resides at the core of this culture’s violation imperative and ramifies into its outer reaches: if bacteria can create life on this planet, and humans are doing their damnedest to destroy it, who, then, is stronger, the creator or destroyer?

  This question, as absurd as it seems on the surface, is in many ways key to understanding this culture’s self-described superiority, its destructiveness, and its perception of its own destructiveness as a sign of its superiority.

  •••

  Bacteria communicate. If one group of bacteria gains resistance to antibiotics, they can help others to gain resistance, too. An article in Science Daily entitled “Bacteria Communicate to Help Each Other Resist Antibiotics,” states, “The more-antibiotic-resistant cells within a bacterial population produce and share small molecules with less-resistant cells, making them more resistant to antibiotic killing.” The first author of the article, Omar El-Halfawy, notes, “These small molecules can be utilized and produced by almost all bacteria with limited exceptions, so we can regard these small molecules as a universal language that can be understood by most bacteria.”73

  Antibiotics, however, are by no means the only things bacteria talk about. As a writer for Scientific American put it, “Forty years ago scientists discovered that some bacteria send and receive messages—in the form of small molecules—to and from surrounding cells. This kind of communication, called quorum sensing, enables bacteria to monitor their population density and to modulate their behavior accordingly. When there are enough cells around to create a ‘quorum,’ bacteria begin producing proteins known as virulence factors that sicken their hosts. They can also grow into aggregates called biofilms that render them up to 1,000 times more resistant to antibiotics.”

  I understood the part about biofilms, but not the part before that. How is it in the best interest of these bacteria to sicken the hosts when they gain enough cells to create a “quorum”? Why would they do that?

  I asked a friend who got his PhD working with biofilms.

  He responded, “The article from SciAm is actually an oversimplification (as is almost all science writing for public consumption). The truth is that quorum sensing will do different things depending on the bacteria in question and its lifestyle. Most bacteria, which are not pathogenic, would use QS to regulate some aspect of their lifestyle. Some organisms will use it as a way to turn on virulence factors, while others use it to turn them off. For example, a bacteria that infects via the fecal-oral route (we all eat small amounts of feces all the time, sometimes it carries disease) and causes an acute gastroenteritis might want to turn on genes that code for a toxin to stimulate diarrhea to boost its transmission. Staphylococcus aureus, however, will often switch to sessile biofilm mode of growth, repress virulence factors, and set up shop somewhere in your body like a heart valve or the bone (causing endocarditis or osteomyelitis respectively).

  “The takeaway message is actually much broader—bacteria dynamically react to stimuli to change a wide range of host behaviors from virulence factor production, changing movement speed, altering metabolism, etc. Bacteria can sense a wide range of things, including nutrients, ions, and temperature; and can change to adapt to their environment and (if they are pathogens) ensure their transmission.”

  Well, that makes a lot more sense, and frankly makes bacteria all the more impressive to me.

  Let’s return to the Scientific American article, and its next sentence: “Quorum sensing is now known to be widespread in the bacterial world, and many researchers hope to develop ways to disrupt it.”74

  Okay, so you know that bacteria are foundational to life on earth; and you know that in fact in your own body, cells of bacteria outnumber human cells by about ten to one;75 and you know that bacteria are everywhere on the planet, which means they’re effectively impossible to quarantine on a large scale; and you know that bacteria communicate; and yet you “hope to develop ways to disrupt” one of their “widespread” functions? Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?

  •••

  One more thing: if aliens were to invade the earth, another reason they’d try to learn our languages would be to try “to develop ways to disrupt” our resistance toward them.

  •••

  Slime molds aren’t unique in their ability to transform from single-celled to multi-celled creatures. An article entitled “Future research trends in the major chemical language of bacteria” states, “The discovery of chemical communication among bacteria revolutionized the thinking that bacteria exist in isolation as single-celled organisms. It has become evident in the last fifteen years that bacteria have the potential to establish highly complex and often multispecies communities.” These bacteria can then participate in “coordinated and synchronized community behavior.”76

  •••

  I keep thinking about bacteria communicating antibiotic resistance to each other, including those quite unlike them. And I keep thinking about that question asked by the scientists about why plants would help “competitors” to resist some danger. And I keep thinking about the narcissism of this culture, and how both narcissism and supremacism keep making us ask the wrong questions. I don’t think the question is, why would bacteria “waste” energy “clueing” in “competitors” about some danger. I think these are better questions: Why do we keep trying to hold ourselves separate from everyone else? Why do we keep trying to believe we are superior to them?

  •••

  The neuroscientist John Allman has said, of bacteria, “Some of the most fundamental features of brains, such as sensory integration, memory, decision-making, and the control of behaviour, can all be found in these simple organisms.”77

  •••

  Bacteria are also faster than we are, relative to their size. Most bacteria can move ten times their body length per second. Some can move 100 times their body length. The fastest humans can run about five times their body length per second.

