Parasitic Drive

There are still many spaces:
ecosystem coordinates,
that are left open to the chance
of species, we'll not make sense of.

Odd opportunistic characters
we instinctively fear,
but also depend on,
to avoid fragility of purpose.

Even where they move in shadow,
their tricks revealed eventually,
teach us something
of who we are.

Existence emerges from process opportunity,
which in hand creates rooms,
that fill and we seek purpose
building a strange complex castle.

I'd try to reconsider who, what, where,
is really a parasite to what, who, where?
What matters - to me - is only how
we worked to play the flow.

Years ago I was recommended to read a popular science text about parasites. The book’s introducing chapters were, however, so disgusting that I was not able to really get into it until last week. The book is “Parasite Rex” (C. Zimmer, 2001) and it does give a horrifying description of the ​mechanism of action of many parasites. Beyond the disgust, however, and in the latter half of the book, ​the author relays ideas about how parasites impact evolution of species. I had not come across these ideas before, but they open a new world to me, in brief parasites may:

• drive environmental adaptation and differentiation
• support speciation (separation of different species)
• be the motive for sexual reproduction and gender differentiation

While now I feel compelled to further study this field to understand the evidence in these areas, some of the ideas “ring true” and radically transform my picture of evolution as a much more complex web of driven interactions between biological mechanisms that are happening on many different scales of space and time.

The strangest thing is that it isn’t even so clear what exactly a parasite is, which leads me to speculation that other systems might, in fact, ​be subject to the same rules that were part of our evolution. The ideas that branch out from this boggle the mind.