Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Notes from Derek Thompson On Work

October 4, 2023 – 10:35 am

p. x The decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress in their lives. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many people today ask their jobs to provide community, transcendence, meaning, self-actualization, existential therapy … these workers – particularly highly educated workers in the white-collar economy – feel that their jobs cannot be “just jobs” and that their careers cannot be “just careers”. Their jobs must be their callings.

p. 45 “There is new enthusiasm for universal policies – like universal basic income, parental leave, subsidized childcare and a child allowance which would make long working hours less necessary for all Americans. These changes alone might not be enough to reduce Americans’ devotion to work for work’s sake, since it’s the rich who are most devoted. But they would spare the vast majority of the public from the pathological workaholism that grips today’s elites, and perhaps create a bottom-up movement to displace work as the center of the secular American identity.

On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working. It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends and partners, according to research conducted by Ashley Williams… In one study, she concluded that the happiest young workers were those who said around the time of their college graduation that they preferred careers that have them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies. How quaint that sounds. But it’s the same perspective that inspired economist John Maynard Keynes to predict in 1930 that Americans would eventually have five-day weekends, rather than five-day weeks. It is the belief… that work is not life’s product, but its currency. What we choose to buy with it is the ultimate project of living.”

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Notes from Britain alone: How a decade of conflict remade the nation

October 4, 2023 – 10:26 am

p. 10 Put simply then, nationalisation means making the state more national… The concept developed in this book has two inspirations. The first is in the historical and sociological scholarship on nationalism, which situates it as a general feature of modernity. The second is Britain’s unique history of capitalist development through empire, and its post-imperial experience of ‘nationalisation’.”

p. 15 Nationalisation… to reuse Gellner’s working is the process in which the boundaries of the state are made more congruent with the boundaries of the nation. This process cannot be reduced to either cultural or economic forces. The redistribution of resources (which might typiucally be though of as economic) cannot work or make sense without the formal and informal boundaries of the nation (which might typically be thought of as cultural).

p. 18 It might seem off to describe the NHS as a founding myth to a nation that has existed for centuries. It might be more accurate and specific to instead characterise the NHS as a founding myth of post-imperial Britishness. The shift from empire-state-nation to nation-state produced Britishness as a kind of national identifiy we recognise today. It is a national identity made through the Second World War – the so-callled People’s War, where plucky Britain stood strong as Europe fell, with Britishness coming to stand for anti-fascist, tolerant and ordinary – and thereby conveniently placing colonialism and empire to one side and out of the picture. Post-war nationalism was not just for the British people then, it also helped cement the British peoples, shorn of empire. This is part of the meaning and significance of the National Health Service for a declining imperial power: it was as much a post-imperial project as it was a post-war project.

p. 23 Austerity was also nationalising in the way that it stoked social conflict over the distribution of resources. In short, existing conflict over who gets what, when and how – including struggle over the boundaries of the nation – intensidied. If the state governs on the basis that there’s not as much to go around and that failing to get spending under control is a matter of national survival, then there are going to be effects… Those with resources – ranging from the tangible, such as wealth, to the intangible, such as whiteness – worry that they will lose out, either by falling down a rung in social status or by losing out to others. People wonder where the money went, and which people – or what types of people, more accurately – took the money.”

p. 24 “For this post-crash situation, two or possibly three viable nationalisation projects emerged… The first… is obvious enough: Brexit…. Eurosceptic elites developed a nationalising narrative that mobilised a unique coalition of voters through concerns over inequalities, including with immigration. By claiming to speak up for the ‘left behind’, those elites could tell a compelling nationalist story about how leaving the EU would take control back from the so-called metropolitan elite. By detraying the left through their pro-immigration and out-of-touch metropolitan values, thise metropolitan elite also betrayed whiteness and its links to the British, and especially English, nation.”… The second… Scottish independence. The third, .. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party … able to mobilise through the sense that stagnating growth, low wages and years of austerity meant that some parts of societty were losing out and staying poor as a feature of the system … the most high-profile policies .. invoked post-war and post-imperial nationalisation, especially in public ownership of key industries such as railways and increased profressive taxes.”

p. 185 new opportunities for nationalist, or class, political mobilisation. Based on the conflict of the last decade, mobilisation against inequality is more likely to take the form of fiscal populism through wealth taxes – in which the nation reclaims its rightful wealth from a small, immoral elite that have cheated their way to riches – rather than through rejigging capital-labour relations to redistribute resources through the social relations of employment… This kind of revenue could help fund a Green New Deal in the style of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan and American Great Jobs plan. The potential for nationalisation here is evident.”

