Dr. Eric Haseltine

But we've retained that original form of multicellular where really we're different organisms.

And that is literally true with our biome.

Right.

Most of your DNA isn't yours.

It's all your biome.

Right.

And so one way to think about the body from the standpoint of evolution is we're really not individuals.

We're a collection of many different organisms, each with their own agenda that have cooperated for mutual benefit, but whose needs often collide.

And anyone who's felt an urge to do something like eat a donut or maybe do something amorous that they shouldn't knows that life isn't pure.

One part of you wants to do it, and the other part says, don't do that.

Well, it's fractal when you think about it.

When you think about the way your body is, you have specialists.

Evolution has decided that a collection of specialists will outperform an equal mass of generalists.

So when you look at your body, you know, your toenail does a very different function from your liver, from your brain.

And within your brain, you see hyper-specialization.

There's different nuclei that have different shapes and sizes.

So, diversity of function and narrowness of specialization is what biology has decided works best.

And look at human evolution.

We went from a society of generalists where everybody hunted and everybody gathered and

to now you look at a corporation where, or even medicine, like I'm an internist, but I do nephrology in adolescence with, we slice things narrow and narrower.