Abstrakt
On the last Gatherings in Biosemiotics in Copenhagen 2015, one of us (AM) ended his contribution by the following diagram (see picture below). The message of the picture points out that all different lineages of living beings sprouted from a common original biosphere, hence they are heirs of then established "ways of living".
That means that living activities of one lineage (be it metabolites, feromones, and other signals, display, coding rules etc.) may be understood in other lineages as signs (or even intended as such). What meaning will be given to such signs is, of course, a question of the state, memory, experience, and evolutionary history of the acceptor lineage in general, and individuals in particular.
In the first part of our communication, we would like to give examples of such mutual understanding (or misunderstanding) in evolution, leading to complicated biospheric symbiotic and symbiogenetic networks. In the second part we give an account of contemporary achievements within a research of holobiotic interactions, and illustrate such interactions on casual studies.
Our microbita seem to influence our development, health or even mental well being in much greater extent that we ever thought. Disrupted relationships (disbiosis) with microbial part of ourselves supposedly lead to various autoimmune diseases, depression, autism or various metabolic disorders.
Microbiota also represent another part of epigenetic inheritance as major part of symbiotic bacteria is transferred from the mother to the newborn baby horizontally (surprisingly even to the developmental fetus through the placental barrier yet during pregnancy). Without such inherited information the baby's health can be negatively influenced as well.
Such mutual, symbiotic evolutionary history strongly undermines the overestimated concept of the gene within evolutionary and developmental studies and also the concept of our human, biological individuality.