Richard Jacobs: Hello. This is Richard Jacobs with the future tech podcast and future tech health podcast. I’ve got a great guest today, William B. Miller Jr. MD. He’s the author of a book called the Microcosm Within Evolution and Extinction in the Hologenome. It’s a little bit of his background, which he’ll get into more. He’s a physician, evolutionary biologist and a lecturer on the new science of the Hologenome, which he’ll define and, the impact of the microbiome on evolutionary development. So his book came out in 2015. I’m making my way through it, but we’ll talk about that in a lot more. So Bill, thanks for coming.

Bill Miller:  Oh, thank you. That’s great to be on the show.

Richard Jacobs:  Yeah. Tell me first a little bit about your background. You were a physician or still are. What was that experience like and how did it morph into your current interests?

Bill Miller:  I was very lucky in going through school. Along the way, you learn things about yourself. And one of the things that I learned about myself is that I really couldn’t picture myself in corporate America. I just thought this wasn’t going to be for me. I really wanted to be able to do something where I felt this. I had some independent action and I was very interested in science. That made it easy to be considered becoming a physician because when I did become a physician, which is many decades ago, medicine was extremely unlikely that it is today, which is now it is a corporate experience. But back then, there was the model of the physician that opened his practice. He put out a shingle. He had a great of independence and that attracted me just as much as the science and the concept of being of service to others, which was important to my family and has always been important to me. As it happens, I was going to be a surgeon, at the very time I was going through my initial training as an intern. I was training at a place that happened to receive one of the first CT scanners in the world. After the Mayo Clinic came where I trained and there’s just no way for me to recreate for the listeners exactly how exciting that was because you were really seeing inside, not three dimensions, of course, it’s two dimensions, but your brain could convert this to three dimensions very easily. And so as a surgeon in training, I’m listening to my surgeon mentors and you know, what they’re saying? All we are now is technicians because these machines are giving us the diagnosis.

Richard Jacobs:  Oh they thought that this would be the end of their medicine.

Bill Miller:  Well they didn’t think this was going to be the end. They felt that it was going to vary dramatically, change their role. Now you have to remember that at the time I started, which was a different century, quite exactly, medicine was very hands on. I was trained in palpation, in listening very carefully to patients’ symptoms. There were all certain sets of physical signs that you would use, in order to make a diagnosis of appendicitis, for example. This is all, I mean, nobody even knows them anymore because you use CT or ultrasound and you have almost a hundred percent accuracy and the time that I was training you would do things called exploratory laparotomies. Basically, you’d open up the abdomen and you take a look around and the dictum at for appendicitis, for people that, I mean most people would not know this. When I was in training, you are supposed to be wrong about the diagnosis of appendicitis pretty frequently. The idea was you dare not let an appendix stepped to the point where it ruptures. So it was perfectly acceptable to open up people that didn’t have appendicitis more than now and again at a certain percentage rate in order to avoid catastrophic circumstances. Well, now today that’s, of course, terrible because you have a completely precise means of diagnosis of appendicitis, which was first with CT and even now with ultrasound equipment. It’s extremely accurate. And of course, MRI would do the same thing. Anyway, getting back to the major point here, so I ended up giving it a lot of thought, what I would like to do. And I was extremely intrigued by this new imaging and its advantages. And I ended up going into that. So I spent a long career, several decades as a radiologist and doing a lot of work in the diagnosis and also an intervention, basically sticking tubes and needles into people to try to make diagnoses or to repair certain things. It was a terrific career and I was very privileged to have that. But it really all led in an odd way to my interest in evolutionary biology. And even when I look back, I wonder why I started to make certain connections that I did, but for example, as an image, I was noticing that the patterns of disease, were reliable. In other words, if there’s a thing called pattern recognition in radiology, which means that you’re looking for certain lights and darks and certain patterns that reflect Anatomic changes. But it was deeper than that. Disease happens in recurring patterns and so you form a differential diagnosis and that differential is narrow for certain diseases and not as narrow for others. But the point I think your listeners will certainly understand, certain things were reliably distinguishable because they formed a particular pattern and some of those things were infectious disease, certain infections form reliable patterns, and certain microbes caused certain patterns in certain places, in certain organs that you could pick up with high reliability and I started to wonder why is this? And of course, the theory was that the microbes are circulating around and they just happened to this spot. But that made no sense. Cause if they just happened, there would be no reliable patterns. And amazingly enough, nobody was thinking about these things, but at least not in the way that I was thinking about them.

Richard Jacobs:  So what’s an example of a pattern you saw over and over?

Bill Miller:  Well, toxoplasmosis and patients that have toxoplasmosis, which is a parasitical disease and it’s not that common, but it forms a very characteristic pattern on computed tomography around the fluid spaces of the brain. You can almost always know that diagnosis, just from the computed tomographic pattern, that’s not an absolute truth, but it’s certainly true. Also, for example, we know in pneumonia that I’m off of this influenza very frequently. This is not going to cause a kidney infection, very rarely actually can, but it’s really, really rare. That’s going to be a different bug. And I started just to think about these things and wondering why they were that way. And at the same time, I was always interested in evolution. I think a lot of people are, and you don’t have to be a scientist at all to be interested in evolution. And for some reason, I got this strange notion that infection was the common currency of all illness. And here’s why. So often when you look at infectious disease, you can’t tell it from the metastatic disease on imaging equipment. Now, many times you can, but there are many circumstances in which the diagnosis that it looks identical. And that struck me too. Why would that be?

Richard Jacobs:  When you say metastatic, you mean cancer or is there another meaning to metastatic?

Bill Miller:  Yeah, metastatic cancer. And why would that be true? Why would they form the same patterns? Well, I mean there are lots of theories and so on, but you know, being a simple person like I am, I started to think of cancer as an infectious disease. And at the time I was doing that, starting these thoughts, this was an uncommon, almost heretical notion. And of course, now we understand that cancer is commonly caused by infections. There’s a whole big list of them, cervical cancer, by viruses and so on. People are being, by HPV, immunized against it. And in fact, it’s almost mandated that young women be immunized against cervical cancer, which is a viral illness. So we know that stomach cancer is related to H. pylori infection and so on. There are a number of theories developing that prostate cancer, breast cancer is infectious diseases, also not proved of course. But anyway, I started to think about those overlaps and that led to my unordered thoughts, my disordered thoughts about evolution and thinking, you know, what all has to be linked. There’s got to be, there’s order to the universe, there’s order to biology, evolution and infectious disease ought to be linked. And at the time that was a very uncommon notion. I wrote a book in 2013 about it, but I spent 15 years thinking about it and researching it. And the pace of progress is very quick now in evolutionary science. And it was not like that. There was nothing really nothing written about it back when I was starting to think about it, starting to try to put the patterns together. But let me talk about a girl named Sue and then we can go onto more firms science, but a girl named Sue, and so why is that important? Well, I’m in radiology conference in Chicago, one of my favorite cities, and I’m sitting through hours of lecture a day and let me tell you, I have limits, you know, it’s not ADD. There’s just a limit.

