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The Organism that Broke Biology

2023-04-14 · explainer · Hank · 3:53 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Science & nature · mode: Personal essay · tags: self promotion

After admitting John's weekly AFC Wimbledon news has won him over, Hank uses lichen to tell how the word symbiosis (1877) arose after Simon Schwendener saw fungus among the algae, and argues the microscope revealed a hidden world that broke biology's rules, leaving us surrounded by young knowledge we think is old.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Hank admits John's AFC Wimbledon news has started to win him over to sports

  • ★★ Hank admires John's effort to get nerds to like sports; he long thought John was trying too hard, but weekly AFC Wimbledon news, even bad, has started to get to him. (playful) — 00:00:00 · AFC Wimbledon, John Green

00:00:23 — Lichen under the loupe: the coining of symbiosis and Schwendener's discovery of fungus among the algae

  • ★★ Hank uses a jeweler's loupe to show that ordinary tree parts and rocks are studded with a bizarre crusting of life. — 00:00:23
  • ★★ Hank says no one had heard the word symbiosis until 1877, when Albert Bernhard Frank coined it for something many people then did not believe existed. — 00:00:52
  • ★★ Hank says early microscope views of lichen looked mostly like algae, and people took lichen for just another kind of plant, like a moss or fern. — 00:00:52
  • ★★ Hank says in the 1860s, about 10 years before the term symbiosis, Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener saw fungus parts among lichen's algae; people disagreed and argued for a long time. — 00:01:10
  • ★★★ Hank says lichen was the first organism that did not seem to be only itself: neither fungus nor alga could live apart, and together they formed an entirely new kind of organism. — 00:01:36

00:01:48 — Lichen as a new kind of organism; the microscope and infant knowledge; looking deeper at trees

  • ★★ Hank says the explosion of information that came with the microscope shattered many of our understandings of the world and of life. — 00:01:55
  • ★★ Hank says many things, including our own bodies, exist symbiotically, though the word itself is less than 150 years old. — 00:02:17

  • ★★★ Hank says we are surrounded by 'infant knowledge' that we think has been around forever. — 00:02:26

    “We are surrounded by infant knowledge that we think has been around forever.”

  • ★ Hank says most days on a forest path he barely looks at the trees, thinking about work, worry about the planet or people, or a song in his head. — 00:02:30

  • ★★★ Hank says we can now see what is invisible to our eyes: every tree holds a little world that, once glass was polished carefully enough, broke many rules we thought we knew. — 00:02:52

00:03:18 — Journey to the Microcosmos lichen episode and the starter microscope at microcosmos.store

  • ★★ Hank says Journey to the Microcosmos just released an episode on lichen that inspired this video, for those who want to go deeper into lichens' history and beauty. — 00:03:21 · Journey to the Microcosmos
  • ★★ Hank says they worked with their microscope expert on a starter microscope, from $350, available at microcosmos.store with other merchandise. — 00:03:33

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says we were certain there were very particular buckets to put living things into, and biology was broken again after lichen. — video description
  • ★★ The description cites bacterial conjugation, exchanging genetic information by touch, and prokaryotic consortia, like lichen for bacteria, as further weird things organisms do. — video description
  • ★ In a comment John thanks Hank for his kind words about AFC Wimbledon and jokes his five-year plan to have Hank fund the club's playing budget is on schedule. (joke) — creator comment · AFC Wimbledon, Hank Green

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: lichen · symbiosis

Also: AFC Wimbledon · Journey to the Microcosmos · Microcosmos Microscope · Microscope · Simon Schwendener

Only in the description or credits: Albert Bernhard Frank · bacterial conjugation · categorization · microbial consortium

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