Host/Parasite
relationships
2000
Research
for the Net.art project titled "Home Transfer"
by Pat
Badani
About parasites
The
theory of Evolution postulates the ultimate relationship of all
living organisms. In order to live, an organism needs energy. While
some organisms are able to synthesize their food from inorganic
chemical sources, other organisms depend directly or indirectly
on plants and other sources for the relatively complicated compounds
on which they nourish themselves. This association creates a host-parasite
relationship.
Parasitologists
have long agreed that host-parasite relationships exist, but they
are far from agreeing on the scope of this topic. The physiological
parasitologist tends to think of this relationship as physiological;
the life-cycle parasitologist considers it ecological; the systematic
parasitologist thinks of it as systematic; and the medical parasitologist
looks at it form the pathological or immunological standpoint.
The original meaning of the word "parasite" was "near food", and
used as it was in a social sense, it had no connection with pathogenicity
or disease. In the secondary adaptation of the word to biology
it has acquired many subjective meanings. The words parasite and
parasitism are used in the wide, general sense, as referring to
an organism which is dependent for some essential metabolic factor
on another organism which is always larger than itself. The parasite's
potential to scavenge nutrients from its host for the benefit of
its own growth and development, adds a level of complexity to host-parasite
interactions. However, implying that the colonizing organism lives
at the expense of its host is too narrow a concept, since the same
organism can at different times be harmful, innocuous or beneficial
depending on the site it inhabits and the stimulus it produces.
Although the word parasite is often used as a synonym for pathogen,
pathogenicity is not an essential characteristic of parasitism.
No organism is an entity unto itself; it lives as a member of a
community and the life processes both of itself and of its neighbors
act and interact with each other. This interaction is never of
equal intensity in different species, but the more intimate it
is, the more it approaches our concept of the phenomenon we call
parasitism. It is, however, an extremely common phenomenon, and
there are probably more parasitic than free-living organisms. Parasitism,
however, too often has its real nature clouded by a concept of
disease and is regarded subjectively rather than objectively.
Because
a parasite lives in a living environment, parasitologists attempt
to discover how this one reacts to its presence. The Host/Parasite
relationship in biology, provides an excellent example of the evolutionary
principle of substitution of function whereby the original function
of an organ or system is altered to cope with a new set of circumstances.
The
Internet and parasitism
Biological
metaphors cling to the Internet, the "viral" or the "parasitic" being
the most tenacious. Taking this into account, my paper attempts
to apply some of the above mentioned biological notions regarding
Host/Parasites relationships, by analogy, to an anthropocentric
point of view, whereby the Internet is seen as the Parasite
and the Home is seen as its Host.
For
the complete paper, please contact pbadani@ilstu.edu |