we literally are bacteria

We are cloned bacteria. The process of multicellular development from a fertilized egg is nothing more than the same logarithmic cloning of bacteria familiar from the science lab petri dish. Of course, an animal's development transforms the bacteria into tissues, robbing them of their individuality and subverting them to mere building blocks. But their bacterial ancestry cannot be denied - every cell in your body has all the constituent organelles of a free bacteria. Many human somatic cells can even survive for a while as single organisms, in the right environment. And of course, those transitional organisms that shows us what the precursors to multicellular organisms might have looked like that are in the first stages of multicellularity, such as myxobacteria.

We think of cells as this conceptual entity, and that plants, animals, and bacteria are all organized via this entity. It just happens that one of the three (bacteria) only use the one cell. I'm saying the correct way to think about it is that 'cell' and 'bacteria' are actually different words for the same thing - the bacterial organism. Our bias comes from the historical happenstance that cells of plants were discovered and described first (Hooke's cork). Later we realized that animals are also cellular. Microbes were known, but the 'Cell Theory' was first applied to plants and animals, and only when their structure and contents were found analogous to bacteria, did the bacterial body earn then 'cell' moniker. It took the Darwinian revolution to make us realize that our cells are descendents of bacteria, but the perceptual dichotomy of cell vs. bacteria has prevailed.

Thus, all life on earth is bacterial, every one of us animals is nothing more than a single bacterium, cloned a few trillion times, albeit with a high degree of specialization among the clones. We are like a beehive; a very integrated beehive. Asking the question are bacteria or humans the dominant life form, is missing the point - humans are bacteria, thus bacteria rule.

I think the realization that all life on earth is utterly, truly, literally bacterial adds an interesting twist on the origins of life question. With the semantic exception of viruses, and the possible exception of nanobacteria, Did you know that we have never observed any life on the planet that is not bacterial? The RNA world and pyrite-based autocatalytic cycles are just armchair philosophizing at this point (I say that in the nicest way possible, I just mean we've never observed these systems au naturale). So, if all life ever is bacterial, including the oldest stromatolites... whither bacteria? My preffered theory is weak panspermia - I like the 'it came from elsewhere' but only to give more time for the chemistry - > replicating molecules process to have cooked in. Cop out, I know, but it just feels right during my armchair philosophizing sessions. But the point is that panspermia posits that life got here as bacteria. My point that all life there ever there was is bacteria, I believe strenghtens the panspermia view.

So now that you know what you really are, you won't feel so ashamed of your disgusting sexual habits, after all, you're just a bunch of dirty microbes!