Parasite

A parasite is a living organism that depends upon another organism for its continued survival. Parasitism is a form of symbiosis where the parasite benefits and the host is harmed. While it used to be thought that parasites were very simple creatures generally with little impact on their ecosystems; however, biologists now understand that parasites can be very sophisticated, precisely evolved to take advantage of their hosts and that parasites can have significant effects on their environment and on their host's evolution. A common parasite in humans is Toxoplasmosis..

Young earth creationists see parasites, along with diseases, as coming about as a result of Adam's sin against God and are one of the problems that arose on Earth because of the beginning of sin. For example, viruses are categorized as obligate intracellular parasites, and are ‘infectious particles’ rather than organisms. Creation scientist Dr. Jerry Bergman asserts that God did not make pathogenic viruses and that it is a result of a post fall world. Dr. Bergman states that in relation to pathogenic viruses that "pathogenesis is evidence of something gone wrong, a mutation or the accidental movement of genes, and not evidence of a system deliberately designed to cause human disease and suffering. In addition, creation scientists point out that the elimination of some parasites cannot be explained vis a vis the theory of evolution. For example, Creation Ministries International states the following:

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Carnivorous fish such as the Oriental sweetlip and the coral rock cod normally feed voraciously upon shrimps and smaller fish. But these photographs show them placidly allowing cleaner wrasse and cleaner shrimp to crawl around tongue, gill chamber and vicious-looking teeth—and the cleaners don’t seem to be at all reticent to enter the 'jaws of death'. And when the wrasse and shrimp have finished picking off parasites, the large fish let the cleaners go again without eating them. The 'cleaning symbiosis' benefits both species, but evolutionary mutation/selection can’t explain how it arose. Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgi summed up the evolutionary puzzle presented by such symbiotic relationships (he was actually referring to a much simpler relationship between a young herring gull and its parent): ‘All this had to be developed simultaneously [like the cleaner entering the big fish’s mouth at the same time the big fish suspends his 'normal' (post-Fall) habit of eating small fish], which as a mutation has the probability of zero. I am unable to approach this problem without supposing an innate drive in matter to perfect itself.'

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See Also

• Homosexuality and Parasites