A billion years before humans began carrying fire around with them to gain a dominant evolutionary position, the planet was inhabited by single cell and eukaryotic cell life. This life (and viruses) inhabited every niche on the planet. They still do and they are relatively invisible to humans as they have been for five centuries though we have the technology to see some of them.
They live in and on us by the trillions. Since I had a severe cold for the past week, I am conscious that we have not fully accommodated to this miasma of trillions of creatures.
I have been somewhat aware of some of this world for many decades. The mother of my children did research in a lab that studied sprue. Sprue was a malabsorption problem of the small intestine and made digestion of vitamin D difficult. Sprue is now called celiac sprue and every Lefty and every hysteric claims to be allergic to gluten, the germ cell that aggravates celiac sprue.
The lab was constantly taking cell samples from the intestinal tract and growing them in petri dishes. The doctor who ran the lab had a saying about the entire intestinal tract that ‘it was replenished everyday ( because it housed so many pathogens) from your ruby red lips to your veritable anus.’
I never forgot that. I also remembered it when I recently recommended a tooth gel, Livionex, to stop dental plaque.
So I had some inkling of the invisible swamp we live in.
What most fascinates me is that we, biologists, have no idea how evolution occurs in this vast swamp. No idea. The entire world is alive and living happily invisible to use except for our rare use of micro-technology.
And these preposterous people who are called ‘scientists’ are telling us with certainty how the atmosphere and climate work.