Tal­mu­dic Ques­tion #85

There is no doubt that this looks like the clas­sic DNA model. How­ever, this strikes me as be­ing two snakes which might make a very in­ter­est­ing story shared around a fire 600 years ago. I'm sure the story ex­plained the nat­ural world as they saw it back then. Very totem pole like. It also strikes me as hav­ing a re­li­gious tone re­lat­ing to the snakes and the gar­den but these peo­ple would not have en­coun­tered the Chris­t­ian phi­los­o­phy.

The dou­ble snake is the com­mon icon for eter­nity and life on the shaman cul­ture. True, it's supris­ing to see con­ver­gence with our faith!

To me it looks like a ver­sion of the zig-zag pat­terns com­monly seen in Na­tive Amer­i­can art. There it of­ten sym­bol­izes light­ning.

This Tal­mu­dic ques­tion, in a way, be­longs to the bio­di­ver­sity field. In this planet we call Earth, from the very mo­ment live ap­peared as such, "if a site can har­bour life, that site, sooner or later will "at least" har­bour mi­cro­bial life", mean­ing that other kinds of life may or may not be there, but that the ad­mirably adapt­able mi­cro­bial kind of life surely will thrive there. Mi­crobes are every­where life can es­tab­lish in. Now: how many of these sites could one find in the planet we live in? From the microbe's "point of view", these sites are mi­cro­hab­i­tats. In­deed there is a huge di­ver­sity of them on the planet. (Here the sense of the word mi­cro­hab­i­tat ex­tends to the con­cept "mi­croniche").
Mi­crobes are se­lected for and adapt to these huge di­ver­sity of mi­cro­hab­i­tats / mi­croniches. As it hap­pens with many other life form char­ac­ter­is­tics, size and form of mi­crobes are also se­lected for. In fact, size and form are in­deed very im­por­tant as­pects of be­ing a liv­ing be­ing, even a small liv­ing be­ing. Small mi­crobes ex­ist be­cause there are mi­croniches for them to take profit of, to be adapted at, to make a life out of it, to be able to re­pro­duce there and col­o­nize the space, etc., etc. Other mi­crobes, mostly pro­to­zoa, take profit of this and make a liv­ing out of con­sum­ing the smaller ones.
So: Why mi­crobes aren't all of them big, or square shaped, or cylin­dri­cal, or, for that case, big or small. They are like that be­cause there are a va­ri­ety of mi­croniches (= "life strate­gies") of­fered to mi­cro­bial life. And life "re­sponds to the of­fer", and a va­ri­ety of small mi­crobes find their fit­ness in be­ing small, and oth­ers, the mi­cro­biovoric ones, find their fit­ness in con­sum­ing the smaller ones pro­vided there are enough of the first ones to main­tain the pop­u­la­tions of the sec­ond type.
IN FACT IT IS A TRUE CHALLENGING AND VERY PRODUCTIVE INTELECTUAL EXERCISE TRYING TO ANSWER WHY A LIVING CREATURE IS AS IT REALLY IS, IF ONE LOVES TO BE CREATIVE IN BIOSCIENCES ... So, if you are not tired, put your mind to work think­ing why a small, or if you want, a very small mi­crobe is as it is. In other words: which is its mi­croniche? Chal­leng­ing, real chal­leng­ing and in­struc­tive...

Ob­vi­ously, if they were big, they wouldn't be mi­crobes at all, they'd be mac­robes. Sheesh.
About the pic­to­graph: Re­al­iz­ing that he­lices can nest is a heady in­sight. But why don't we see more three- or four-strand he­lices in na­ture, or in art? In na­ture we are more likely to find sec­ondary and ter­tiary he­lic­ity in­stead. Maybe it's hard enough to vi­su­al­ize and draw a dou­ble he­lix.
The only triple-he­lix that comes to mind is more con­cep­tual than phys­i­cal: the E‑M fields that show up in three-phase ma­chines and trans­mis­sion sys­tems.

I am also re­minded of the cre­ation­ists' con­fu­sion, which might be para­phrased "if am­phib­ians evolved from fish, why are there still fish?". In many en­vi­ron­ments, larger mi­crobes (all else be­ing equal) might be se­lected against. In par­tic­u­lar, large mi­crobes that de­pend on eat­ing smaller ones do poorly once they have eaten all the smaller ones.