Evolution-Inspired Cooperation

I thought I had about diseases and living things: Watching my plants grow for a while, and occasionally get in trouble with aphids, or green worms, or whatever else is out there waiting to feast on the plant, I noticed that the biggest contributing factor to which plant will do well and which plant will get attacked by some bug or disease, has mostly to do with its environment. The environment has to be right for the plant, not too much sun, not too little, just the right type of moisture, the right balance of nutrients and chemicals in the ground.

Everything in life thrives in a specific environment and specific conditions. Change the conditions, and you make it more favorable for one type of thing to grow over another.

So when we get sick, one major cause could be that the conditions within our body or outside it have changed to make it more favorable for that organism, just like how certain bugs will show up once a plant has been too long in the shade, or had too much moisture.

My point is that instead of focusing on killing that organism, a different way to think about it is changing the environment that supports it, if possible.

Also, another thing I thought of in relation to this, is that every living thing developed in a specific environment, or a specific range of environments. And over time, it developed the ability to adjust and deal with those conditions. Living things can form cooperative relationships or destructive relationships because their range of survival is either a match to one another or not. In some cases, an organism develops to multiply and survive in an environment which is composed of another living thing, and then that living thing becomes part of the environment to which it adapts. Like predators, or maybe viruses, OR gut bacteria and mitochondria.

But what I am saying is that then the *combination* of those entities is something that has better chances of surviving than the single units. And maybe we can even think of them as a single entity that is synced remotely.

So, we can think of our gut bacteria and our mitochondria as part of a single entity that includes all of our cells, AND think of having men and women as an instance of the same principle. Women's body has specialized in giving birth and nutrition to a baby, and men's body has specialized in securing food (I guess). They sync. Another example is the liver and the muscles. Different entities that co-exist. And the longer this exists in evolution, the more specialization is possible perhaps.