Richard Jacobs:  Yeah everyone does.

Bill Miller:  How many days are you enrolled? For how many hours you can be blitzed by slides and dry information. I mean, this is not game of Thrones. This is pretty dry material. It’s interesting, it’s vital. It’ll be important to me actually, but there’s a limit to everything. So I turned to a partner and I say, I’m playing hooky this afternoon at about three o’clock. I’m either going to go to the art museum or the Field Museum. Do you want to come? He goes, okay, which one do you want to go to? I said, well, let’s go to the field museum. And so, playing hooky from my lecture, he and I went and I don’t know who’s listening has ever been to the field museum in Chicago, you ought to when you enter that magnificent rotunda as you walk in, there is one of the best dinosaur fossil specimens in the world. It’s the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Montana, Sue. That probably the most complete number of bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And it is enormously impressive to look at.

Richard Jacobs:  But I had been to the Museum of natural history in New York, so I don’t know how that helps.

Bill Miller:  Oh, that’s fantastic. Do you know what I’m talking about? So I’m standing in front of sue and I’ve given, you’re listening to some of the backgrounds of some of these odd thoughts I’ve been having. And I’m noticing two things that really strike me. First, as an image, I really, I’m an anatomist and I’ve got to be pretty good at anatomy because I spend my whole time looking at anatomy in order to make diagnoses, disease diagnosis, but I’ve got an understanding anatomy pitch perfect in order to do that appropriately and I’m looking at this Tyrannosaurus Rex and now, this is 60 million plus years ago and I’m looking at it bones and several things occurred to me simultaneously, which really pertained to evolution exactly. First I’m looking at the shape of the vertebrae and I’m thinking, wow, those vertebrae look a lot like my vertebrae. I’m looking at the pelvis and I’m thinking of given certain differences, which are not enormous, almost everything is like that, the hip joint also like a human hip joint. When you look at the femur bone, the general shape of it, if you could just use your imagination and shrink it down in an x-ray, I could take an x-ray of a T-Rex femur, shrink it down proportionately in size and only make a number of relatively subtle changes. And I could make it look like a human femur. I mean, it’s not exact please, you know, be creative here with me. But if there’s an awful lot of resemblance, even to the muscular insertions, those jagged little zones along the bone where the muscles insert, those have to be very special, strong attachments. And they go by a specialized type of things called Sharpey’s fibers. You don’t have to get into it, but those crests and those ridges and all those things, boy, their close, it is really interesting. And you look at the crazy arms of a T-Rex, which make no sense. And if you’ve ever seen the picture of one even, you realize that those arms are like ridiculous. They can’t even, they can’t really grasp anything. They can’t actually oppose each other. I’m not sure they could wrap around with the claw end, could touch to really be facile for gripping and grasping that you could use them for caring but not really to grasp.

Richard Jacobs:  They could be remnant I guess.

Bill Miller:  Well I’ll explain where my thought process went because that’s exactly, where we’re going. So I’m looking at all those things and I’m starting to sort of speak out loud and then I saw one loud by the thing T-Rex roamed of the United States and other areas of the world for at least 6 million years and was almost unchanged during that entire six-year span. So I’m reading about evolution and I’m being told that it’s due to mutation and that there’s, the mutations are happening all the time. I’m told that natural selection shapes what organisms are because only the fittest adaptations yield survival advantage. And yet I’m looking at two arms that make no sense. It certainly, if in a system of gradual change over millions of years, don’t just think you’d get bigger. I mean this is what I’m thinking back then. One of those arms gets bigger over time to fight for mates to get more food. I mean it just to have two arms that just look way out of scale and silly. Now obviously they had a purpose, but you’d think that nature could do better. So I’m still sort of speaking out loud to my partner and he just looks at me and he says, you know, you’re just, you’re a maniac. It just takes a lot of time. And he just completely dismisses me and he’s a wonderful guy and we’re still friends. But the point is, it was just like, you know the proverb proverbial, and you put a bit in a horse’s mouth. I’m just, I just could not let that go.

Richard Jacobs:  Well this is by far, not the only example. You know, you’ll have a naked mole rat who still has an eye, but it’s covered by skin or whales, they still have these prehensile feet, the legs tucked in them. There are many, many examples of anatomy that wasn’t discarded within the creature. Why? Why would that happen? It makes no sense. If you’re looking for efficiency and survival to fit in.

Bill Miller:  Right, there really is an answer and it’s more complicated than it’s going to sound right now because you have to understand the full pathways, but it isn’t survival of the fittest. It isn’t at all. And it really relates back to a more complicated system of evolution than was previously understood. And it’s really, it is survival of the fit enough to survive. In other words, it sounds like a pat answer, but is it actually a true one? The T-Rex is that came into being, and they didn’t come into being through this, the process of natural selection as what you, if people had been taught, but it did come into being and it was fit enough to survive. So that’s a huge difference between the survival of the fittest and fit enough to survive because it changes. The underlying dynamics can now change. So that’s where I ended up where I am. I spent the next 15 or so years acquiring education in evolutionary biology, which I had not had before. And a lot of the terminology was unfamiliar. And although I’ve had a lot of science background, I had to learn a lot about genetics and I was particularly interested in immunology as it relates to evolution, which no one was talking about. So you can even now look up, do web searches. I mean any of your listeners can do web searches and if you look up, immunology in evolution, you will learn about how immune cells evolve to protect against pathogens. But you’ll find almost nothing about how immunology could be a cause, a factor of evolution as a driving factor. Yeah, so big changes are the frame of reference and I think almost anyone listening has had a similar experience. When you start getting odd ideas, they cascade into more oddity. You know, you’d never get bless oddly. Once you start to be odd, you can only get more and odder.

