lichens and photobionts

 what if there was a variety of mushrooms that also plants? thats lichens: a tube of fungus, filled with chloroplasts in the form of either green algae or cyanobacteria (or both). critically, this changes the typical fungus strategy from decomposer to primary producer - they can simply sit on a rock and live off sunlight, just like a plant!

they are essentially the 'ultra-plant'. lichens compose the majority of biomass in a variety of habitats (like Sequoia groves) for this reason. they are very successful, can resist drying out, so can colonize almost any habitat or surface. 

what came first? cyanobacteria! (which came from deep sea thermophilic bacteria)

cyanobacteria, the 'first plants', invented chlorophyll. fungus probably evolved next, separately, as a marine organism. fungus would become terrestrial and steal the cyanobacterial cells, creating lichens. and, proto-algae (eukaryotic protists probably) would steal them too via endosymbiosis, creating chloroplasts and therefore algae. algae evolved and gave off true plants.

fungi see these photobionts (cyanobacteria and/or algae) as simply gelatinous balls dripping sugar syruip when exposed to light. so, fungi wrap their arms around them and absorb up all that sweet sugar. 

the fungus seems to remain in control, though, so lichens generally just do fungus things. they crawl outwards and fruit with caps (usually cup-shaped apothecia) and spread out spores. the photobionts give up 80% of their sugar production to the fungus, and allow the fungus to penetrate them with special hyphae, so they do seem like slaves. crucial, however, since that same fungus isolated in culture without its partner would simply grow as an undifferentiated mass of hyphae. 

can fungus copy that proto-algae, and themselves engulf a photobiont via endosymbiosis? yes! but its only happened once: Geosiphon pyriformis, the only member of its genus, a fungus whose cells have engulfed Nostoc cyanobacteria cells, creating a 'chloroplast' again. its not a lichen, because the symbiosis is intracellular, not extracellular. fungal-bacterial endosymbiosis has occurred a few other times as well, but apparently never involving chlorophyll/photosynthesis. so, if Geosiphon eventually internalizes the Nostoc genome into its own nucleus, it would become a new type of organism. 

mycorrhizae are fungi that are symbiotes with plants. there is a plant analogue to lichens: plants will wrap themselves (their roots, specifically) around fungal hyphae, surrounding them and feeding off each other - the ectomycorrhizae. even more common are the endomycorrhizae - fungi that dont just wrap gently around, but instead penetrate and invaginate into the plant cells - an intracellular endosymbiosis akin to Geosiphon, except in plants they are much more common: ~85% of all plant families have had endomyco's found, compared to simply 1 species of the fungal-algal endosymbiosis.   

stories

why do humans have such a tendency towards creating stories? "A literary cycle is a group of stories focused on common figures, often (though not necessarily) based on mythical figures or loosely on historical ones." take the Matter of Britain. for centuries, groups of people just began telling each other stories sometimes non-fiction, but over time fiction penetrated deeper and deeper until eventually certain stories were complete fabrications, yet still passed on (eg., the Greek gods). while Charlemagne truly existed, most of his paladins did not in the Matter of France. why is it compelling for us to create fabrications? creativity? 

being creative lets you be fanciful, imaginative, and interesting. it excites the mind and intrigues the audience. it's crucial to rhetoric. its as though thinking wildly is a dopamine-producing process, similar to how solving puzzles or playing games is. theres no particular reason humans should necessarily gain satisfaction from games evolutionarily, though 'play' is encoded into all mammals in some sense, yet humans love games for the sake of it. Similarly, wild thinking must stimulate us arbitrarily so. 

if I can trap your attention by stimulating your imagination, you'll keep listening to me. you'll grow to like me. my words have meaning and instill the production of thoughts and values within you. by telling a riveting story, I can now capture your attention, have you believe what I'm telling you, eventually trust me and even become a follower or a rival. group theory dictates that any method whereby humans can create trust among disparate tribe members will be evolutionarily advantageous. this extends to the benefits of religion. 

so, religion IS stories. mythology. religion is a series of stories that are collected and passed on about specific historical figures, and over time about made-up ones as well. the stories provide a gathering of people, ways to cope with scary thoughts (death, purpose), morals, values. a group of people said let's stay in a big group and all tell these stories, and recruit others to tell these stories. but the foundational question is, why are stories so potent to humans? and is there even a line between religion and stories?

