As the Zygote Games Science Guru, it was my job to pore
through piles of
scientific papers and technical books looking for juicy details to incorporate into Parasites Unleashed. And most of the books and papers I read through were, to put it mildly, dry. So it was fun to pick up Marlene Zuk’s lively new book, Riddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are (Harcourt, 2007).
The book examines how parasites and their hosts coevolve, or change in response to one another. A host’s adaptations to repel a parasite are eventually met with workarounds from the parasite that let it infect the host, bringing both organisms back to square one. It’s a Red Queen’s race that makes disease (says Zuk) “part and parcel of how we are supposed to look, how we are supposed to live.” And she shows us how, with examples drawn from studies of animal behavior, epidemiology, and parasitology, all told with a gleeful smile and a delight in the slightly gross. She calls her book “a disease appreciation course;” I for one certainly appreciated it.
Riddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are
Marlene Zuk
2007, Harcourt
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