Richard Jacobs:  I’ll give you a quick example. You know, I’m driving around, years ago in New York in the winter and I’m looking at the trees have no leaves. And they looked like my lungs, they’re just upside down or I’m upside down to them. And then it’s the other structures that again look the same as lightning. The branches it looks like my lungs, I think, that’s odd all this similarity.

Bill Miller:  It is odd but it’s been thought about actually, it has even the name, it has two names. One that I use pretty often. I use them both in my own writing and with colleagues. One is called fractal reiteration and the other is mosaic formulation. Both of these terms mean basically, patterns repeat in nature and that’s very well known. And the reason for that is actually twofold. One is efficiencies are in general repetitive patterns because the underlying physical forces act without exception on everything. So living things are inanimate things. They tend to have to do the same things because we must follow the same physical laws. In the end, we must be efficient, in the end, we must adopt the most efficient flow states. It’s true in thermodynamics and thermodynamics is one of those things that we have to adhere to where there has to be certain parsimony, there has to be an equal and opposite reaction to anything has to flow through us in just the same way it does through the physical world. And so all living things tend to have recurrent patterns, whether they’re visible to the eye or not. And in fact, we have the world’s most singular example of fractal reiteration, which is the absolute common core of life, which is the cell. The cell is the universal unit. It is the base unit from which everything else emerges. Single cell organisms are bound but you and I are combinations of single cells put together in complicated networks that make us what we are. And one of the big changes in evolution and with my interest in medicine, I came to it earlier than many, now it’s pretty common currency. But again, when I started thinking about it, it was quite unusual. And when I wrote the book on the Hologenome, the book that you were nice enough to mention from 2013, the microcosm within, it was almost no literature behind it back then. So it was among the first, there were certainly some people that I could site. I was not the first, by any means to the idea. There was a man named Jefferson in Australia, who thought of it because of agronomy and there were the Rosenbergs that are in Israel and Scott Gilbert in Pennsylvania. These are all brilliant people that, so no one comes up with anything that’s absolutely new, that doesn’t have feet. It doesn’t have legs within some pre-existing excellent idea. Every decent idea is an outgrowth of an excellent idea that proceeded it.

Richard Jacobs:  Oh, you’re not going to try to be cheap. But you know, there’s an evolution of thought too.

Bill Miller:  Absolutely. We, going through one of the most dramatic and wonderful periods of time. This is will be brief aggression, but you know, it is easy to look at our political landscape in despair. I mean, whatever your political opinion is, you can look at the turmoil around the world. You read Google News, you read the newspaper. It’s enough to just make your heart sink. And you just wonder, I mean, this is just, it’s gotta be terrible, let me just say, there has never been a better time to be alive than right now. This is it. This is the premier moments to be alive in the history of the world. No one would be smart to wish to change the time of that year in which they lived for this moment, your chance to be even and live a long life has never ever been better. Certainly at least in the developed world, then it is right now. And even in the undeveloped world, it was way worse than, we are in a terrific period of time and we still have terrible problems, but it’s never been in this, there are no good old days. And part of the reason I’m saying this is our pace of progress in the treatment of disease particularly is much faster than it was ever in the past. Every decade now puts us ahead up to 300 years. Fair to the rate at which we were going before.

Richard Jacobs:  One thing to add more details to that so that’s true. But at the same time, there are dogmas in certain industries that, I wonder how that’s going to play out, you know, like in climate change, there are people that are saying, oh, it’s not happening. And then there are people that are saying, if you don’t believe it’s happening, you should be silent. And then evolutionary biology and evolution, there’s the Neo-Darwinists and modern sentences, they’re saying, anyone who doesn’t agree with this is idiots and they’re trying to be silent. How do you think those things play in this polarization of what should just be silent?

Bill Miller:  Well, let me just say they play in dramatically and every single one of them is highly consequential. But again, it’s important, I believe, to have perspective. What is it like now compared to what it was before? Well, every one of our faults is no different than faults that existed before. So for example, the pace of, although there is a dramatic resistance to change that still exists, it’s far less than in the past. And let me just offer this as a thought. Between the period 1554, and not arbitrary number 1554 and 1627. There might’ve been three generations. Nothing would’ve changed. Nothing substantial would’ve changed in the lives of those people. Not In agriculture, not in medicine. There was humorous, the body humorous, a little bit in astronomy because that was when it first began to flourish, but most people could care less, not in religious life. Everything was identical. Musical forms hardly changed between the period. Everything, what your father knew? The son knew the grandchild knew and the place of women didn’t change one iota during that period of time. Now you can’t imagine the free generations can hardly talk to each other and it’s a newly emerging problem. We have a pace of change that is so rapid now that the body of information, each generation has, is extremely different if we think of it in the most trivial sense. Um, so there’s a thing I used to do in our local newspaper and I would look at whose birthday it is, mostly the scaffold people were, and then it got to be a game. Could I reach a day, where I would not know one name that was being mentioned by famous people, but mostly there, you know, TV people, mostly TV, movie and music? Could I reach a day where I didn’t recognize one name? And eventually I came pretty close I mean, the only name I could recognize with someone whose birthday would make them 67 or 75 but among the 23rd and 20 years old and 30 years old, most of the 40-year-old, country singers and rock stars, and I didn’t know one name. My point is not that I’m singularly ignorant and not that I’m not interested in new trends, it’s just that if the generations separate according to a very strong cultural difference that wasn’t so throughout history. Yes, of course, the young, I’ve always rebelled against their elders, but it is now, we don’t even share the same platforms.

Richard Jacobs:  Someone that’s 18 now, is hearing a song that we know has been remade 10 times over the past 50 years and they think it’s new, versus someone now, that’s 70 that doesn’t know nor care about the latest stars. It goes both ways.

Bill Miller:  Yeah, absolutely. Again, another trivial example is if, my son wanted to organize an event and what he’s going to do, let’s put together a movie night and the idea was you’re going to get a movie that’s famous that maybe not that many people have seen. So he was thinking you’d have to look for some names that are not that well known. No, he could use gone with the wind because among his age group but which is about 30, almost, none of them I had ever seen gone with the wind. A lot of them hadn’t even heard of it. Now for my age, you know, my parents got one which was the most famous movie in history. And for my age even, you know, obviously everyone I know my age, which is something like 180, has seen the film usually multiple times. So, I mean, we’re talking about things that are trivial, but science is progressing at almost the same rate. Here’s the wonderful thing I had in my career from the time I began my training to the day that I actually left medicine to start my new career. My Second Act, which I’m lucky to have, I almost did nothing that I had learned, been trained to do in my training. Almost every single thing I did all day long was the product of new technology. And then something I had to have learned along the way. What a privilege,

Richard Jacobs:  Here’s something that nature can teach us. You know, there’s a reason why, again, there’s self-similarity. My lungs, my blood vessels, trees binding, etc. Nature contains within it all its history seems too. And even the more we pay attention to history mean history is becoming more and more important. I think the faster change happens because you’d lose all these lessons that you could have had if you don’t look around.