stories are a subclass and a flavor of LANGUAGE as a whole. so, what's so valuable about language, that which is instilling stories with such value? whatever benefits language provides, stories must also include those. the origin of language is multifactorial. before language we needed to evolve a basic theory of mind, recognize you are different from me, and abstract abilities like planning. infant language development is revelatory in that early language among humans probably started similar to that, and all early language could only continue to evolve if it WAS understood by the children at the time. nonhuman primates are revelatory as well, like how chimps can communicate with hand gestures, have genetically encoded gestural signals (eg chest beating). gestures were the first form of language. 

so how did language become subspecialized into stories, and why? each can refer to objects or events that aren't present in the moment (including imaginary ones), each can put an idea in someone's head and get them to change their behavior to do it. each can instill NEW ideas inside someone's head, things they never even conceived of but now can consider doing (eg, learning). what ideas would you want to instill? evolutionarily, look to apes to see how they use gestures etc to communicate with each other, what types of things they try to get the others to do. move, stop, come, do this for me, there will be rain, that way is dangerous, if you do this action then this bad thing will happen, i love you, help me. 

mental images are entities conjured inside your mind. humans evolved to do this in three ways: (1) dreams [spontaneous]), (2) memory recall [think about a past experience], (3) prefrontal synthesis [active imagination]. early language served a more operational, functional purpose - getting food and water, staying safe, where's the tiger? strict memory recall, and theory of mind, were important, but only later on did we start flexing our prefrontal synthesis muscles, once we had the basics already figured out. 

stories are language that hijacks and stimulates the prefrontal synthesis pathways directly. telling stories can quickly conjure 'memories' into other people's minds, as well as new ideas = teaching. stories are typically fanciful or atypical, novelty which cements its teachings more quickly in the user. also, children seem to preferentially enjoy the fanciful, and were integral to the evolution of language, so perhaps stories grew initially as vectors for quickly and reliably teaching children evolutionary advantageous lessons without having to demonstrate anything to them physically. same as regular teaching or communication would be, except spicier, with more flare. 

the spicy flare aspect is what seems unique to stories, and what seems to fuel their main strength: the ability to quickly transmit among the masses and influence them. stories require symbolic culture - a feature of certain human cultures where they pass on behavioral traits among generations via centering the reasoning for those behaviors on something completely made-up, symbolic. it started as distant as 300,000 years ago. "we must do these behaviors because of [concept that's made up]". promises, currency, etc. social constructs were likely the first or one of the earliest forms of symbolic culture - we must do certain things this way, 'just because we trust each other' (essentially). at its core, its the concept of trust - we all agree to trust that the made-up thing is real/reliable, and therefore all agree to conduct our behaviors as such. so, cooperation. 

what purpose did the Matter of Britain serve? or ancient African folklores? what about LOTR? what about DND? 

pine tar

 

for most of our (Homo) time on this planet, all we had at our disposal was basically plants and fire. we had so much time (>50,000 years) to experiment, that we've done just about everything to plant products. if you light wood on fire, it burns. if you instead heat it up without lighting it aflame (heated in an anoxic environment since oxygen=explosion), instead it acts in a purely physics-type manner. all the molecules inside the wood have their ambient temp raised, turning solids into liquids and liquids into gases. the liquid and gas products then escape outwards (terpentine from smoke, pine tar from liquid run-off - to be captured by humans), while anything resilient enough to still be a solid is left behind (charcoal). chemistry, and the phases of matter, explains it all. 

can we leach human bones as if they were blocks of pine? bones are animal (not plant) and therefore seem to be more protein filled - bones boiled yield liquid collagen, which is a sticky glue-like substance, that solidifies when cooled. plant resin, in contrast, is more pure carbon - benzenes, phenols, cellulose (carbon-rich), polysaccharides - with less protein/nitrogen/amino acid content (?). 

plants REALLY LIKE benzene. but all Life loves squalene - an unsaturated hydrocarbon. cells wrap it around itself to form rings = steroids, different types between animals, plants and fungi. 

regarding biochemistry, "everything is water". meaning, in its basal state, all biochemistry existed in an aqueous medium, water soluble, polar. therefore, if cells wanted to enact meaningful change, they'd need a mechanism that was different - that was water insoluble. therefore, fats/water insoluble compounds became the 'key' to biology - these are the molecules that can bind to receptors, cross cell membranes, activate proteins. plants use terpenoids (unsaturated hydrocarbons) to interact with biology in a wide array of ways - cell sgnaling, deterring predacors, etc. 

hydrocarbons - these were so important to both life, and later to human society. we talked about their impact on biochemistry. all realms of life were excited to discover hydrocarbons and exploit them to no end. when human society discovered them, we did the same thing - distilling and separating wood and coal into all sorts of composing parts, heating them up to create new parts, mixing things together to get new parts still. using them in every industry from construction to medicine. human society exploited hydrocarbons hardcore. hydrocarbons were the key that allowed humans to fully exploit the field of synthetic chemistry and all it could be. 

