From the books written by Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), we know that the cells of our body are a series of historical encounters between bacteria. In this way, the origin of life lies in the symbiosis between different organic entities.
With this premise, the North American biologist implied that we are the resulting part of all those stories that one day crossed their destinies and that mutually benefited to achieve the vital development of our species. To put it another way, nature is the result of a symbiosis; cooperation between different species.
There are examples in all orders. The relationship between the small Hawaiian squid and the Vibrio fischeri bacterium is the model that will serve to illustrate this phenomenon. Without the encounter with said bacteria, the little squid would not survive. Because Hawaiian squid are not born with this bacteria that is so important to them, but they have to find it. Only when they find it in the deep sea do they manage to develop the luminescent organ that allows them to hide their shadow and thus escape from predators.
The squid is illuminated from below thanks to a light whose origin is none other than a colony of bioluminescent bacteria. In the same way, all the development of nature obeys a co-development, a symbiotic association by which the cells of one species contribute to the development of another species. From this principle, the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in her book entitled The mushroom at the end of the world (Captain Swing), traces a list of facts that touch all scientific branches, from biology to political science, and whose central axis is the matsutake, a fungus highly appreciated in Japan for its aroma; a scarce good whose exchange value prevents the majority from knowing its flavor.
The matsutake grows spontaneously under red pines. Its origin lies in the intimate association that the fungus maintains with the pine tree itself, a symbiosis, that is, a fungal relationship by which the fungus will release strong acids to break down the rocks in the soil, thus releasing nutrients that make its development possible together to the development of the pine; a natural alliance that will lose its biological origin from the moment it becomes a market product and forms part of a supply chain that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing identifies with the story told by Herman Melville in Moby-Dickwhen the American novelist describes the process of producing whale oil, a job that begins from the moment the ship’s harpooners capture the animal.
They are unassimilated indigenous people from the eastern shores who lack the industrial discipline of the times. As with the Melville harpooners, so with the matsutake pickers, a labor force lacking in factory discipline who go after a white whale that has now turned into a fragrant mushroom, in turn called the mushroom. from the end of the world because it grows in forests devastated by human action.
Due to these details, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book is one of those books that continue to tell us things once they have been read; one of those books that places us at the beginning of everything, when the first living being arose thanks to its relationship with living matter.
the stone ax it is a section where Montero Glez, with prose will, exerts his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge
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