Bill Miller:  Correct. Yeah.

Richard Jacobs:  So, to start with love with the new technology. It’s great, but it all has its roots and history and if you don’t understand any of that, you’ll miss out and you’ll waste all this time reinventing when you don’t need to.

Bill Miller:  Absolutely. Well, one of the great places where change is happening at this extremely accelerated rate, which I regard as a great positive and the cultural things we are talking about, are very interesting asides to me. But one of the things where the change is super-duper rapid is in understanding on the microbiome. Now for those that are unfamiliar with the microbiome, it’s talking about bugs. I’m talking about germs, germ bugs. Those are the trillions and trillions of bugs that are in us and on us. And the number of these that are in you and me, is variously estimated at the minimum 38 trillion and the maximum about a hundred trillion. Now our own body cells are around 30 trillion. So we’re outnumbered by our microbes and so that has to completely change the way we see health and even our humanity. Let me give you an example. So when I look in the mirror, I see Bill Miller and of course the first thing I say is George Clooney, eat your heart out. I am the best looking guy in the world. I mean, how could I doubt that I see it anyway, what I do see, and let me assure your listeners that George Clooney has nothing to fear from me. Anyway, if I see this image in the mirror, it’s one thing. Its a one person image and I look at that and I feel like one thing. I don’t feel like anything more than one thing. It is a complete illusion. What are we actually, we are in an unbelievably complicated confederacy of multiple forms of life. My own Bill Miller cells, they are personalized. There are no, there’s no other person that has my exact genetic and extragenomic, but genetic complement, the exact combination of myself is unique in the world, but there’s an invisible pairing that isn’t absolute partner. It’s not just a hanger on an absolute partner. Those are the trillions of microbes that are part of me. And what we’re learning in this accelerated pace of change that we started to talk about is that when I went to medical school, first of all, no one even bothered to think of them. Microbes were simply pathogens. There are only there to hurt you. And then there was a curiosity thing called a symbiont means microbe that gets along and it serves us in some way and we serve it symbiosis. But it was considered a rumor. I mean, we understood that there are certain microbes served a function, but they were just an aside. And I mean we could do without them anyway. And the hangers-on, they’re there because they’re there and nobody really ever them any thought that how did we think about them? Danger. Our job was to eradicate them. They were enemies, they were pathogens. And that’s all I was ever taught. Well, now we know completely differently. These microbes are absolutely vital to us. We are combined organisms. So the term that people are using, the common one and the stuff that I write are holobiont. Holo meaning all or genome, hologenome all points, all living things, a combination or superorganism. The superorganism can mean various things. But what it should mean is the idea is that we are a combined form of life and we are obliged to be. So these microbes, they can’t live the way they want to without us. We are their best habitat and we cannot do without them. If we were germ-free, we would be dead.

Richard Jacobs:  So you’re going through the roles that you know, people thought traditionally microbiome or microbes, only one role is trying to kill you. But one symbiotic role, for instance, what they produce serotonin and the guts or when you said beach balls. Another is the role that it looks familiar with, you know, try to kill you. What are the other roles that microbes can have with us?

Bill Miller:  Well, they are critical, throughout our metabolism, and I’m actually writing up something about this now, but they really function significantly in our growth and development or developmental milestones, they are critical factors in our appetite. What’s called our diurnal cycle? So appetite is to tidy, when do I feel full? When do I feel hungry? If I’m a lean person or I’m a fat person, do my microbes have a say in it? They certainly do. They have a powerful say in it. This is stuff that I was of course never taught in medical school. You know, back in the 18th century, when I went, it was considered ridiculous. But now what we’re learning in this cascade of new knowledge that we’re getting is that these microbes have an enormously powerful role and we’ve only just on the very beginning of understanding the interstices, the networking between those microbes and our own being. And we’ll talk more in depth about some of these things, but I can promise your listeners that these, this research over the next 15 or so years is going to start to yield terrific results for people. A lot of those diseases that have afflicted us, what we’re finding out is that the common denominator runs through the microbial world. It doesn’t mean that the microbes are the cause of every disease, but disease in a human being and in all other animals runs through the common denominator of this partnership with our microbes. So that disease is set off if microbial patterns are unbalanced or our own cells if they get unbalanced, they can create a reaction within the microbial sphere, which gives them an unbalanced, which then reverberates back to us to further unbalances. And we’re only beginning to understand each of these. So our behavior, our moods, depression has some linkage. It’s still ill-defined, the research is still new and it hasn’t been deeply validated yet, but there is a lot of research that does indicate that our microbial composition determines some aspects of our human behavior. And then another thing that completely contradicts everything that I was taught. So when I was in medical school and then all through my practice, really the dictum was absolute that certain areas of the body, we’re sterile. So, of course, physicians understood that there were lots of germs inside our gut. They were there because they’re feeding on the fibers that are part of the nutrients that we take in and their hangers’ on. And they might assist a little bit indigestion, but it’s not a big deal. I was taught of course, that the womb is sterile, that a fetus is sterile, that amniotic fluid, the fluid that surrounds the baby in the womb is sterile. Here’s a common thing I would say to a patient, well we’ve gotten back the results of your urinalysis and your infection is cured in your urine, is sterile. Said that all the time, this is completely wrong, but I said it all the time and here’s what we know now, no place is sterile. What was I told about? I was told that the brain, spinal cord, the fluid around these vital organs, sterile, absolutely. Because there was a blood-brain barrier and any microbe that could even be circulating through only the pathogens could get through. The brain was sterile. The microbes, the spinal cord was sterile. No, it’s not true. No place is sterile.

Richard Jacobs:  That’s why I asked you offline. So people, even people that know a bit about the microbiome, they think traditionally, oh, we’ve got a big colony there. And then if they know a little bit more. They know there’s a separate colony in the mouth and separate, one in the anus and etc. But you’re saying, and I asked you offline, that bacteria are present throughout our entire body. There’s no place in the body where they are not there.

