There’s plenty of information at https://www.thepetfoodcon.com/cybernetic-hypothesis-of-periodontal-disease-in-mammalian-carnivores/ that visitors can read for themselves.
However, I believe it may be helpful to provide a commentary that may illuminate what I believe to be a fruitful line of enquiry.
The genesis of the Hypothesis started way back in time. As a starting point I’ll mention the wonderful chance encounter with a Greek vet (whose name escapes me but maybe was Mygiakis) in 1989. He had travelled from Thessalonika and I had travelled from Australia to the WSAVA conference in Harrogate, UK. It was as if we were both on a pilgrimage to a pre-ordained meeting.
Over breakfast Mygiakis had the boarding house breakfast room spellbound with his commentary. And arising from that magical, almost spiritual first encounter, I obtained a copy of James Lovelock FRS seminal work The Gaia Hypothesis. The work propounds that the Earth functions like a living entity with multiple interrelated systems behaving in a ‘physiological’ manner.
At a later date I heard Professor Lynn Margulis speaking on the radio and was enthralled by her account of co-evolution—not evolution—as being a central force in the development of life on Earth. Her magnificent co-authored book is Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution.
Ideas were forming in my head and in the late 1980s I was becoming aware of and puzzling over the pandemic of mouth rot in my patients. Leastways, in hindsight, that seems to have been the sequence of events. Common things are common and often perform a useful function. How could a pandemic of disease be useful????
In my conscious state I was not making much progress. However, my unconscious brain kept working such that in the early hours of Christmas morning 1992 I woke with a fully formulated hypothesis incorporating the ideas of Lovelock and Margulis into a hypothesis of how the Earth was regulated in the Age of Mammals.
Lest I forget those waking thoughts, I set off to my writing desk and committed the Hypothesis to paper. I say, in the past tense, that the Hypothesis explains how the Earth was regulated, before man picked up the club and became the dominant force on planet Earth.
Prior to that, it was the four-legged carnivores as supreme regulators and about the interface of their canine teeth, that all other things rotated. I believe that by setting aside homo sapiens now dominant role and imagining carnivores as the regulators, we can begin to catch sight of an elegant, yet simple interplay that entrances the mind – and with immense potential for our understanding of nature and the science we practise.
