Reading Thoughts and Notes
Zombie Roaches and Other Parasite Tales, Ed Yong

• Parasites “control” their host, but what is volition to begin with? Our microbiome “hijacks” our volition, but simultaneously we think we volitionally “want” to eat
• When something devours something else alive, how do we know that this is “something else”
• “Manipulation is not an oddity”
• Reminds me of Brave New World, cockroach doesn’t want to resist
• Functions that replicate themselves through more intelligent hosts can be very small and compressed; replication does not imply a good model of the world
  • Evolution is capable of searching the space of how to control and manipulate, in ways understand, neuroscience
  • Small ideas can infect and determine the direction of a life

Sing, Karin Tidbeck

• ” It’s remarkable what people will say and do when you’re part of the background.”
• Aino very untrusting, learned from the way the world treats others, her
• “I hadn’t thought of the possibility” ouch
• “I can hear myself think.”
• “They don’t hate me. They’re afraid of me. It’s different.”
• So periodic silence falls and only those with a certain gift which is in itself a curse on the physicality of those who bear it can make sound, though the sound is unintelligible??
• eggs and plateaus
• “I couldn’t stand being in the village for Saarakka. Everyone else talking and I can’t”
• Everything rises, nothing sets. When Saarakka sets Oksakka rises
• How being raised other can internalize and perpetuate
• Petr wants to sing the same way Aino wants to go to Amitié to be light, both seek acceptance and conformity in other worlds rather than internally

The Body’s Ecosystem

• The microbiome is much more than simply the bacteria that live in the gut, though those are also important
  • Bacteria in the mouth, skin, lungs, and sex organs among other regions of the body have their own influences on what it means to be

Summary
Parasitism is not the exceptional anomaly of ecosystems, it is a foundation. And more than a foundation of ecosystems, it is also a foundation of society and ideology. In his Ted Talk, Ed Yong explores the biological pillars that parasitism forms. For example, the neurological parasite Toxoplasma gondii that up to 1/3 of people may harbor, subtly influences behavior and disease. Yong also points out that in the case of the emerald cockroach wasp, the cockroach no longer wants to resist the directions of the wasp, and becomes a docile and cooperative host for the wasps’ reproduction.

Compelling Points

• Parasitism of ideas, broad concepts, ideologies, compels us to conform
• Can sometimes kill the host
• Very small organisms can profoundly impact much more complicated systems, subtly, overtly, at scale and at minutiae
• Is parasitism bad if it controls volition such that we ‘want’ it?
• High level abstracted controls are prime parasitism targets – if a neurological lever exists for making an organism walk towards water to lay the eggs of a host, this lever will be exploited in the course of evolution

Implications
Can the emerald cockroach wasp be understood as its own organism? It would simply not exist if we truly isolated its population of similar beings. Thus, as Deleuze points out, there are no origins. Only second origins. And the second origin of the wasp is within a cockroach. Thus is the cockroach an extension, a part of the wasp species? Is it futile to draw these lines, or necessary?