Bill Miller:  No place in the body is entirely free of microbes being either packed bacterial or Chorio, which is a different kingdom, a domain, I mean and the viral. So even all this information that we’re getting about the trillions of microbes, it’s an under-count because the virome is so enormous and of all the viruses we have been taught, I had been taught to understand viruses purely as pathogens. Purely and exclusively as pathogens. Here’s what we know now. They’re vital co companions in development and they are vital for our health. They definitely cause terrible afflictions. It’s a balance and we’ve only had explored, we only were aware of one part of this balance. So everything is changing very rapidly and all of this is a very good change. For once there’s good news. Finding out about these relationships, which we are only beginning to explore in depth is of extreme importance. And then getting back to evolution. What we’re finding out is that the viral realm is a major part of the evolutionary narrative that is, it’s much more important than these random genetic mutations which all of evolutionary biology has had this multi-decade romance with believing that for generation after generation of evolutionary biologists and even have a majority today still would answer the science test question. What causes evolution? They’d say random genetic mutations cause variations and natural selection drives evolution and these are incorrect statements.

Richard Jacobs:  Yeah. Just to let you know, you know I’ve done many podcasts on this and so I didn’t even want to Belabor that how wrong that is and how misinformed and incomplete that is. Just take it as the listeners now will know if they listen to any other podcasts. It’s so incomplete to be not even barely descriptive as to what’s really going on.

Bill Miller:  Right, and again, it doesn’t mean that they have no influence. That’s not what I’m saying. Just so I clarify, I’m not saying natural selection is not important in evolution, No. It is, for reasons that are different than have been understood previously. And I’m not saying that random genetic mutations don’t occur and are not consequential. Of course, they are. But again, the relative importance of them is undergoing a very important reappraisal.

Richard Jacobs:  Well, one quick thing about the virome, I spoke to a lot of George Church and also Louise Filler out about the, you know the virome and I didn’t realize all creatures have viruses that have integrated their information into our DNA itself. So we have dozens or hundreds, I guess they call them endogenous retroviruses that are part of our DNA, part of our makeup and have guided our evolution and the evolution of all kinds of other creatures. That’s crazy to think about.

Bill Miller:  Well, it’s not only crazy, but it’s also true. I mean, for example, the placenta, which is the lifeblood of the Mammalia, of mammals, those are the product of at least four critical retro-viral insertions that allow specialized cell types and special cells that can form this special trophoblast, which is an essential element of the placenta. It’s unimportant what the cells exactly our called or anything. But the point is that these viral incursions, infectious events, and that’s the part that I want to stress for your listeners, it’s an infectious disease that drives evolution, not random mutations. Why? Because of the Infectious Disease Dynamics control whether the virus is getting in or not. In immunology, that governs our ability to determine what the co-partnership levels are that exist. So all evolution is co-development between the microbial world and on ourselves. We are the product of that compact. That compact is governed through immunology and this is how that cycle, it is this cycle, which is really infectious disease dynamics that actually drives evolution and extinction. And those that are further interested can read the book and we can talk at any depth that you wish, but in the best mini capsular form, it’s not genetics standard random mutations that cause the variations than yield that can be filtered by natural selection. It is infectious disease dynamics. It has these insertions over evolutionary time that matter the most. And so that explains why some creatures can stay unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.

Richard Jacobs:  One question here. I understand that it plays a huge role, you know, infection and it drives evolution. I understand why you’re saying that now, but what about environmental pressure causing ambiguity changes, which leads towards maybe a new species, I mean, isn’t that a big part of the puzzle too? The oxygen levels in the environment being nill, then coming up to a high level and then going down and coming up. I mean, didn’t that cause tremendous pressure and changes in organisms and evolution as well?

Bill Miller:  Yes, absolutely correct there’s no question. I like to use the term the complementarity between the organism and its environment and as an important codicil of what I’m saying. The environment that we’re talking about includes all of those microbes that are in the environment that are exerting their effect as part of it. Yes, of course. Cold temperatures and climates that very matter. Areas that get more sun versus areas that get less sun and so on. They all matter. But of those environmental impacts and including epigenetic changes of those, the most consequential are infectious events. These are infectious in ways that are not typically thought and we tend to think of a microbe that invades and starts to become a real pathogen and takeover body systems and destroy us. But infectious events proceed along with the levels of partnerships. There have been infectious events going on all the time. Infectious exchanges between microbial populations and our own cells that are just part of the ongoing partnership that, but they shipped to balance, speciation is an infectious event. So you can make the statement that evolution is infectious disease dynamics if you restricted particularly lead to the concept of it being related specifically to speciation because you have to confer reproductive isolation. And obviously, that can’t happen unless there is some genetic or cytoplasmic incompatibility. And that can only occur as an immunological event. So one of the things that almost no one talks about, but I cover in my book if you really can’t have speciation without talking about immunological incompatibilities. I mean, after all, why can’t two species reproduce mechanically? A sheep and a dog could get it on, right? But of course, that doesn’t work. And the reason that doesn’t work is not that the parts don’t fit in. It’s creepy and disgusting as that might sound to talk about. I hope that people don’t think I’m a pervert for saying this, but it’s not mechanical and it’s not even, you know, a function of sexual drive because animals are crazy. And so we’re humans. What it is a function of is actual reproductivity and compatibility. That’s a genetic chromosomal incompatibility. If that’s a cytoplasmic incompatibility, cytoplasm being this stuffed inside the cells, that’s the fluid inside the cells that occupy a part of the interior of the cell, inside of the cell membrane, the outer wall of the cell. And all of these are participants in the splitting of cells, the joining of cells and reproduction between the egg and sperm. And there’s got to be compatibility. If it’s incompatible. It’s an immunological event.

Richard Jacobs:  Isn’t it interesting that the organisms are informed, your sexual drive is informed, you know, the sheep knows not to, somehow it’s just not attracted to the dog for the most part. Maybe in a few extreme examples, it is, but you know, people are not attracted to mate with animals again except in a few extreme examples. But isn’t it interesting that we know we have this knowledge or this feeling on who to mate with and who not to mate with?