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Notes from Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political

August 25, 2023 – 11:52 am

Nancy Fraser p. 38 “the ecological dimension has to be front and centre. It is not reducible to, but it is deeply intertwined, with the dynamics of the economic, financialisation and social reproduction crises. It was when I took this objective of a crisis critique that I found I could not any longer keep the ecological dimension in the margins”

p. 48 Akwugo Emejulu “If you see something that needs to change, you have to do it yourself. The idea that someone else either understands the issue better than you or has beeter ideas than you seems anti-egalitarian. This does not mean you are making someone else take responsibility for their own liberation… Rather , it’s to say: “If you want change to happen then you actually have to grab a broom and gather with others to make that happen.”

p. 53 In the UK you are one of 24 Black female professors out of 19,000 professors nationwide, 14,000 of whom are male.

p. 68 Sheila Rowbotham “After abolition the memory of the extraordinarily far-sighted and creative things that had been done just got completely pushed aside. The GLC’s radical scope was much wider than previous left councils in the past. Ken Livingstone had been influenced by Harvey Milk in San Francisco and was aware of the liberation and feminist politics in a way that was unusual among Labour Party politicians. I worked in Industry and Employment, the area for which Mike Ward was respobsible. Mike had been inspired by the visionary measures adopted by the Communist council in Bologna, but he also knew in detail about the history of local government in Brighton. Robin Murray, the chief economic adviser, had experience as a development economist and in community politics in Brighton where he lived. My immediate boss was Hilary Wainwright, then in her early 30s. … She contrived to link the creation of forms of democratic planning with economic policies that served human needs, transplanting the Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Alternative Plan into Local government.

JL So what did you do at the GLC?

“I initiated policies on childcare, deomstic labour and contract cleaning for the London Industrial Strategy. … creating jobs by funding women’s workplace co-ops and nurseries. We also funded a launderette run by older women under the Westway. About 20% of people in London at that time didn’t have their own washing machine. Many were pensioners. There had been municipal washing places that were being closed. The women who used one had campaigned for a replacement, a community laundrette. Westway was funded by Industry and Employment and the nursery by the Women’s Committee, headed by Val Wise. So the women who used the launderette had contact with the little children, and they also used to do the washing of all the nappies for the nursery.”

Veronica Gago Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires p. 85 “I think in Latin America the vocabulary of environmentalism has more to do with anti-extractive struggles than with ‘environmentalism’. The vocabulary is changing fast with younger generations. Whilst comrades in other areas talk about ecofeminism, I think that here, in Latin America, the struggles, the vocabulary, the imagery, have to do more with strategies of anti-extractivism and indigenous movements… extractivism for us is the main issue in rethinking the exploitation of land, the exploitations of corporations and the distribution of common resources… the agro-business model is now exploding in terms of environmental problems, both with the basic issues of food and water, and with the dispossession of indigenous people through the expropriation of plants. There is also a very long discussion about the colonial frame of developmentalism in ‘the Third World’, and the dilemmas ralted to the international division of labour for our countries.”

p. 92 Wendy Brown, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berleley. “One of the things I paid too little attention to in Undoing the Demos (2015) was the disintregration of the social… In erican case that disintregration has had two important effects. First, this process literally takes apart social bonds and social welfare – not simply by promoting a libertarian notion of freedom and dismantling the welfare state, but also by reducing legitimate political claims only to those advanced by and for families and individuals, not social groups generated by social powers. Second, something I didn’t emphasise adequately in 2015 … is the extent to which neoliberalism could generate a political formation that combined libertarianism with a very strong statism that works to secure, essentially, the deregulated public sphere that neoliberalism itself generated.”

p. 97 “We live in such nihilist times. By which I mean, drawing from Nietzsche, not that there are no values circulating, but that our values are commercialised, trivilaised, fungible; they’re traded, trafficked in, used for branding and profit.”

p. 107 Lynne Segal – “The mantra promoting notions of the autonomous, individualised self is indeed so strong today, although it has little connection to what it is to be human. This is especially pernicious when we enter the world of care, one where public support is crucial for so many. For instance, spaces for mothers with young children are being demolished before our eyes. According to the Sutton Trust, there was a 50 per cent cut in early years day care provision between 2010 and 2017, and at the very same time there was almost the exact same rise in referrals for children in crisis, creating an explosion in demand for child protection services; it is all so short sighted.”

