Be Careful Whether Chaos, Climate Change, And Rev. Martin Luther’s Flea Join.
Pandemics used to be the consequence of several events’ conjunction.
Jules Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) was an intellectual whose wisdom encompassed diverse subjects. An authentic polymath. He made significant contributions to the mathematical sciences.
On his three-body problem solution, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) based the relativity theory. The cited three-body problem is a complex issue on stars’ mobility in the solar system. Poincaré laid the foundations of chaotic systems.
Nothing depends on chance, and nothing is random. There are specific laws that explain the fortuitous processes. Chance is only the measure of our ignorance, Poincaré wrote in his book Science and Method.
Let say something about chaos and butterflies.
(I apologize to mathematicians and meteorologists for my boldness in this field).
In the 1960s, American mathematician Edward Norton Lorenz (1917–2008) developed chaos theory. It happened by chance. What a curious paradox! Chance driving to the idea of non-chance. His original is in the article Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.
Lorenz’s professional interest was in weather forecasting. He said the following: the outcome of something depends on different variables. And it is impossible to predict. With his idea, he put in flight the well-known butterfly effect. But Lorenz talked of seagulls, not butterflies. However, Smagorinsky could be the metaphor’s creator, even W. S. Franklin. Kerry Emanuel says:
“The butterfly term was probably introduced by Joseph Smagorinsky (1969), but the concept has a long lineage, dating back, perhaps, to Franklin’s (1898) grasshopper: <<Long range detailed weather prediction is therefore impossible, and the only detailed prediction which is possible is the inference of the ultimate trend and character of a storm from observations of its early stages; the accuracy of this prediction is subject to the condition that the flight of a grasshopper in Montana may turn a storm aside from Philadelphia to New York!>>.”
Seagulls, grasshoppers, and butterflies. An assembly of animals and tiny bugs. Plus, other things.
What I talk about when I talk about the butterfly effect? Of course, with this question, I am paraphrasing Haruki Murakami. Murakami is the famous Japanese writer author of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
James Gleick, from Harvard, clarified the butterfly issues. He, like Murakami, was a writer. But he also was a publicist and fellow countryman of Lorenz. Gleick did it in his 1987 book “Chaos: The Making of a Science.” In short: the fluttering of a butterfly in Beijing’s air can change New York’s weather systems.
It will happen in the following weeks or months as a long-distance effect. It is a metaphor, of course. Someone (you) sneezes in Boston, and another (me) develops pneumonia in San Francisco. As everybody knows, pneumonia and other infections occur by microbes.
We, humans, are almost half-microbe.
Humans and microbes lived together for millions of years. The relationship between ancestors of both increased after hominins became hunter-gatherers.
Hominins were remote pre-human arboreal ape ancestors. They were interacting with each other while settling in a territory. That to say, the places they created were small colonies of a couple of dozen individuals.
The encounter’s phenomenon took a long time in the human calendar: around 8 or 9 million years. It is much time, but only a blip on the planetary clock. Later in human evolution, after hominins came australopithecines. Other relatives’ primates also traveled throughout evolution roads. They were more modern than the primitive arboreal hominins.
In the meantime, those pre-human primates were shaping their microbiome. The evolutive fact was happening in the context of the ecological environment. At the same time, they evolved to higher evolutive scales. And they also interacted with many animals (it was a process known as domestication).
The investigators considered the human microbiome as a consortium of microorganisms. Not only microbes. It must add its genes and many metabolic products. In other words: microbiota, microbial genomes, and their metabolites. All joined inside (gut) and outside (skin, mucosa) the body.
Our body harbors around 250 times more microbial genes than human genes. Humans are 90% microbial and only 10% human (Human Microbiome Project, Nature, 2012). This ratio is now in question and reduced to one to one (50% of each). At best, we would be a half-microbe.
The rodents’ epidemiological role.
We already have two protagonists in life’s drama: humans and microbes. Let’s go to add a third character. They are rodents: Very abundant animals with epidemiological transcendence. In the large family Muridae, the rats (genus Rattus) and mice (genus Mus) stand out. This family has a wide range of at less 129 genera and 584 species. To understand this, Homo is a genus; Homo sapiens is a species.
Rodents have been traveling companions of humankind since the most remote times. And yes, they also have a diverse and rich microbiome.
Rodents contribute a fourth important biological variable to the subject at hand: insects. It is a natural universe of infinite dimensions. In the Iliad of existence, they are tiny characters endowed with great transcendence. Insects are effective Trojan horses for millions of years.
From the evolutive point of view, they are an excellent lodging for microbes. Insects take and transfer microbes from the biological niches. They do it from mammalians, rodents, and their microbiomes.