Bill Miller:  Yes. And what’s happening? It’s interesting that again, we don’t have an answer. I mean you’re asking a really deep question and I don’t want to make it seem like the answers are well known. But I will offer an interesting aside which is the new sophisticated experiments on the microbiome. And let me finish this thought and then I’m going to skip to why we found out what we did about the microbiome and why it was invisible up until recently. First, what we are finding out are some almost kind of creepy associations. This is still new stuff and it’s not been really highly validated yet, but it is almost certain that our individual microbiomes influence our mate selection almost certain. And I can’t tell you that, I’m going to run the new dating app, you know, microbiome profile dating app because I would be rejected by everybody. Your microbiomes are too disgusting to have a mate. It’s just, we used to talk about chemical attraction and pheromones and things like that. Well, we’re finding now the scientific basis behind how these things are produced. The chemical attraction could be, maybe that the microbiome that we share is also a reflection of ourselves having certain compatibility which we sense into it because we don’t understand consciousness. We don’t understand self-reference and we don’t understand intuition and there are a million theories and I’ve written about those, some theories of it myself. But, it could be that subliminal understanding is because we have means of sensing the mating compatibility of the microbiomes that we share, it sounds astounding and it sounds ridiculous, but it’s not.

Richard Jacobs:  Pheromones, the smell of like, oh, that person smells good or they have a nice perfume on. I mean, it’s crude the way that we’re sending them, you know, using our nose or sensing molecules that are coming off of them. So why couldn’t we sense molecules coming off of them that we can identify as a perfume, but somehow we’re sensing literally their smell. I mean like that.

Bill Miller:  Well, in fact, they’re running those experiments. I mean, they’re doing creepy, It’s not creepy but interesting studies where they get men to exercise, in t-shirts, they have them give their t-shirts over and then they have women smell them and rate them according to attractiveness or disgust and you know, what’s the smell? Is it good or bad for you? And they’re finding some substantial overlaps between microbiomes of female attraction and males that have a coincident microbiome. Again, this is preliminary stuff and we all know that reports come out and contradict earlier things. So let’s see how it shakes out over the next decade or so. But if there are some very interesting things that are happening on this horizon, even in the sense of cellular life itself, what we’re learning is the communication patterns of cells between cells, cell-cell communication, and cell-microbe communication has been completely misunderstood. It’s much, much more abundant than we ever understood before. Microbes, for example, chatter together all the time. They’re highly sociable. So your listeners would probably think, well, microbes are stupid. I mean cells are dumb. I mean, how, what could they know? I mean, you know, they don’t know Shakespeare. Well, they don’t, but you know what? They know they know cellular life and they are very good, at being cells and that is intelligence. So, Hawkings was great, Stephen Hawking, he had a fertile mind and his definition of intelligence was very direct. “Intelligence is the ability to adapt”. And almost no one has ever said anything more intelligent about intelligence than Hawkings and that statement, because adaptation is problem-solving, right? And how do we problem solve? We communicate.

Richard Jacobs:  So you’re saying that our cells have intelligence, bacteria has intelligence.

Bill Miller:  Absolutely.

Richard Jacobs:  Here’s a question I wanted to ask you so the thinking on viruses and bacteria and etc. when people thought they’re just bad, they infect you, there’s no intelligence. There’s just this one action or there’s very little intelligence. But what you’re saying is cells, bacteria, viruses, etc. They have a playbook actually they can be symbiotic. They can integrate themselves into another creature. They can attack it. They can be cooperative with it in certain ways or they’re not. Well, they’re dependent upon each other, but they are still remaining separate. I mean, it seems like they have a playbook and therefore they have preference and choice and they have an ability to have a strategy. To me, that’s intelligence. When I think about bacteria, why have some integrated themselves into ourselves, like the Mitochondria or the Placenta? Why does some attack us? Why do some hang out in our gut or wherever and feed off what we feed? How do they make those choices and why?

Bill Miller:  Well, first of all, I want to say that you’ve expressed it beautifully. You’ve just really put it together with the line of thinking together exactly. Properly route. I was taught and all scientists knew as a fact that cells are, basically, the mental imaging was they were automata. They were reactive. In fact, I’m old enough to recall when scientists truly believed that only humans really were thoughtful only humans had valid emotions. All other animals just react to things. Plants just bend to the light. It’s called tropism. It’s this if the light was drawing them and they were just like robots to the light, just like a tractor beam, this concept and dogs, you know, they just reacted by hunger, pop lobbying reflexes, they were reflexive animals. They were not reflective. They were reflexive. Two very different things. Well, I’ve got to tell you, those were totally incorrect notions and now all scientists understand differently. There’s no one who owns a dog that doesn’t understand that a dog is not intelligent. All through human history, we had never, I mean, certainly in the Victorian circumstances of Victorian Science, no animal was regarded as intelligent except man, it was a contradiction in terms the only man had intellect, only man had self-reference, only a man knew or a woman, you know, all mankind understood abstract thoughts. Only humans problem solve. Well, we look back and we laugh. How could anybody believe something that was that stupid? Well, because it wasn’t stupid. It was just the evolution of thought that you had brought up before. It takes time for people to get accustomed to new ideas. There’s a cycle of thought and it takes time for people to get to wrap their brains around new things. So certainly people began to understand that animals are intelligent, dolphins are intelligent. Well, if they’re intelligent and then we became a little bit more informed and we began to understand that plants have enormous forms of intelligence. They just exhibited in plant ways, not animal ways. And now we’re to the next threshold in which we now know through careful experiments. And so this is not one of those things, you know, with the validations might in. This science is in and firm. All cells are intelligent. Cells are ingenious, in cellular ways. Of course, they’re not thinking the way you and I are thinking and they don’t communicate as we do, but they do communicate abundantly and they problem solve extremely well in their sphere. In fact, how well so cells, how well do bacteria solve problems? Well, I can answer that directly. Life on earth began about 3.8 billion years ago and we don’t know exactly what the first forms of life were, but let’s just say they’re almost certainly what is termed Prokaryotes. Those are bacteria. These are cells without a nucleus. Our cells, which we deem more sophisticated, but they’re really not. They’re just a different form are called Eukaryotes, which is just a fancy scientific term, which means cells that have an internal Nucleus, internal Organelles, internal compartments. So in bacteria, the genetic material is distributed throughout the cytoplasm, the fluid inside the cell. In eukaryotes, our kinds of cells, my Bill Miller cells, my genetic material is inside a nuclear envelope compartment inside the cell proper. You know, we tend to think of it as being protected, but that’s a human notion, which probably has little sense. Anyway, what do we know about just say that bacteria, if we’re 3.8 billion years ago, they’re certainly bacteria as we know them today, almost exactly as we know them today are. There is evidence for them from 3.4 billion years ago. And we think life began a little earlier than that. So we have Stromatolites. These are fossils of bacterial societies. So bacteria form together into colonies that are called Biofilms. These are highly complicated social networks of bacteria. They’re working together to solve problems together. How do they do that? Through communication, through abundant communication, which has been turned by certain scientists as chatter and they make collective decisions. It’s got a special name, Quorum Sensing, but the end result is they put themselves together in this colonial form quite frequently. And they do that for nutrition, for energy efficiency, and for the common defense. In other words, awfully alike humans when we put together sets of cities and societies for efficiencies, individual advantage. What are each bacteria doing in that colony? It is maintaining what’s called Homeostatic Balance. Fancy terms. It just means they’re trying to maintain a steady state of this is what is good for me. This is enough calcium, this is enough potassium. This is enough energy for my cells. This is how I can sustain myself. A cell has, a microbe, a bacteria, has a state of preference. I know this will sound weird to the people that are listening, but it is a fact.