p. 114 Lynne Segal “Biology and culture, biology and environment are never in any way separable. Donna Haraway has so much to say about how complicated this relationship is, seeing biology as an “endless resource” of “multiple possibilities”. Similarly, the neuroscientists Steven Rose points out how even the environment of chromosomes is unstable, making patterns of genetic transmission entirely unpredictable. Genetic outcomes not only depend upon endless external physical, social and cultural factors, but also on unstable internal cellular features. So, when we are trying to explain something as complex as how we become women, or men – if indeed we do identify with these gender positions we’re seen as born into – the complexity is quite phenomenal! The idea that we could separate out the intricacies of the biological from the convolutions of culture is foolish. And yet we have evolutionary speculators, such as Richard Dworkin, providing “biological” reasons why women wear high heels and tight dresses. However laughable, the media present these biological musings as gold standard science. Thus, popularisers of scientific folk tales come to be seen as leading scientists.”

Hilary Wainwright p. 130 After 2019 general election”one of the reasons why we lost, say, in the North East, and, to some degree, Wakefield, some of the north-western towns, and certainly in Stoke, is because in fact people’s political alienation, their experience of having no control over the decisions shaping their daily lives, was not actually a result of their experience of Europe, but rather their daily life experience, especially of Labour Councils that took their voters completely for granted, treating them more or less with contempt. Even on the interviews on the election night, you heard working-class people who voted Tory explain their decision by saying “Labour’s done nothing for us round here” as much as they talked about Brexit.”

p. 185 Angela McRobbie, Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London “Most of the time I’ve been working in Germany in the last three years has been dedicated to an AHRC three-city study of fashion micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan…. The argument has emerged that it is the existence of a social wage which permits small creative enterprises to function where there is support and subsidy for rent of studio space and equipment, and a huge number of courses for upskilling and further training. Germany is the land of free at-the-point-of-delivery vocational training. The social democratic heritage, even as it is being transformed, remains pretty intact. And since Fashion is a female-led field, these provision benefit the context of women’s employment.

Gargi Bhattacharyya Professor fo Sociology at the University of East London

p. 197 “from Thatcher onwards – and escalating when we come to 2008, and the formal new institutionalisation fo the new austerity – part of how any public consensus around welfare or any social support operates is by increasingly making all of us guilty until proven innocent. Nearly all state functions become modelled as punitive, so instead of via the cuddly daddy who will tell you off, who will give you all a sweetie if you’ll just come and line up. Instead, we’ve got the state patriarch sating “Well I’m not sure any of you are my kids anyway. Can you prove it?” And so then we’re all endlessly having to prove how we are deserving of t he smallest indulgence, even the indulgence of being allowed to live our lives. That really shifts expectations. … it’s always “How can I avoid punishment?” even if the punishment is only taking away some of the small supports … everyone gets trained to look over their shoulder and to not ask for help because sometimes the threat of punishment is greater than the small social good that might be gained… The machinery enacting our rights is becoming increasingly punitive.”

Sylvie Walby p. 214 JL You describe feminism as a project, rather than an identity. Why?

“The concept of a ‘project’ contains the implications of change, of movement, of fluidity, of possibility. The concept of ‘identity’ is very fixed. I’m not comfortable with the concept of identity because of its tendency to essentialise, albeit on the level of culture rather than biology; hence I find it a relatively unproductive term … the concept of ‘project’ is better than ‘movement’ because it contains notions of practices, as well as ideas.”

p. 218 “There is a possibility of a cascade of changes, something which appears to be quite small can have very large effects … The concept of a cascade is really important. It’s an analysis of society as being made up of multiple systems. .. of two main kinds: regimes of inequality and institutional domains. The notion of the crisis ‘cascading’ is that it cascades through these interconnected systems. It’s not that the whole society will move at once, but that steo by step, one system could change another. But there’s no inevitability; and any specific system could absorb it. I used the example of the financial crisis, for example … there was no inevitability that there should be austerity. You might say the same with Covid there’s no inevitability that the closing down of the economy had to mean austerity. The government can simply print money” And if we compare the two crises, the government in this instance has simply printed money, whereas it didn’t in the previous one.”