  Damn it, we aren’t even superior in that way.

  •••

  I know what the human supremacists are going to say. Dude, anytime you drive down the interstate, you’re probably going ninety or 100 feet per second. That’s sixteen of your lengths per second. Oops. Still not as fast as some bacteria. But when you get on a jet you’re going about 900 feet per second, which is 150 times your body length. And the fastest jet went more than 4,500 miles per hour, which is more than 6,600 feet per second, which is 1,100 times your body length per second. S
core one for the humans. You can’t talk about humans—and human superiority—without talking about technology.

  Never mind that bacteria are on the plane, too, which means they’re going even faster relative to their body size than humans.

  Oh, well.

  I’m not denying that humans can go fast. But don’t you think a relevant question might include, at what cost?

  What infrastructures are required for humans to go even sixteen body lengths per second, much less 160 or 1,100? What are the ecological costs (ignoring, for now, the social and psychological costs) of these infrastructures? Who pays these costs?

  I don’t think at this point I have to detail the costs of the oil economy (or, for that matter, the industrial economy, or civilization itself) on individual nonhumans, on nonhuman communities, or on the planet (leaving aside for now its costs on humans in the colonies). It should be clear to anyone paying any attention whatsoever that the oil economy, the industrial economy, and civilization have all been complete disasters for the natural world.

  The usual next argument by human supremacists is that these costs are worth it. But the problem is that those foisting costs onto others don’t get to decide if it’s worth it. Of course the ones who are privatizing profits and externalizing costs are going to say that the profits more than make up for the costs.

  The thing I don’t understand is how people who make this argument somehow also try to claim superior intelligence. How’s this: why don’t you use your money to buy a car that costs $25,000, and then I’ll take it and sell it for $10,000 and keep the profits? Then we can do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day. What a deal! Pretty soon I’ll be rich, and then we’ll know for sure that I’m superior!

  Or hell, let’s leave the car out of it. You (the world) deposit wealth (trees, fish, minerals, soil, and so on) in a bank (the world) and everyone in the world lives off the interest. In fact each year there is more wealth than the year before. This is because every tree, every fish, every living being (which means every being) deposits more wealth than it takes. How else do you think the world became so wealthy? By everyone making the world rich by living and dying. Everybody wins! Except I don’t like the arrangement. I want it all. So you deposit wealth and I find ever-more-sophisticated ways to steal from you and from everyone else. This means I’m a genius! I’m superior. It is settled. It’s time for me to break into my favorite song: “No time for losers, ’cause I am the champion of the world!”

  •••

  Another question we need to ask about humans traveling so fast is, for how long?

  Even before the invention of automobiles or airplanes, humans were still capable of traveling at up to 200 feet per second, or thirty to forty times our length per second.

  Just not for very long. Two hundred feet per second is the terminal velocity reached when a human jumps off a cliff.

  Of course going this fast is shortly followed by terminal catastrophe.

  I’m sure you can see the metaphor, right? For how many species has the infrastructure necessary for humans to travel at current speeds already been a terminal catastrophe, and for how many decades total will humans have been able to travel at these speeds before terminal global catastrophe? What are the causal relationships between humans going this speed and global catastrophe?

  •••

  I’ve got more bad news for the human supremacist crowd, which is that there’s a sense also in which bacteria can be considered to be immortal. Yes, immortal, that wet dream of monotheists, technotopians, and other human supremacists, who all seem to take umbrage at the fact that we, like everybody else, must die.

  Or I guess it’d be more accurate to say, like almost everybody else.

  Here’s how it works. Bacteria reproduce by dividing. Each daughter is the same as her mother—in fact, is part of her mother—except that whatever molecules inside her that had become damaged are now diluted in her offspring, and then diluted again in theirs, with this dilution acting as a form of self-rejuvenation. Of course individual bacterium die all the time, just like almost anybody else, but bacteria could still easily claim immortality. Here’s why. Because they reproduce by division, as opposed to sex, where a new being is created by the combination of cells from multiple parents, with bacteria there’s an unbroken line of self-ness in each one going as far back as, well, the beginning. Moreover, you could argue that the death of one bacterium is the death of only one small part of that bacterial self.

  •••

  Bacteria aren’t the only beings who are in some sense immortal. There are water bears, hydras, a certain sort of jellyfish, and lobsters. Yeah, I didn’t believe it either. But it’s true. And we may as well add bdelloids, planarians, and turtles to the list. And although glass sponges aren’t exactly immortal, they can live for more than ten thousand years.

  Water bears have a somewhat different form of immortality than bacteria. Water bears, also called tardigrades, also known as moss piglets (and you thought their name couldn’t get any cuter than water bears, didn’t you?), are tiny (half-millimeter) creatures classified sort of half-way between arthropods and nematodes. As you can tell from their names, they like to live in water or in moist places like moss, and they look like little eight-legged bears or piglets. They’re as cute as their name. And they’re everywhere. They’ve been found on the tops of the highest mountains, and in hot springs, and in ocean sediments, and under layers of solid ice. They are also found in meadows and lakes, and in stone walls and roofs.

