I Am An Atheist
What if God was originally a parasite?
Yes I know I'm atheist and no I don't claim to be a scientist. However sometimes I read things and think randomly weird thoughts. I was reading up on how parasites may have a bigger step in evolution than first thought. No I'm not talking about God literally but I do wonder when the earth was VERY new, since parasites have been co-evolving along side species (and even forcing evolution sometimes) if this is a valid hypothesis.
I realize people don't share my sense of humor on here but I find this thought quite entertaining even though it forces one to have an identity crises.
So I had this sudden thought of:
"what if there was a first parasite?" 🤔
Then I thought about the Alien movies for some reason 😆
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002023
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150127-what-if-all-the-pests-vanished
https://www.nature.com/news/parasites-drove-human-genetic-variation-1.9345
From the BBC article (top)
From the Nature article (bottom)
Yes I know I'm atheist and no I don't claim to be a scientist. However sometimes I read things and think randomly weird thoughts. I was reading up on how parasites may have a bigger step in evolution than first thought. No I'm not talking about God literally but I do wonder when the earth was VERY new, since parasites have been co-evolving along side species (and even forcing evolution sometimes) if this is a valid hypothesis.
I realize people don't share my sense of humor on here but I find this thought quite entertaining even though it forces one to have an identity crises.
So I had this sudden thought of:
"what if there was a first parasite?" 🤔
Then I thought about the Alien movies for some reason 😆
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002023
Here we use this system to ask whether coevolution—specifically, parasite-host interactions—can drive complexity to higher levels than would otherwise be achieved. Several authors, including Dawkins and Krebs [7] and Vermeij [16], have proposed that coevolutionary “arms races” lead to increased complexity as adaptations and counter-adaptations favor more and more extreme traits [6]. Indeed, we show that host-parasite coevolution produced substantially more complex host traits than did evolution in the absence of parasites. Moreover, we show that this complexity arose in the evolving computer programs, in part, by an unexpected process: selection for increased evolvability, which was achieved by genetic mechanisms reminiscent of so-called “contingency loci” that are found in many pathogenic bacteria [17].
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150127-what-if-all-the-pests-vanished
https://www.nature.com/news/parasites-drove-human-genetic-variation-1.9345
From the BBC article (top)
This idea, that animals must keep improving their design just to stay alive in a competitive world, is called the Red Queen hypothesis. It was proposed by evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen in 1973. Van Valen named it after a passage in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, in which the Red Queen tells Alice that in the novel's alternative world "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place"
From the Nature article (bottom)
Modern humans began to spread out from Africa approximately 100,000 years ago. They settled in distant lands, where they had to adapt to unfamiliar climates, find different ways to feed themselves and fight off new pathogens. A study now suggests that it was the pathogens, particularly parasitic worms, that had the biggest role in driving natural selection — but that genetic adaptation to them may also have made humans more susceptible to autoimmune diseases.
36-40, FVIP