Richard Jacobs:  Well, they want to keep themselves alive, so what’s wrong with that?

Bill Miller:  Yes, but also in a preferential state. What is it? What is their preferential state? It’s Bourbon and, you know, high-grade whiskey. No, it’s their state, whatever. Again, we’ve made a terrible mistake in science by assuming that things have to be according to our frame of reference, but our frame of reference is only our own. That’s why we miss-apprehend animal intelligence so dreadfully. Animals are not trying to solve problems in the same way we do. Here’s an interesting experiment. I just ran myself. I Love Bananas and I like bananas. I eat a lot. I eat several a week and I’m always frustrated because throughout my whole life, I’ve taken off bananas at the stem and you know, tried to peel them, right? I think most people that are listening will do that and it’s our normal reaction. The stem looks like a handle and I yank on that thing and sometimes it works really well and a lot of times it works badly and I’m pushing up the top and I’m getting annoyed.

Richard Jacobs:  Sorry the other end is much better.

Bill Miller:  I know so I happen to watch a video on apes and I’m starting to watch them eat bananas, and every single one of them takes it from the other end. So I tried it. It’s much better. It’s so much easier. It’s just our human problem solving a bias was to make a certain assumption according to what humans tend, what our experience has told us is in general, if you can grasp the handle, you get a better tug, a better force of tug. But an ape doesn’t have a human sensibility. And you know, dog solve problems in ways that we never can. Dogs can smell cancer cells. That’s a problem-solving thing for a dog. Humans can’t. So who’s more intelligent? The answer is we are differently intelligent. Differently.

Richard Jacobs:  Yeah. Well, a couple of things come to mind. So yeah, just like different people have different intelligence, different preferences. You know, some people are auditory or kinesthetic or visual learners. Well, I think people have all kinds of intelligence. You know, Michael Jordan has intelligence in sports that I don’t have. Certain artists have intelligence in that way, certain people have intelligence in let’s say, physics or in science, nothing wrong with it. They’re all just different types of intelligence. So, I think the animals have, yeah, different kind of intelligence. A dog may have factory intelligence that, well they do, surpasses us unbelievably. I’ve wondered what is it like to smell like a dog? Do you get a visual representation or a feel of the gradients of different smells and there are all these intelligence out there that we don’t, we just discount? Machines are artificial intelligence. It’s not artificial human intelligence its machine intelligence, which actually appears to be its own separate intelligence. So why not bacterial intelligence or viral or yeah, why not?

Bill Miller:  The answer is there is no why not. The answer is that we just have to learn to accept that this is one of the things that cells can do and could this concept of the state of preference, the concept of cells being intelligent and all microbes being intelligent, are viruses intelligent? Well, yes, they have some form of intelligence. Again, it may be very, very different even from other microbes. It’s not clear that viruses are alive. Here’s why it’s going to get a little complicated. But you can define life through self-reference. That is, do cells have an awareness of themselves? Now they don’t have to be able to do the mirror test of self-awareness, but are they aware of their own status? The answer is sure. There’s no question that a microbe is aware of its own status because it will react purposefully. It will problem solve in order to enact a better circumstance for itself. So that’s self-awareness in the general sense as opposed to the abstract self-awareness as why am I alive and why am I living? And we don’t know that one bacteria could absolutely know how to differentiate itself from the next bacteria in the same way that I know how to separate myself according to my self-identity from another human. But if you regard self-reference as properly, it’s self-awareness of status, of equanimity, of Equipoise, of preference. Absolutely, microbes have that. Do bacteria or fungi? Yes, they all have that. Do viruses? This is an important question though because the virome is the largest of all the domains. And even it could almost be argued the most consequential of all because it’s the vital intermediary amongst all of the cell types that we’ve mentioned. My cells with the nucleus bacterial cells, we communicate with microbes and they communicate with us according to many different pathways. There are chemical signals, there are electromagnetic signals. There may even be the Soliton waves. This is new research and not much is known about it. Certainly, cells communicate with each other through cell adhesion and through mechanical transduction, they pushed, they pull, they tug sheer forces. All of these things count in that world. But one other way that cells communicate is they trade genetic material, horizontal genetic transmission and viruses or viral particles, sub viroids particles are a vital means of communication. It could go right through the membranes or it can go through, think of them as like little spaceships in the extracellular matrix. They formed little vesicles. There are special names that we don’t need to get into them and they will transfer between microbe to the microbe, microbe to our own cells ongoing all the time. This is vital communication traffic that has gone going all the time, which has been invisible to us until recently. So there are viruses alive. It’s a close call. There are academics on both sides, then I’ll fight you on it. Here’s what I do know. Let’s not get stuck on that argument because these are the vital things that we need to know whether we declare them living or not. What can they do that we didn’t understand? They can cooperate, they can problem solve to their own limited way and they, so for example, viruses and I think everyone’s aware, take HIV. Some people get infected, infected with HIV and they get sick really fast and die. Others can get infected by HIV and it hides. It hides sometimes for a decade or more, two decades before it becomes aids. Who’s making that decision? Well, it’s not the person. It’s the virus is making a decision according to its own proclivities, its own needs to reproduce and it’s choosing its time. It’s strategic. I mean, I know this sounds fun to people that are listening, but this is our world. We’re beginning to understand exactly how much more complex it is than we thought before.

Richard Jacobs:  It’s funny as you’ve been talking all of a sudden that thought of the laws of habitats and animals and I thought, oh no, we lost all the microbiomes of all the creatures that have been gone extinct and all the plants and all that information. I felt the pang of loss for a minute because there’s so much more information than we ever could have begun to think of that has been lost because of things like that.

