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