Society MD

Posts Tagged ‘Blood’

If you have ever tasted blood before… you might be some kind of freak, and you should not be surprised if parents keep their children far away from you. But if it was just something you were curious about (“Hmm, I wonder what this tastes like…”), you may have noticed that blood is fairly salty in nature. And this leads to the question of why blood would be that way. After all, salt is something that should only be used in small measure on most things – it is very potent stuff, you know. So the notion that there is salt coursing through our veins can be a bizarre revelation.

Interestingly enough, it all began with sea water. As most any child who paid attention could tell you, the ocean is 3.5% salinities, which makes the aggregate total of the water 2.5% ordinary salt. It is no coincidence that our blood has the same level of salinity in it. The very first life forms evolved in the sea, because it is the perfect breeding ground for life. And the fact that the first of these life forms to become replicators (which meant that they could replicate themselves) built increasingly more sophisticated protein sheaths means that they essentially became our DNA.

In a sense, our bodies are nothing more than giant robots, designed to carry around and propagate these replicating life forms. And since they thrive in salt water, we carry around salt water inside of our veins. Therefore, the reason why we have salt in our blood is because of the way our bodies (and indeed, pretty much all bodies) evolved. Though we live on the land, we carry the sea around inside of us, in order to facilitate these life forms – which is a pretty good trade off, considering that they essentially created us.