Microbes roam all microbiomes. The Darwinian struggle for existence is a never-ending Trojan war between different microbial systems. In this biological conflict, microbes win more often than we humans would like.
Reverend Martin Luther’s flea.
Ernst Wilhelm Heine is a German architect and writer. He wrote a curious anecdote (in Luthers Floh, 1987. I used a Spanish edition). According to Heine, the pages of a book archived in a medieval monastery hid a flea. And the bug could suck Martin Luther’s blood. I mean Luther, the Protestant reformer priest, not M.L. King, the antiracist leader.
With unabashed irony, Heine claims the flea was responsible for the religious Reformation. The ideological movement shook the foundations of the Roman Holy See in the 16th century.
Heine holds the bold and humorous hypothesis that a simple flea changed the history of the world. With an intervention as simple as crucial ─a flea biting a human─ the anecdote becomes a category.
Remember that fleas also bite mammalians, besides some rebellious clerics. The tiny fleas ─not the clerics─ used to drink rodents’ blood. It is what happened to the rats running, from the beginning, through the pages of a great novel. I mean The Plague (La Peste, in French), by French writer Albert Camus (1913–1960).
Both fleas and rats take part in many episodes of humans’ history. But sometimes fleas (insects) and rats (reservoirs) need external help like chaos’s law. In other words: the concurrence of specific rules governing planetary avatars. Some natural events related to epidemics (i.e., climate).
Well. We have already placed all the actors on the stage of the life opera: microbes, insects, rodents, and humans. But there is still one ecological factor of primary importance. It is the play stage design: the climate and its chaotic periodic alterations.
The climate is a factor of epidemiological significance.
Concern, the relationship between climate and epidemics is ancient. It is as old as humanity’s dawn. The wise father of medicine, Hippocrates of Cos (460-c. 370 B.C.), drew attention twenty-four centuries ago in his famous book Of the Epidemics.
Daniel E. Lieberman is a professor at Harvard University. His disciplines are evolutionary biology and biological sciences. In The History of Human Body, Lieberman asks: “Who is not concerned about the climate change that is now occurring?”.
It worries many of us, I say. Vicissitudes of climate are interesting for millions of people. It is present in political, economic, and media forums. And among informed citizenries.
Greta Thunberg is the extreme and symptomatic example. She is a leader of the youth ecological movement. We remember her protesting in front of the Stockholm parliament. She plays her role as a great propagandist of a disrupted climate’s consequences. Greta managed to mobilize millions of people worldwide. And this serves to shame those who decide humanity’s present and future.
Weather and its unpredictable prediction are one thing. Climate and its chaotic millenary events are another. It is well known that meteorological weather conditions the actions of human life. Climate change has marked the biological and cultural evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens.
The human primate has reached the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder. Thanks to five significant transformations associated with the vicissitudes of climate. These changes turned the African arboreal ape into the modern human being. If we agree with this premise, it is correct to say that the same is true for other biological beings.
Telluric factors ─that is to say, linked to Earth─ are diverse. Earthquakes, tidal waves with tsunamis, and volcanic activity, among others. Related to the climatic factors, I highlight El Niño/La Niña variation with the Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
ENSO is a complex phenomenon (Although a bit simple, a good explication here). It causes severe local effects near the Pacific sea (on the west coast of Ecuador and Peru). But repercussions happen at great distances. It is the so-called teleconnection or the technical name for the butterfly effect.
I am interested in everything on Earth. Our marine blue world is a humble planet endowed with incredible vitality. Kyle Harper said that our shared history is inseparable. He refers to both humanity and planet Earth biographies. He explains it in his book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Harper is chair of the Department of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma.
From Hippocrates, we know the significant role played by climate changes in epidemics. Physical, quantifiable manifestations of climatic factors are atmospheric, economic, political, ecological, and sanitary. All related to human life. They change history when associating with epidemics.
The Antonines or Galen’s Plague (II Century) is a good example. Another is the Cyprian bishop epidemic (The forgotten pandemic, III Century). And also the historic plague of Justinian (VI Century). There are many more, and every one has its peculiar face. Many scholars think there is some yet to come. Coronavirus? Avian Flu? A still unknown virus? Who knows!
Conclusion: The climatic change quartet.
- Climate change is a severe problem. It is not a local atmospheric perturbation.
- Climate change goes further than meteorology. That is to say, rains, snow, thunder, hurricanes, floods, hot, and droughts.
- Climate change causes a significant disequilibrium in nature.
- Climate change is the chaotic scenery where many severe infections can happen.
