{"id":283,"date":"2009-02-14T14:35:15","date_gmt":"2009-02-14T22:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=283"},"modified":"2009-02-25T14:21:59","modified_gmt":"2009-02-25T22:21:59","slug":"a-romance-to-make-seth-brundle-weep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=283","title":{"rendered":"A Romance to make Seth Brundle Weep"},"content":{"rendered":"

Haven’t been posting the past few days.\u00a0 I really should have written something to commemorate Darwin’s 200th birthday, but how can you celebrate when the latest Gallup poll<\/a> shows that over 60% of the US population is too blinkered, too misled, or too downright stupid to grasp the reality of natural selection? And I would have posted something on the latest ep of BSG, if it hadn’t turned out to be the lamest episode of the season, an extended talking-heads infodump broken only by \u2014\u00a0 wait for it \u2014 another<\/em> talking-heads infodump, both of which sketched the outlines of what I fear may be the clumsiest backstory retcon since X-Files limped across the finish line.<\/p>\n

But today is Valentine’s Day, that most romantic of occasions when Hallmark, de Beers, and Laura Secord try extra hard to convince us that (fucking + pheromones) = (everlasting commitment + gratuitous spending),\u00a0 and hope that no one notices how the “hearts”\u00a0 festooning\u00a0 valentines\u00a0 don’t look like hearts at all, but rather the inverted asses of receptive females.\u00a0 So it is only fitting that this was the week during which Science<\/em> unveiled a bond that is the very archetype of intimacy and lifelong commitment (overview here<\/a>; research paper here<\/a>).\u00a0 Any doof with a dick will tell you that he can’t live without you.\u00a0 Here’s someone who means<\/em> it:<\/p>\n

\"Parasitoid<\/p>\n

You’re looking at one of those parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in live hosts.\u00a0 Said host, as you can imagine, isn’t especially keen on being devoured alive from the inside out, and has a whole vigiliant immune system ready to fight off any foreign invaders of the flesh. The wasp counters by injecting, along with her eggs, an aliquote of a virion (basically, a virus without the crunchy coating) that short-circuits the immune response of the victim.<\/p>\n

So far, so good.\u00a0 These basics aren’t news to anyone who caught the Alien<\/em> flicks.\u00a0 But here’s where it gets interesting: the virus can’t replicate outside the wasp.\u00a0 It literally1<\/sup> leaves its balls behind \u2014 or more precisely, the code that handles replication and the synthesis of the protein sheath stay behind, embedded in the wasp’s own genotype.<\/p>\n

At first glance this might seem unremarkable:\u00a0 after all, that’s how all<\/em> viruses work, right?\u00a0 They insert their code into the control program, hijacking production and getting the cell’s assembly line to start pumping out more virii instead of the usual products.\u00a0 But there’s the rub:\u00a0 usually, it’s complete<\/em> copies of itself that the virus generates, not these half-assed squiggles of DNA that don’t even come with packaging, don’t even come with code<\/em> for packaging.\u00a0 These virions leave the wasp, and they’re toast.\u00a0 They don’t have enough parts left to even penetrate another host cell, much less take over its replicative machinery.\u00a0 All they can do is cover the eggs of parasitic wasps and keep the host’s immune system from raising the alarm.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s the wasp<\/em>‘s genome that builds them now, using embedded viral genes that never leave the cell.\u00a0 Without the wasp, these viruses can’t replicate.\u00a0 And without the virions protecting their eggs, neither can the wasps.<\/p>\n

I don’t think we’re even talking about two species any more.\u00a0 I think these two organisms have become so inextricably fused that we’re talking about a single species, born of the fusion of two.\u00a0 What was once a virus is now a glorified glandular secretion, part of a greater whole.\u00a0 Could any relationship be<\/em> more intimate?<\/p>\n

Back when I was a real biologist I attended a guest lecture by one Lyn Margulis, the first person to figure out that the mitochondria in our cells were once free-living organisms in their own right.\u00a0 She was pimping the next iteration of that theory, the radical proposition that species could fuse together as well as split apart.\u00a0 I remember being unimpressed by the examples she cited; all those worms with symbiotic microbes inside them still gave birth to pristine offspring, after all, each of which had to be inoculated afresh.\u00a0 It seemed to me that you couldn’t say that two species had fused if they had to split up again and then rediscover each other with each new generation, and when I raised my hand Prof. Margulis didn’t have an answer.<\/p>\n

But I think these little braconid wasps may have finally handed her one.<\/p>\n

1<\/sup>Well, metaphorically-literally. Phages have no actual balls, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Haven’t been posting the past few days.\u00a0 I really should have written something to commemorate Darwin’s 200th birthday, but how can you celebrate when the latest Gallup poll shows that over 60% of the US population is too blinkered, too misled, or too downright stupid to grasp the reality of natural selection? And I would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-evolution","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":299,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions\/299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}