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THE COCKROACH "can be parasitized by the parasitoid Moniliformis moniliformis, leading to increased locomotion activity ... the same cockroach species can be parasitized by the tropical wasp Ampulex compressa, inducing a zombie-like state and preventing it from any spontaneous locomotion. These parasites may have conflicting interests, and in case of coparasitation, this might be expressed in different manipulation patterns than for singly infected hosts." https://lnkd.in/e2g9KSe View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE. "The core issue is thus to specify how “agents” emerge from chemicals (ribozymes) to form identity (such as for replicators) and then form groups that learn membership. For all extant life, these agents must have initially been RNA stem loops. Single RNA stem-loop generation occurs by physical chemical properties solely as demonstrated by natural and randomized RNA experiments." https://lnkd.in/eUYvi8e View in LinkedIn

RNA DEFINED BY GAME THEORY. "Social membership is not considered. Nor is the emergence of complex behavior or phenotype crucial. Interactions within and between networks simply must emerge from individual fittest type origins as suggested in former quasispecies concepts. There are no group behavioral issues or principles that must be adhered to. The collective has no group fitness even though it can show emergent features." https://lnkd.in/eUYvi8e View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first weekend on parasite-host relations, an ancient and wine widespread phenomenon in nature that ranges from true parasitism to mutualism. This does not cover the range of microbial and viral parasitism. These examples serve to illustrate the deeply sophisticated ways that a body may be hacked by another creature. View in LinkedIn

SACRIFICIAL INTERMEDIATE HOST. "A type of parasitic flatworm targets cockles in New Zealand, driving the marine mollusks to the surfaces of muddy bottoms in shallow waters. There, oystercatcher birds snap the cockles up and eat them, flatworms and all. The shorebirds serve as the final hosts in the flatworms' complex life cycle." http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0901_050901_wormparasite.html View in LinkedIn

JUST A STOP ALONG THE WAY. Some parasites use an intermediate host during their life cycle, and in order to travel to the ultimate host, they induce the intermediate host to be eaten by the ultimate host. View in LinkedIn

REPRO CHANGES. "Manipulation of reproductive behaviour has been reported for several parasites. L. boulardi females superparasitize Drosophila larvae (i.e. larvae that have already been parasitized by another female wasp; Superparasitism is supposedly beneficial for the virus, because it permits horizontal transmission between L. boulardi embryos from different mothers." https://lnkd.in/e2g9KSe View in LinkedIn

WALKING LARDER. "Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga is a Costa Rican parasitic wasp that terrorizes the spider Plesiometa argyra. When it's time to procreate, an adult female wasp will seek out a spider, paralyze it and then lay an egg on its abdomen. After hatching, the larva wasp will feed on its host, while the spider goes about its business." https://lnkd.in/evbigMp View in LinkedIn

THE VERY GREY ZONE. "In quasispecies the ensembles of RNA stem loops (ribozymatic hairpin structures) represent not solely content that rather specify self from nonself, but in parallel—and this truly seems the start of living processes—they act as agents, obedient to chemical/physical laws and, in contrast to interactions in the inanimate world, to syntactic, pragmatic, semantic rules. It is exactly this latter feature that is absent in inanimate nature." https://lnkd.in/eUYvi8e View in LinkedIn

REBUTTAL #2: "Agency on its own behalf and interpretation of meaning—context-decoding—are obviously, and essentially, already present at the level of single proteins or RNA molecules." https://lnkd.in/eeiUHXC View in LinkedIn