Sophia Siddiqui, Institute of Race Relations

p. 250 “The reproductive labour of migrant women is essential to maintaining the capitalist system, as the care work needed to sustain families is increasingly outsourced onto their shoulders. But in every conceivable way, migrant women remain cordoned off from the body politic through immigration regimes that exclude them and push them out to the edges of society. And these immigration regimes often prevent them from being with and caring for their own families, who they have to leave behind in their countries of origin, to care for the families of more affluent others. We can’t look at these issues in silos; we need to see them together, particularly in the context of the multiple crises of care and of capitalism. That was how the term ‘reproductive racism’ emerged”

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Notes from Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

August 22, 2023 – 9:02 pm

P. 15 While material consumption is certainly falling in post-industrial nations like the Us and UK, on the other side of the world, in the countries whence Americans and Britons import most of their goods, it is rising at breakneck speed. … in 2019… we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950. .. you could have said the precisely the same thing about every year since 2012… out appetite for raw materials continues to grow, up by 2.8% in 2019, with not a single category of mineral extraction, from sand and metals to oil and coal, falling.”

p. 67 “geologists … estimated that the amount of sand, soil and rock we humans mine and quarry and dredge each year is some 24 times greater than the amount of sediment moved each year by Earth’s natural erosion processes.. Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955… by 2020 the total weight of human-made products … was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet…. The sum total amount of material that we have dug out of the ground in the past century … 6.7 teratonnes (or to be even more precise, 6,742,000,000,000 tonnes). .. for every human-made object on this planet, every building, plane, train, car and phone, try to picture a pile of earth, sand and dirt six times its weight. And the pile of moved material is getting bigger with every year that passes.”

p. 70 “Sand is serious business. According to the UN Environment Programme, if we are to avert a ‘sand crisis’ we should be treating it not as a commonplace resource but as a strategic mineral, something to be uttered in the same breath as metals like copper or even battery materials like lithium.” (Fibre optic cables eg)

p. 75 The recipe for the cement we mostly use today was patented in 1824 by a man called Joseph Aspdin. He called it Portland cement, because its colour resembled the Portland Stone quarried in Dorset. In truth, however, there were all sorts of vying recipes around the same time, and no one is quite sure whether ASpidin, a slightly shady character, really won the race or actually purloined his blueprint from somebody else.”

p. 82 Cement production accounts for a staggering 7-8% of all carbon emissions. At the time of writing, those emissions were split roughly 60:40 between the chemical reaction occurring in chalk or limestone as it burns off its carbon in the process of becoming cement, and the energy needed to heat the kiln. The latter is relatively easy to resolve .. but the chemical reaction is a far harder nut to crack.”

p. 108 better known as the main production hub for a company whose name is emblazoned in red on the buildings, TSMC. This is Fab 18 – the most advanced factory in the world .. founded in 1987 …a business whose sole purpose is to manufacture the processors dreamed up by Apple or Tesla or ‘fabless’ chip companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm… pushing the boundaries of physics… over a 3-year period from 2021, TSMC was budgeting to invest $135 billion”

p. 116 China spends more money on importing computer chips these days than it does importing oil … import costs as of 2017 were greater than Saudi Arabia’s total revenue from oil exports, or for that matter the global trade in aircraft.”

p. 128 Steve Sherlock, 6,000 years ago in Britain, Street House “the late Stone Age … the saltern – salt factory – here was up and running, churning out salt and cheese and possibly other products too, a thousand years before Stonehenge’s standing stones were even erected. .. the people who worked here – who are thought to have come across from mainland Europe, possibly from France – had brought with them knowledge about how to turn natural resources into a product before selling or trading it onwards.”

p. 133 “As early as AD 523 when the Ostrogoths ruled what was once the Western Roman Empire, their administrator Cassiodorus wrote to the Venetians that: “All your energies are spent on your salt-fields; in them indeed lies your prosperity and your power to purchase those things which you have not. For though there may be men who have little need of gold, yet none live who desire not salt”

p. 174 Today it is estimated that around half the nitrogen in our bodies was fixed from the air via the Haber-Bosch process…. But in these earliest years, the main use these nitrates were put to was creating explosives for the German army.”

p. 203 “there is about 32 billion tonnes of steel out there in the world … you could build seven high-speed rail tracks between the earth and the sub. Or, were you to divide it between every person on the planet, you would end up with about 4 tonnes per person. Given you already know there are around 15 tonnes per person in the developed world, that underlines another important point: the stocks of iron around the world are very unequally distributed. .. the average person in China today has roughly 7 tonnes of steel. The average person living in sub-Saharan Africa has less than a tonne of steel per capita.”