  Like I said, water bears aren’t “immortal” in the same sense as are bacteria. In fact their normal life span might be about a year. Their “immortality” in this case is more like “extremely tough.” We’ve all heard the story of how hard it was to kill Grigori Rasputin, right? According to the story, he was poisoned with enough cyanide to kill a regiment, stabbed, shot, beaten, left for dead, and when the killers came back he lunged at them, so they wrapped him in chains and threw him into a river. When his body was recovered he had water in his lungs, which means the cause of death was said to be drowning. It ends up, as so often happens, that the reality was far more prosaic: he wasn’t poisoned, and after being beaten, he was killed instantly with a gunshot to the middle of his forehead. Be that as it may, water bears make even the mythical Rasputin seem as fragile as a Facebook friendship.

  Water bears are normally fairly soft and squishy, kind of like itsy-bitsy caterpillars. But if we can say that when the going gets tough slime mold get communal, when the going gets tough water bears desiccate and hibernate. They can reduce the water content of their bodies to between one and three percent. In this state they’re virtually indestructible. They can survive a temperature range of 800 degrees, from 350 degrees above zero to more than four hundred and fifty below: they can survive a few minutes at only two degrees above absolute zero. They can survive pressures from the vacuum of outer space to six times the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench (6000 atmospheres). They can survive radiation levels 1000 times higher than those that would kill any other animal. They can survive many toxic chemicals. They can live without food or water for ten years, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce when times get better.78

  But I thought they only lived about a year. That’s the thing: including hibernation, they can easily live sixty years. Some estimates say they can live up to two hundred. I know, a lot of that might be spent hibernating, but we still say humans live seventy years, and we spend at least twenty of that sleeping, so I don’t think we have much room to complain at saying they can live for decades, if not centuries.

  I want to mention one more thing about water bears before we move on, which is that while humans know that these creatures survive some of these extreme conditions because water bears are found living in them, we know they survive others because humans have intentionally put them, for example, into outer space, or into extreme temperatures, or under intense
radiation, simply to see if these others can survive. Research like this always leads me to ask: what sort of fiend would do this? What sort of monster would take a creature from its home and send it into outer space, or drop it to almost absolute zero, just to see how long it will survive? What would we think of aliens who did this to humans? What do we think of Nazis who did this to humans? Just last night I was reading about the Nazi Sigmund Rascher, infamous for his vivisection of Holocaust victims. He conducted experiments in which he subjected prisoners to extremely rapid de- and re-pressurization, ostensibly to help fighter pilots who might have to bail out at high altitude; experiments in which he exposed prisoners to freezing water and then used different methods to restore their body warmth; and experiments in which he shot or otherwise inflicted horrible injuries on prisoners, then checked how well new drugs slowed the bleeding. So, what would you think of Nazis, or space aliens, or anyone else, who sent your friends or loved ones, or you, into extreme conditions, just to satisfy their curiosity as to how much you can survive?

  This is human supremacism. It’s also sadism.

  Also, the next time any human supremacists comment on how extraordinarily resilient and adaptable humans are, water bears may simply laugh and say, “Space suits? We don’t need no stinking space suits.”

  •••

  Bdelloids are “immortal” in the same sense as are water bears, in that they are creatures—rotifers—who live in water, and who can voluntarily enter states of long-term hibernation in which they can survive extreme conditions, then voluntarily wake up, perhaps give themselves a good shake like a pup getting up from a nice nap, and continue with their lives. But they also do something else very interesting. They generally reproduce asexually, which of course many other beings do. But one potential problem of asexual reproduction is that when your genetic material gets damaged in the daily rough-and-tumble of living, those flaws can be passed on intact to your children. If you recall, bacteria deal with this difficulty by exponentially diluting the flaws into essential meaninglessness. Bdelloids use another means: they beg, borrow, or steal DNA from other creatures. I’m going to let Traci Watson of Science Magazine describe it: “In Mother Nature’s edition of the TV reality show Survivor, the bdelloid rotifers would probably be the last animals standing. These tiny aquatic creatures can survive high blasts of radiation and years of desiccation—and they’ve persisted for tens of millions of years without sex. Now, a study published online today in PLOS Genetics hints at how the bdelloids do it. A new genetic analysis shows that roughly 10% of the bdelloids’ active genes were pilfered from other species, such as fungi, bacteria, and plants. These foreign genes have endowed bdelloids with talents that no other animal can boast, which could help explain their ability to shrug off extreme conditions of aridity. Ultimately, the bdelloids’ appropriation of foreign genes may hold the key to their success despite celibacy, which usually results in a species’s extinction.”