A Previously Unidentified Biological Cause of Trumpers and Suicide Bombers and Brutality in General
(Based on research unveiled in the New York Times on October 4, 2011)
By David Gottfried
When 9/11 blitzkrieged across our nation, we were astonished by the exceptional cruelty of the fiends who committed the crime. (Arguably, we should not have been so shocked; those horrible people were no worse than the perpetrators of Auschwitz). The manner of the killing seemed so frightening as to be almost otherworldly, as if some subject of hell had made a colony on earth.
Unfortunately, an article I read, several years ago, suggested to me that evil in general, and suicide fighters in particular, are ordained by nature. The article was in the NY Times on October 4, 2011. It was an article about the character of slime molds. It did not say anything about man’s capacity for violence. The theory set forth in this essay, to the effect that the behavior of slime molds foreshadows man’s violence and that violence is a secondary product of the immune system, is my own, but it is based on the research discussed in that article.
The article noted that slime molds are societies of amoebas or congregations of thousands of amoebas which have banded together to fight starvation. Amoebas are microscopic, single-celled animals. They are a rather primitive life form and to my knowledge do not possess even the merest, slightest forerunner of a brain.
When these thousands of amoebas band together, they do in a group what they cannot do singularly. They seem to form miniature polities replete with armies to defend themselves.
The article claimed that these colonies of amoebas have a means of fighting bacteria -- collectively. About one percent of the amoebas become members of the colony’s police force. These amoeba cops keep the colony safe from bacteria. When an amoeba cop encounters a bacterium, it swallows the bacterium so only it and no other amoebas will be damaged by the bacterium. Before it dies from the bacterium it just swallowed, it leaves the colony so that the other amoebas will not be infected by the bacterium in the wake of its death.
The amoeba cop very simply commits suicide, by eating a deadly bacterium, to protect other members of the amoeba colony. So much for the idea that committing suicide, in the course of fighting, is outside of the realm of natural behavior. Amoeba cops are, perhaps, nature’s first suicide bombers.
In amoeba’s we have an example of organisms willing to commit suicide to defend his brothers. Amoebas do this even though they have no brain and no nervous system. This shows that group or tribal identity is so deeply entrenched in life that it harks back long before prehistory, to our most primordial beginnings.
The will to fight others is perhaps derived from the immune system. For example, some human immune cells are called phagocytes. These cells swallow microorganisms and then proceed to destroy them by spraying them with hydrogen peroxide (These microscopic cells have microscopic hydrogen peroxide machines) and making the interior of the cell highly acidic. Although we did not know that hydrogen peroxide could kill germs until the 19th century, our cells knew this when we were slithering in the muck of the sea and the swamp.
In the case of Amoebas, the immune system is enlarged and extends from one person to another, i.e., one amoeba will kill and be killed to save his brother. Perhaps war in general is an example of the externalization of the immune system.
In any event, given our fervent sense of group loyalty, which may be based on phenomena forged in the neonatal stages of life on this planet, the prospect for inter ethnic brotherhood and togetherness might be nothing but an impotent pipedream.