p. 216 “The ore is rock rich in iron oxide, essentially granulated rust, and turning that into a metal means ripping the oxygen atoms away from the iron atoms. And that, ultimately, is what this enormous furnace is here for: to provide an environment where the oxygen can leave the iron and bond with the carbon from the coal.”

p. 217 “Iron is a fossil fuel product. Each year we empty staggering quantities of coal – more than a billion tonnes … into the thousand or so blast furnaces operating around the world. The iron that comes out the other end may not have much carbon embedded in it, but its production entails the creation of enormous quantities of CO2 – around 7-8 percent of the global total.”

p. 221 “In 1800, 95% of Britain’s energy came from coal; at the very same point, almost all of France’s energy – over 90% – still came from burning wood.”

p. 225 “Around 70% of the world’s niobium = a rare earth element that helps harden steel for use in jet engines, critical pipelines, superconducting magnets, and the skeletons of bridges and skyscrapers – comes from a single mine in Brazil. During the Second World War, the Germans and British vies for the affections of neutral Turkey, in part because it produced nearly all of the chromium the Nazis used in their weapons and machinery.”

p. 230 “low-background steel … completely uncontaminated with radionucleotides … essential for the production of sensitive equipment like Geiger counters and some medical devices… the only way … is to find a source of the metal that dates back before those first nuclear tests in 1945. Old sunken battleships are a particularly popular source. .. there is a roaring trade in metal piracy from old warships, especially in the South China Sea.”

p. 287 “The flipside of getting ever more effective at mining ever poorer copper ores is that we displace ever more amounts of the planet in our bid to do so. Between 2004 and 2016 Chilean miners increased annual cooper production by 2.6%. Yet the amount of ore they had to dig out of the ground to produce this marginal increase in refined copper rose by 75% ,,, the numbers … show up in no environmental accounts of material flow analysis, which count only the refined metal. When it comes to even the United Nations’ measure of how much humans are affecting the planet, this waste rock doesn’t count.”

p. 340 “Engine knock was one of the great early challenges faced by the motor industry. In an effort to outdo its rivals at Ford, GM began in the 1920s to look for a way to quiet the engines in its Cadillacs. One of its engineers, a man called Thomas Midgeley, discovered that a drop of tetraethyl lead in gasoline would miraculously increase octane levels and stop all the pinging. And so began one of the most shameful stories of pollution in modern history … everyone knew the risks of putting lead in petrol right from the start. .. rather than seek a way to remove lead, GM simply removed the word from the chemical’s brand name, they called it ‘Ethyl”. There were warning signs from the start, with a spate of illnesses at a refinery in New Jersey shortly after it entered the market. Men were quite literally going mad, hallucinating and then working themselves up into a frenzy. Six men died who all worked in the same place, the section of the refinery where they synthesised tetraethyl lead … some states banned the use of leaded gasoline … but then, in an extraordinary stunt, the inventor, Thomas Midgley, held a press conference where he wasted his hands in a solution of tetraethyl lead and spent a minute inhaling its fumes … unbeknownst to the journalists witnessing it, Midgley had just spent a period in Florida recuperating from lead poisoning itself. GM and its lawyers suggested the men who died must have fallen victim to their own negligence .. This was the Roaring Twenties where anything went, and state by state the bans were revoked and the age of leaded petrol began.”

p. 352 polyethylene … “by the late 1930s, ICI came up with a system for mass prodicing the plastic… When war broke out shortly afterwards, this wonder substance was rapidly co-opted for the national effort. After Japan took control of Malaysia and all its rubber plantations, suddenly polyethylene was of critical importance . Production went into overdrive … the Royal Air Force could use it to cut the weight of its radar systems just enough to fit them inside its planes … pretty much every ton of polyethylene produced up to 1945 went into those radar cables, but once the war ended ICI was left with a sudden glut of the plastic, so it went looking for buyers. This would soon become a recurrent theme. Cheap plastic toys, beads, jewellery and other such trinkets often owed their existence less to consumer appetites than to a surplus of supply”.

p. 385 “Australia … has overtaken Chile as the world’s biggest lithium producer, though nearly all of their spodumene is actually shipped off to be processed in China …. It means Australia need not take responsibility for all the emissions produced when they are refined, which is rather a lot.”

