Parasitic ideas need to be helpful, or at least not too harmful, to the idea-organism in which they reside, but they can be very harmful to individual human beings. So long as they help (or do not badly harm) the idea-organism’s chances for survival and reproduction, they can cause all sorts of pain and death [...]

In the brain and not the chest.Headshots are the very best. Zombies are used metaphorically in many ways, and the word “zombie” has a history predating the horror movies we know so well. If you don’t mind the drooling and lumbering, “zombie” is a useful, specific monkey wrench in the tool box of language. – [...]

A new drug from China appears to be effective in getting rid of a number of intestinal worms, a problem that plagues more than a billion people around the world. Worms cause anemia, weight loss among infants and malnutrition, and they can retard mental and physical growth. As a result, they can exact a huge [...]

After entirely too much time spent reading and worrying about the likes of phylum platyhelminthes and phylum nematoda, and phylum apicomplexa, I have begun making comparisons between the natural world (in which parasites often thrive) and the abstract man-made realms which have yet to enumerate or adequately model evolved organisms (which is not to say [...]