Parasitic. Symbiotic. Electronic.

I have never written a blog before and never had the inclination and so don't be surprised by the crude and amateur way in which I write this. I have decided to treat it almost as just a running list of thoughts that I have kind of like an extremely long plurk post.

Parasites: the title of this class. A title which, before showing up to class, confused me as to what we were supposed to be doing in an English class titled "Parasites". I didn't know if we would be writing papers about parasites and learning about them biologically, or if it was a metaphor for something that would be determined in class. At this point my opinion is only slightly more informed, but I am inclined to say both in weird ways.

We walk into class on our first and second days, and we watch a movie about parasites called "Shivers". At first I didn't know what to think about the movie while we were watching. Later on I got much humor from it as well as a good discussion in class another day about its social implications. But what I was really spending time thinking about was the positive and negative repercussions of having parasites. For example, some parasites do indeed feed off of us, but they also give us things in return. So it is a type of symbiotic relationship with a lot of parasites, not all, and we have many already in us that we don't know about or think about. A major portion of what helps us digest food in our stomachs is with the help of bacteria and their contributions due to having evolved to break certain things down, and take things that we don't need but they do. They then release the things that they don't need, but contribute to our survival and we use them. We have co-evolved in a way that allows us to live together and contribute to the other one's survival.

There are also many parasites that do do us damage in one way, but they also protect us from other dangers. One example would be Helminth (a.k.a. parasitic worm) infections. http://nutritionwonderland.com/2009/02/parasitic-worms/. They do eat and steal our nutrients as well as sometimes our bodily tissues, but some of the things that they produce in order to exist within us can actually help with other diseases that we are capable of contracting such as Type 1 Diabetes. They don't even cause any symptoms other than a little itching sometimes.

But i have also thought about this in application to society and social behavior. For example, one could view marriage as a type of parasitism. It is a mutual parasitism and symbiotic in most cases, but parasitism it still is. There are many ways to look at it, financially you are combining accounts (typically but not always) and living off of each others earnings, you live withing the same household (site) and share food, sometimes you will even provide the other with food that you have made. Even our children display parasitic behavior towards their parents. They obtain food, shelter, clothing, and many other things from their parents while hardly having to anything besides school.

We as a society tend to look down on parasites as "cheaters" (to quote the radio lab) because they don't obtain their own food, but who really does? We not only take nutrients from other animals and plants, but we kill them in the process. Most parasites tend to keep their host alive and just siphon off enough to survive because without their host, they will die. In some ways they are more generous than us I suppose. We do not use use the suns rays that it puts off as a way to create our own energy, we break it down from other living creatures in order to survive, so we are no better on a basic level than most of the parasites we hate and proclaim as "cheaters".

The point of "Shivers" was to take a parasite and use it in a way that would "benefit" humanity (in the professor's eyes at least). He figured that humans thought too much and didn't have enough "guts". And so he created a parasite that would relive us of this "problem" and just let us enjoy ourselves by having sex because we could, with no social restraints whatsoever. The social repercussions of this seemed to be overlooked however, such as too high of a growth rate, STD's, neglect for necessary tasks for survival, etc.

Honestly I speak for the parasites out there. It doesn't mean that I would like to get a tapeworm or anything like that, but I don't hate them for how they evolved. Many co-evolved alongside us and we need them more than we think for survival. This is why scientists are currently entertaining the idea that we are becoming "too clean", meaning we are trying so hard to clean ourselves, and make ourselves healthy, that we are removing many of the things on and/or in us that help make us being healthy possible. This may be the oils on our face that we get which protect us from outside infection which we regularly wash off because it can cause pimples, to e-coli, which can be found in the lower intestine of many animals. We remove them because they can cause us to get sick, but we need them as an essential part of digestion. They are completely harmless, and only helpful, when in the correct part of the body. It is when they are introduced into an area of the body that they should not be that the problem occurs, as it is with most things.