The conservation of religiosity makes a lot of sense. Religious behavior keeps re-emerging because it isn't something done to us, imposed from outside, but because it is somehow produced by our own psycho-biology.
That's something of an argument for secular organizations to adapt the trappings and ceremonies of religions, to make themselves more sustainable by satisfying those inherent cravings. The military seems to have discovered this.
This is my perspective as a life-long atheist, trying to understand the behavior of normal humans. But it may be like a color blind person trying to understand the reaction to a vibrant painting. Maybe I just lack the sense to detect the external religiosity beamed to me by an omnipresent deity.
You assumed it isn't still something being done to us, being imposed from the outside. I doubt that's right. It was a useful tool of power before, it probably still is. Why do you think it's produced by our own psycho-biology?
That the trappings and ceremonies of religion are co-opted by power-structures and televangelists and faith healers to divide and exploit and extract money from... To us religious these are true wolves in sheep-clothing.
I don't think you should seek the answer in a biological imperative to be religious. Instead try to see the Chasm. A yawning chasm saying that we are not worth it, that what we do shall not amount to anything, that all is lost/hopeless, that in the long run you are unloved and unlovable... That is the Chasm.
The experience of the Chasm is very common, and the need to run away from it is very real. Things we do to run away from it include social structures like blaming/ridiculing others, various addictions and obsessions to numb it, food and TV and relationships and sometimes even drugs. Marx saw religion as just another one of these, not evil intrinsically—but he thought the Chasm to come from folks' reactions to their own enslavement and that there wouldn't be a Chasm after we abolished wage slavery.
But religiosity in the sense you mean is better understood as the part where we turn and fight, where we take a stand against the Chasm rather than running forever. Its ubiquity comes from the common problem it attempts to solve, not from some random biological preset. Us religious folks continue because we think we have found something strong enough to fight it, whether it is Jesus or the truth of no-self or the pursuit of a cosmic Harmony or something else entirely.
Watching its weird icons puttering by, I always felt like ClearCase was failing in an attempt to do this.
They can be very effective for C. diff infections, but beyond that it’s not as much of a wonder treatment as the initially hype suggested. There have been a lot of startups and researchers working on this space with very lackluster results (outside of C. diff, that is)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28760934/
Biogaia's Gastrus has it.
If the disease states are a result of pathogenic invasion, restoring the natural inhabitants of the gut by transplant and driving out the 'bad guys' by doing so is completely consistent.
Whether you call that 'doing nothing' is of course a different matter; it's a bit like explaining armor as 'doing nothing' because it just sits there and soaks up incoming physical damage!
[1] https://www.darm-mit-charme.de/buch.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODJwP8C48cE
> Well, I’m here to tell you that they do nothing.
Utter tripe. After getting a cardiac stent placed last April, I did a deep dive on cardiovascular disease. I landed on work from the Cleveland Clinic by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. In his long-term studies, he finds that bacteria in the gut metabolize certain proteins found in meat and dairy into trimethethylamine, which the liver metabolizes into trimethylamine-oxide (TMAO). TMAO annihilates the nitric oxide blood gas created by the endothelium to protect and repair itself. In other words, that is the root cause of CVD.
That, my friends, is not nothing.
The author of this piece claiming that gut bacteria have no impact on the body's biochemistry is being willfully ignorant of years of well-established studies. At the very least, for the one, narrow interest where I have done a deep dive.
Also, you should probably say it’s ‘a’ root cause. I’m aware of other theories that place a big emphasis on an imbalance between calcium and magnesium/k2 intake.
It's a good read about a valuable concept, never mind that I don't agree on the basic premise that gut bacteria "do nothing."
That said, I don't find the author's framing of this particularly useful. If a theory is wrong, it will be wrong for factual, technical reasons. The extent to which some real phenomena can predict others is testable. Handwaving it away as social contagion, ideology, or mass hysteria --- not that those don't exist, medieval dance fever being my favorite example --- isn't good enough for me.
What else would you call it other than microbiome? Gut flora used to be popular but as with the case above what someone eats can often play a role behind what’s living in their gut.
Comparing the general value of more things in an ecosystem representing passive or neutral characteristics as a net positive.
I think the other examples are different given the “addition by subtraction” of these things improving with the natural evolution / diminishing effect of them.
And yet somehow, it feels par for the course when it comes to pop-science microbiome discussion. The entire field of microbiome research has been greatly overhyped despite very mixed and lackluster results in studies. You can go out and find individual studies claiming that certain gut bacteria are associated with certain conditions or that certain probiotics are associated with certain outcomes, but it’s much harder to find those results replicated again or even proven out in the real world, with a few minor exceptions.
Meanwhile, the more philosophically minded writers have latched on to all of this uncertainty and ambiguity as an opening to inject their own pet theories or hypothesize that various disease stages are related to something vague with the microbiome. It’s reminiscent of how misunderstandings of quantum physics are often used to justify quack theories because the reader may not know how to separate quantum physics fact from fiction.
I’m still optimistic that some value will come from microbiome research, but it’s not going to come from wandering blog posts like this.
The oral microbiome, however, is an entirely different story. Decades of research show causal links between oral bacteria and disease. And it’s readily accessible so it can be easily tested and modulated.
Let’s stop using “microbiome” to describe the gut only. The gut microbiome may be full of overhyped studies, but the oral microbiome or the skin microbiome are entirely different stories.