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Notes from Certain Trumpets by Garry Wills

August 18, 2023 – 10:54 am

p. 16 Lincoln “GK Chesterton perfectly captured the delicacy of his operation: “He loved to repeat that slavery was intolery while he tolerated it; and to prove that something ought to be done while it was impossible to do it… But, for all that, this inconsistency beat the politicians at their own game … and this abstracted logic proved most practical after all. For, when the chance did come to do something, there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell from the clear heights of heaven.”

p. 90 “Armies of the ancient regime were precious items in themselves. An able officer corp of nobles was literally irreplaceable; it could not be expended recklessly. The officers were professionals with expensive training, and they led expensive mercenaries. The aim of such an army was not only to protect valuable territory but to protect its valuable self… All this was changed by the Revoltion. The new force was the People in Arms, raised by conscription for mass resistance to encirclement by the combined regents of Europe. The aim was no longer to maneuver for position but to destroy attacking armies, at whatever cost to one’s own troops. This is the “political fanaticism” Calusewitz attributes to the French of the period. Their officers were not the scions of noble houses, but talented men from the bourgeoiuse or the intelligentsia. Carnot himself was a poet-engineer, born of a notary. Armies were thrown into war with a new recklessness, once it was clear that officers’ positions could be rapidly filled again.”

p. 96 “After Napoleon became first consul for life – and then emperor – he merged the highest military and political authority in himself, and his military talent and appetite outran their real usefulness to the French nation. … Napoleon could not, in his civil capacity, control war because war controlled him. He was imprisoned by his own skills, a slave to them.”

p. 160 The young David Hume withdrew from society while he worked out his lasting contribution to philosophical method, the Treatise of Human Nature (1739). After he published that work, Hume did want followers, but he found none – the book’s influence would be exerted only over a long time and at some distance (initially in Germany). Hume then changed his whole mode of life and did become an intellectually leader – through his enormously popular History of England and his moral and political essays. He exemplified in his own life the two tendencies of intellectual excellence: (a) towards a more severe and lonely quest for the truth and (b) towards a less exacting but more accessible truth, one more to be disseminated than discovered. The best intellectual route is done by the first route, but leadership is made possibly only by the second.”

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Fascinating complexity

August 6, 2023 – 3:35 pm

From A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals Author(s): Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred I. Tauber The Quarterly Review of Biology , Vol. 87, No. 4 (December 2012), pp. 325-341

p. 331 An instructive example comes from studies of the pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum and the several species of bacteria that live in its cells: variants of Buchnera provide the aphid with thermotolerance (at the expense of fecundity at normal temperatures; Dunbar et al. 2007); Rickettsiella provides color change, turning genetically red aphids green through the synthesis of quinones (Tsuchida et al. 2010); and some variants of Hamiltonella provide immunity against parasitoid wasp infection (Oliver et al. 2009). But in the last case, the protective variants Hamiltonella result from the incorporation of a specific lysogenic bacteriophage within the bacterial genome. The aphid must be infected with Hamiltonella, and the Hamiltonella must be infected by phage APSE-3. As Oliver et al. (2009) write, “In our system, the evolutionary interests of phages, bacterial symbionts, and aphids are all aligned against the parasitoid wasp that threatens them all. The phage is implicated in conferring protection to the aphid and thus contributes to the spread and maintenance of H. defensa in natural A. pisum populations” (Oliver et al. 2009:994). But there is a cost to the host in having this beneficial protection, for in the absence of parasitoid infection, those aphids carrying the bacteria with lysogenic phage are not as fecund as those lacking them. Similarly, a tradeoff occurs in aphids that carry the thermotolerant genetic variants of Buchnera, i.e., while more heat resistant, they have less fecundity at milder temperatures than their sisters whose bacteria lack the functional allele for the heat-shock protein. However, the population as a whole can survive hot weather, which would otherwise prevent reproduction.

