You may have Borgs in your mud

bcp · Jul 19, 2021

Mysterious DNA sequences, known as ‘Borgs,’ recovered from California mud

Newfound genetic material may rev up methane cycling by soil microbes

www.sciencemag.org

Bruce

k0ua · Jul 19, 2021

All I know is that resistance is futile.

cdaigle430 · Jul 19, 2021

is 7 of 9 there?

k0ua · Jul 20, 2021

cdaigle430 said:
is 7 of 9 there?

My favorite Borg for sure!

Larry Caldwell · Jul 20, 2021

They thought all the early life forms on Earth were long extinct. Surprise! Now they have found little pieces of DNA crawling around eating other DNA. They even make their own methane, which is the Earth's early atmosphere. It's what they need to breathe. This follows prions, little pieces of DNA living inside our cells and eating us. Those prions are tough little buggers. They can't be denatured in an autoclave, and survive swimming in our pancreatic juices. It shouldn't surprise anybody that there are other species living free.

CalG · Jul 20, 2021

Ever thought about the sprouting growth that comes out from the stump of a felled tree?\

It's not the leaves of the downed trunk that are providing the sugars of photosynthesis to the roots and stump.
It's the neighboring plants providing the growth nutrients, transported by a third, microbial life form.

We are just spectators here on earth. We don't own the place.

California · Jul 20, 2021

CalG said:
We are just spectators here on earth. We don't own the place.

I wouldn't say arms-length spectators. Participants.

Here's a quote I read a while back. I like it:

hummingbird4015 on Kos 3/2018

Somewhere I read that the Native American word for God was mistranslated by the Europeans into The Great Father or The Great Spirit (which was the concepts their own god allowed). But I read that the actual meaning in NA language was THE GREAT MYSTERY . . . I’ve always been drawn to that . . .to me the Divine is not Father God or Mother Goddess but rather the Great Mystery of Connectedness, that somehow in a way we don’t understand logically (because it isn’t logical) but that we feel within as part of our DNA is that (as the NA believed) we are all connected this extraordinary web of life that we are both part of and yet is also outside us.

California · Jul 20, 2021

Mallet said:
That quote seems to be way, way out in left field. The evidence directly from the many natives of the tribes themselves:

Gitchi Manitou is the great creator god of the Anishinaabe and many neighboring Algonquian tribes. The name literally means Great Spirit, a common phrase used to address God in many Native American cultures.

As in other Algonquian tribes, the Great Spirit is abstract, benevolent, does not directly interact with humans, and is rarely if ever personified in Anishinabe myths-- originally, Gitchi Manitou did not even have a gender (although with the introduction of English and its gender-specific pronouns, Gitchi Manitou began to be referred to as "he.") It is Gitchi Manitou who created the world, though some details of making the world as we know it today were delegated to the culture hero Nanabozho. "Gitchi Manitou" (or one of its many variant spellings) was used as a translation for "God" in early translations of the Bible into Ojibway, and today many Ojibway people consider Gitchi Manitou and the Christian God to be one and the same.
Here are the names of the God’s that translate into the Creator. Notice the English translation only applies the pronoun “He”, nothing more.

Gitchi Manitou, the Great Spirit of the Anishinabeg (Gichi Manidoo)

Information and legends about the Native American mythological figure Gitchi Manitou, creator god of the Anishinabe tribes.

www.native-languages.org

Sounds like you know more about indigenous theology than the Ms Hummingbird that I quoted.

She is likely mistaken in citing specifics in her "Somewhere I read...". So lets just consider the philosophy she posted.

In the context of responding to CalG's discussion of this newly discovered DNA, I think we can learn something from her view that we - everything - are all interconnected, and interdependent, in ways that we sense but don't understand.