Bill Miller:  Oh yeah. Oh absolutely. But the good news again to stress because I think it’s important for people to understand. We are really just now beginning to very actively explore these things and boy is it going to make all the difference in the future. So let’s go on a little bit extra on this idea of intelligence, cellular intelligence, states of preference. So what does all this have to do with evolution? Well, this is where the major change in evolution is occurring through efforts of people such as myself and others that are beginning to understand that the narrative that we had before, which was an enormously important building block. I mean, we could never be where we are going to go or where we are now without all the terrific work that was done before, those of us that are working to change things. But we are definitely at a new threshold. And here’s where we stand. Everything that we’ve talked about is a prelude if you want to understand evolution, the two major themes that we’ve had up to this moment. First that the nature of the human living circumstance of being a Holobiome to a superorganism is enormously different than we had understood previously. And secondly, we’ve just talked about how every single one of our cells and every single microbe, or at least every cellular microbe is intelligent. So what does all this mean? Well, it means this, because cells are intelligent because cells are problem solvers because they can communicate abundantly. They can engineer. So importantly cells measure because they can assess their state that they’re in, that their homeostatic balance that can access that state. That’s the measurement, that measurement enables engineering. Think of it, the analogy is useful. Humans can measure, humans can engineer, we can deploy to those tools. The tools of communication and measurement to build cities. Cells engineer. So I talked about earlier, how were these enormous collaborations of life. These collaborations are, they form tissues and those tissues are vast arrays of our own personal cells and microbes that work together. And the best way for listeners to do is to think of it as an ecology. Think of a rain forest. I live in the desert, I live in the Phoenix area. Think of a desert habitat. It’s an ecology with all sorts of vital players. Everybody’s depending on everybody else. If people are used to thinking about that as a macro term. So, then people can look at a city and understand its complexities. Well, cells have their own intelligence and cells solve problems in their own way. And how do they solve problems? By building tissue ecologies And then as these tissue ecologies linked together, they become us. We are products of cellular intelligence and cellular engineering. That cellular intelligence is both my personal cells and my microbes. And in partnership, they create a habitat that called Bill Miller. And I’m, I must tell you, I’m very high priced real estate. There’s not one microbe I know that doesn’t want to live in my habitat. So I’ve got very high prices. So I know this is a very difficult series of thoughts for most people who are unaccustomed to going to thinking about it because we’ve covered so much in the new ground today. But basically, if you want to get the thrust of why you are existing as an evolutionary product, the answer is you are the product of intelligent cells that have engineered you to be you and natural selection has assured you are complementary to the environment. You are fit enough to survive.

Richard Jacobs:  Well, I guess that’s where we’ll end it for right now. We’re probably going to do another one of these shortly. But, how can people even start to get a grasp of some of the concepts that we’ve talked about? What are some ways for them to get into it so they’re not just a wash and all kinds of thoughts and just confused as to where to go from here?

Bill Miller:  If you’ll allow me to say the best thing to do, I’ve written a book, it’s complicated. I won’t deny it. But if for those people that are really interested and patient, everything that I’ve talked about is explained very carefully and progressively in a progression within that book. It’s called The Microcosm Within Evolution and Extinction in the Hologenome. But The Microcosm within Bill Miller and that’s available on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or through my publisher, universal publishers, beyond that, you can go ahead and go to the web, which is like a universal brain. Everybody knows that. And they can look up superorganism or they can look up cellular intelligence and they can start to get the background, the two essential bottom line background elements. And for cellular engineering. Now you’ve got to get up to the scientific literature. But I think that most of the listeners would be most interested in trying to understand how is it best, what is this going to mean to me, what the bottom line for most people is the, I’m interested in the science, but what is it going to mean for my life? And the answer is, we’re beginning to learn that we can probably productively manipulate intelligent microbial life. That is we can boost our microbiome, which there’s a large growing body of evidence that we can boost that microbiome and provide some incremental health benefits. And you can go to the web and start to look through the web and research about how probiotics and prebiotics can be used. Prebiotics are fibers that feed good microbes. Probiotics are extra booster doses of good microbes. There’s pretty good scientific evidence, in fact, there is excellent scientific evidence to date. There’s not yet been contradicted, it’s up to date. There’s excellent scientific evidence that seemed to point that there are boosters that you can use that are productive for you and you have to experiment for yourself. It’s important to be your own scientist. If you having problems with fatigue, you’re having problems with, depression, you’re having problems with certainly the bowel problems, try one of these products, and prebiotic or probiotic and see whether it doesn’t work for you. Approach it with an open mind. The research is there and it’s growing. And I think, excellent products are on the market right now and new ones will come to market over time. So I think that’s where things are going.

Richard Jacobs:  Yeah. And I would tell people, you know, my own journey and learning about science and the microbiome and all these things, and I make it my business to interview hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people and companies, but I still had a lot of to do a lot of self-discovery and reading and learning. And at first, it can be very overwhelming. There’s all these terms you don’t know and concepts you don’t understand. But if you keep at it and you keep asking questions, eventually you just go from understanding 5% of something to 50% to 80%. I got to the point now where I can read papers and I can understand 80% of it and I think, Oh wow, it’s working.

Bill Miller:  I think that’s such an important thing that you’ve said. I even in my own experience, when I started to flip from the medicine that I was doing into evolutionary biology, I mean it was a blizzard of new terms. It’s almost like asking someone who’s been a dancer to study physics. It’s just a totally different discipline. And so, what happened? Well I kept at it with some patience and just as you said, by small increments, you’ll learn one term after another, it becomes familiar, then things begin to fall into place that you just couldn’t get through it before. It didn’t make any sense. And then all of a sudden begins to make sense and with respect to the microbiome, a lot of the things that are written are very good and you can go ahead and in relatively short time, really start to feel as though you have enough material behind you to start to make some decisions for your own life.

Richard Jacobs:  Well Bill, this has been great. I appreciate you coming on the podcast and I don’t know if you want people to reach out to you sort of, at least they can get your book. Is there any way that could reach out if they have questions or is the book the best way to do it?

Bill Miller:  Sure. The books excellent or they can go to my website, www.themicrocosmwithin.com and lastly, I have a pretty well followed Twitter feeds, which gives a lot of scientific information, on evolution but also just stuff that interests me, space science, a lot about the microbiome a little bit about Paleontology, at Bill Miller, MD on Twitter.

Richard Jacobs:  That’s great Bill. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I appreciate,

Bill Miller:  Thanks very much, Richard. I enjoyed it very much.