p. 332 The immune system may be formulated as having two “limbs”: an outward-looking limb that defines the organism as that which is to be protected from foreign pathogens, and an inward-looking arm that looks for potential dangers arising from within the organism itself (see Burnet and Fenner 1949; Tauber 2000, 2009; Ulvestad 2007; Eberl 2010; Pradeu 2010). This dualistic vision was the original conception of Metchnikoff at the end of the 19th century. He regarded immunity as a general physiology of inflammation, which included repair, surveillance for effete, dying, and cancer cells, as well as responsibility for the defense against invading pathogens (Tauber 1994). This larger, systemic understanding thus places defensive properties as only part of a continuous negotiation of numerous interactions between the organism and its biotic environment—both “internal” and “external” (Ulvestad 2007; Tauber 2008a,b). If the immune system serves as the critical gendarmerie keeping the animal and microbial cells together, then to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont. To escape immune control is to become a pathogen or a cancer. In cancer, such autonomously proliferating (lower-level) cells must escape the innate, acquired, and anoikis-mediated immune systems of the host in order to survive (Hanahan and Weinberg 2011; Buchheit et al. 2012). Infections are those microbes that have similarly evaded the immuneenforced social modes of conformity (Hoshi and Medzhitov 2012).

p. 333 . To use an anthropomorphic analogy, the immune system is not merely the body’s “armed forces.” It is also the “passport control” that has evolved to recognize and welcome those organisms that help the body.,,, ” From this vantage, there is no circumscribed, autonomous entity that is a priori designated “the self.” What counts as “self” is dynamic and contextdependent.

p. 334 We are genomic chimeras: nearly 50% of the human genome consists of transposable DNA sequences acquired exogenously (Lander et al. 2001; Cordaux and Batzer 2009), possibly by the horizontal gene transfer from microbial symbionts to animal cells (see Dunning Hotopp et al. 2007; Altincicek et al. 2012). Although much of this added DNA is thought to be “parasitic,” some transposable elements may have been critical in creating new patterns of transcription (Sasaki et al. 2008; Oliver and Greene 2009; Kunarso et al. 2010). The emergence of the uterus, the defining character of eutherian mammals, appears to have been facilitated independently in several mammalian families by transposons integrating into the regions controlling the expression of the prolactin gene. These transposons contain transcription factor binding sites that enable the prolactin gene to become expressed in the uterine cells (Lynch et al. 2011; Emera et al. 2012). Moreover, this convergent evolution of gene expression via the insertion of transposable elements also suggests that such transposons can mediate adaptive evolution. The selective silencing of such transposons by DNA methylation or small interfering RNAs appears to be another policing mechanism that has facilitated evolution (Chung et al. 2008; Kaneko-Ishino and Ishino 2010; Castan˜eda et al. 2011). Thus, animals can no longer be considered individuals in any sense of classical biology: anatomical, developmental, physiological, immunological, genetic, or evolutionary. Our bodies must be understood as holobionts whose anatomical, physiological, immunological, and developmental functions evolved in shared relationships of different species. Thus, the holobiont, with its integrated community of species, becomes a unit of natural selection whose evolutionary mechanisms suggest complexity hitherto largely unexplored. As Lewis Thomas (1974:142) commented when considering self and symbiosis: “This is, when you think about it, really amazing. The whole dear notion of one’s own Self—marvelous, old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self—is a myth.”

p. 335

The milk oligosaccharides produced by human mothers cannot be utilized by newborn infants; however, they serve as an excellent food for strains of Bifidobacillus that enhance infant nutrition (Zivkovic et al. 2011). The vermiform appendix, long thought of as a vestigial organ, may actually serve as a reservoir for normal gut bacteria such that symbionts can be rapidly replaced after bouts of diarrhea (Smith et al. 2009). Diarrhea remains the leading cause of death in children of less-developed countries (CDC 2010), and antibiotic-induced colitis, caused by the spread of Clostridium after the normal symbionts have been killed, can be cured by the low-tech procedure of fecal transplants (usually from the spouse; Bakken 2011)

p. 335 , the possibility that microbes could regulate neural development had not been considered until recently. Now, however, a microbiota-gut-brain axis has recently been proposed (Cryan and O’Mahony 2011; McLean et al. 2012). Germfree mice, for example, have lower levels of NGF-1A and BDNF (a transcription factor and a paracrine factor associated with neuronal plasticity) in relevant portions of their brains than do conventionally raised mice. Heijtz et al. (2011:3051) have concluded that “during evolution, the colonization of gut microbiota has become integrated into the programming of brain development, affecting motor control and anxiety-like behavior.” In another investigation, a particular Lactobacillus strain has been reported to help regulate emotional behavior through a vagus nerve-dependent regulation of GABA receptors (Bravo et al. 2011). Investigations into the regulation of brain development by bacterial products were unthinkable before this challenge to the prevailing paradigm.

p. 336 This new paradigm for biology asks new questions and seeks new relationships among the different living entities on Earth. We are all lichens.

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