You gotta hand it to life…wow..is it tough! From trees to toadstools, living beings on this planet have an arsenal of weapons to guard themselves and promote their progeny in the face of every imaginable threat, the legacy of billions of years of selection which has weeded out the vast, vast majority of lineages. If you are alive today on this planet, you hold a winning lottery ticket that puts the odds of today’s gambles to absolute shame, a testament to the gumption and good luck of your ancestors. Consider the odds of being a descendant of primordial life on Earth after 4 billion years of struggles, through ice ages, celestial impacts and ensuing centuries of planetary upheaval, and perhaps most of all, the slow and inexorable grind of competing with every other life form that wants to poison you, eat you and take your spot on the bus. The chance that you, yourself, are a descendant, in an unbroken lineage spanning 4 billion years, through death, destruction, disease and bad luck that has claimed 99.999999999……percent of lineages makes you a lucky being indeed.
Because there is only so much room on this particular bus, the number of species that have come and gone dwarfs the remarkable diversity of life on Earth today, and the number of individuals whose lineages have failed is incalculable by us measly humans. This is a statistical fact that we should appreciate more than we do. Rather than griping about what we don’t have, we really should be thanking our stars and the Maker for our incredibly good fortune. It is good to be alive!
While the chance of any lineage having persisted to now is exceedingly slim, and the outlook is tenuous at best, life itself will prevail. The question is, are we humans going to continue to fight life at every turn, or are we going to cast our lot with TEAM LIFE? Not that team life gives one care for us, but fighting against it is a futile waste of time and energy. And the history of life on Earth makes clear that species that waste time and energy on losing battles are less likely to make the next cut.
One of the many ways that some life-forms have managed to persist is through genomic flexibility, as evidenced by this remarkably insightful article on polyploidy and aneuploidy in fungi: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5656283/ Please read it if you can. The authors give us a glimpse into the ability of fungi to engage in all manner of genomic shenanigans, including whole genome and chromosomal duplications and reductions. The fact that these kinds of major genetic rearrangements can and do happen, and that they are stimulated by stressors, tells us something important. When the heat is on, organisms that have the wherewithal to engage in such evolutionary leaps can employ them to survive bad stuff. Weedy and pathogenic fungi such as Penicillium, Candida and Cryptococcus are especially apt to these kinds of tactics. Humans absolutely cannot. We have our own bag of tricks, but major genomic backflips aren’t in our repertoire. At all. Organismal polyploidy and aneuploidy in humans is lethal or extremely deleterious. But plants and fungi do it all the time.
What does this mean for us? Well, it means, don’t go poking tigers with sticks.
In the case of fungi, we have slathered our bodies, dwellings, food and landscapes with fungicides. As a result, the azole fungicides – the most widely used fungal killers after copper and sulfur – are everywhere in the environment, including in your and your children’s bodies right now. If you put an orange in your child’s lunchbox today, then your child has one or several of the following azoles in their little tummy: imazalil, difenoconazole, fenbuconazole, propiconazole, mefentrifluconazole and others, applied to the developing fruit and then as part of a waxy coating used to prevent Penicillium mold. You have seen when the Penicillium has won the battle against our azoles when the lemon in your fruit basket suddenly turns green and fuzzy. That Penicillium is resistant, quite possibly as a result of one of the above genomic backflips, having resorted to this tactic under the constant stress of being bombarded by azoles. In fact, every weedy and pathogenic species of fungus is constantly exposed to low levels of azoles in the human environment – the perfect circumstance for the development of resistance. So there ya go.
Meanwhile, your child is being affected by the cornucopia of azole fungicides in their developing tissues. A multitude of disturbing human reproductive and other developmental disorders are associated with azoles. And as usual, fetuses and kids get a triple dose.
What’s the chances we win the war against Penicillium, Candida or any other weedy fungus? 0%
What’s the chances that we hurt our children and grandchildren? 100%
This is not hyperbole, it’s fact. There is no safe level of exposure to these kinds of chemicals in fetal and childhood development, especially given the number of man-made chemicals involved. It’s death and dismemberment of our own progeny by a hundred thousand cuts – not the kind of stressors we want to apply to our lineage. Again, remember just how lucky we are. The Penicillium will absolutely survive our puny chemical weapons. We may not.
There is a better way forward! It’s better for you and your children, and it’s right there in front of us. It’s called Living with Life!
More soon,
-George