petroleum (aka crude oil, from plankton) is basically the same composition as resin (from plants eg coal). 

god is the spontaneous bias towards life

 

what is god. god is the invisible force that drives particles together, that coaxes amino acid chains to fold and twist upon themselves in fantastic shapes, that swirls stars and planets around each other in massive clouds and strands throughout the universe. god is the drive of life, organization, evolution. god is anti-entropy. god is the spontaneous creation of order, a chain reaction. god is not passive - it is a force. it applies spooky energy towards compelling molecules to 'intelligently' arrange themselves in a feel of best fit. god is akin to gravity, two different forces that each compel molecules to move in specific ways. god is the invisible force that pushes proteins ever-onward towards evolution. 

take cytochrome c. iron is a fancy atom, its like a rare powerful gem that early cells wanted a way to shuttle around and use it as a tool. cells (a single cell is an enclosed community) began making a sticky twisted protein mass named cytochrome c to trap the iron and shuttle it around. proteins became legos, each finding new and interesting ways to create 3D structures and build worlds around them. cells began writing down ledgers of how to create different legos. recipes for crafting fantastical structures. they wrote these recipes as DNA and stored them in the cabinet, a nucleus. later, a big symbiotic community of various cells decided to pool their resources, donate all their DNA into a communal pot, and let that new communal cell replicate. "this god cell will let us all live forever", they mightve said, "though we may degrade, our recipes will be carried on by him, and he can create new copies of us, so while we die, our clones live on". 

and so cells became tissues became organisms. but why? how? what compelled them to do so? the invisible force of god

chemosynthesis and particle physics

 chemosynthesis is the twin sibling to photosynthesis. both create glucose/organic matter by harnessing carbon, but chemosynthesis uses explosions instead of light.

the oxidation of elemental sulfur to sulfate (S2O2-4) releases 150 kcal/mol of energy presumably as heat. imagine sulfur as a fat slow grey globe, hovering around weighed down by its swarming cloud of dense electrons. it is slow and cumbersome - it is fully reduced. it's charge has been reduced by all the negative electrons. 

oxygen is a black hole-like void. it hovers around sucking anything towards it, often to form a bond to it. when oxygen sucks up the electrons of something nearby, the target got oxidized. 

the explosion occurs when the electrons move. depending how fast oxygen is able to rip those electrons away, the bigger the explosion. if the electron is weak and oxygen rips it away super fast and strong, presumably more energy is released. often a bond remains as a result 

heat itself speeds up molecules. heat can add energy to a system and break bonds between elements. heat makes atoms move faster, which can then slam into each other at higher speeds. 

chemosynthesis and cell respiration, life at a basic level, want one thing: fold carbon into interesting useful shapes, to create physical mechanical assets. using chemical reactions and enzymes, exogenous carbon can be ingested, processed, and turned into biomass matter. 

a photon doesnt have mass. its analog of mass is its wavelength, eg the way photons move will follow the stereotypical ways a wave would move. so photons have a wavelength based on how fast theyre going. therefore photons have that characteristic (their wavelength) and it moderates how it interacts with matter, the same as 'mass' would moderate how a 'particle' interacts with matter 

photons do act like particles too, though. a photon would say, "i'm a special snowflake, look at my cool unique wavelength. its my own special way to interact with other things. its a flavor of interaction. other photons have different wavelengths so they have their own flavor of interaction."

photons are abstract. they are more of a confluent ebbing force, an energy that pushes through spacetime. 

live life retrospectively

instead of making decisions based on your subjective feelings in the moment, instead make decisions based on what you think you would've wanted yourself to have done, looking back on this moment in the future. 

think back on an awkward or embarassing memory. the decision was probably made in the moment. what if you instead had thought, how would I want myself to have reacted, as my future self?

thinking retrospectively puts you in the third person perspective, watching yourself from the outside. it could make daily life easier and more straightforward if you feel like you're being actively coached by yourself from the future, and the decisions you currently know you like when you make. 

geology and geochemistry

Geology is the chemistry when traditional 'solids' instead intertwine and act as/are liquids instead. Simple chemistry nonetheless. Correlation: gas flows like a liquid, as when cold fronts come rushing down valleys.

Phases of matter all basically do the same things if put in the right scenario. They're not very different at all. Spectrum from solids/least interactive to gases/most interactive.