The bacteria are dominant, not the humans

The late Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, had frequently pointed out that humans were not the dominant life force on earth, bacteria was.

It is a medical and scientific fact our skin and digestive and respiratory tracts are teeming with bacteria. Many of them play a symbolic role — bacteria in the gut secretes enzymes that aid in digestion. Although we think of the bacteria as passengers, they outnumber our cells by about ten to one.

Even more impressive, the total number of microbial genes each of us harbours outnumbers our human genes by 100 to one.