“A holobiont is an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, which together form a discrete ecological unit through symbiosis, (though there is controversy over this ‘discreteness’). The components of a holobiont are individual species or bionts, while the combined genome of all bionts is the hologenome.” (Wikipedia)
The holobiont concept was (re-)introduced by Dr. Lynn Margulis in the 1991 book “Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation”
“A holobiont is an assemblage of beings that creates a larger whole. The word was first used in 1991 by Lynn Margulis in an attempt to explain her study of hosts and inherited symbionts. With each passing day new research confirms that macroorganisms like us human beings are intimately tuned and shaped by the populations of microbes and fungi (or, as microbiologist Siv Watkins calls them, ‘smalls’) that populate our bodies.”
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“Our very cells were created by the fusion of ancient free-living prokaryotes. The closer we look at our bodies, the flimsier the idea of an individual, bounded self becomes. We are walking communities, swarms in suits and ties, skin-silhouetted Towers of Babel.
Perhaps, then, it is time to expand our idea of archetypes.”
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— Sophie Strand on holobionts & archetypes from the book “The Flowering Wand”
ira sun fearing
jamesholden