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Comment by stuckinhell | Hacker News Reader

Biology is truly fascinating, the ultimate hardware/software combo of proteins/genes.

It's likely parasites can alter our genetic expression and behavior today as well like rabies and toxoplasmosis(cats often have it). Rabies causing the fear of water is truly mind bending, how does it do that?!

Toxoplasma infection is classically associated with the frequency of schizophrenia, suicide attempts or "road rage". https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31980266/#:~:text=Toxoplasma....

Rabies:As the disease progresses, the person may experience delirium, abnormal behavior, hallucinations, hydrophobia (fear of water), and insomnia. https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/symptoms/index.html#:~:text=As%20....

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> Rabies causing the fear of water is truly mind bending, how does it do that?!

It doesn't.

> Rabies:As the disease progresses, the person may experience delirium, abnormal behavior, hallucinations, hydrophobia (fear of water)

This is a weird mistake for the CDC to make. The etymological meaning of "hydrophobia" is "fear of water". But the English word is completely disconnected from that; it just means "rabies". Because of this, the disambiguation page for "Hydrophobia" on wikipedia links to rabies as well as to "aquaphobia", an actual fear of water which had to be named badly because the name "hydrophobia" was already taken.

Rabies was named "hydrophobia" because rabies patients will generally refuse water when it's offered to them. They do that because rabies makes it difficult to swallow, not because they're afraid of the water.

Have you watched a video of someone with rabies exposed to water? I don’t recommend it, it is more than a hard time swallowing.

That is very interesting. In Chinese, a word for rabies is 恐水病, which literally means fear water disease. I have never understood why until I read your explanation, but from what you have said the Chinese term would also appear to be misleading.

It's possible that the Chinese word for rabies is translated from the West. This appears to be the case for other illnesses such as 糖尿病 sweet-urine-disease (diabetes mellitus).†

I don't really know how to find the answer to that question, though.

† I guess if it were a really literal translation of the Western term, it'd be 蜜尿病.

Even more interesting reverse of that, hairworms that infect grasshoppers will once mature cause the hosts to jump into water and drown where the worm then reproduces before starting the cycle again.

And cordyceps fungi compel ants to climb to a specific height off ground, at millimeter and 95% accuracy, to a spot of ideal location and humidity for the fungus to spore.

And the craziest thing is, the cordyceps fungus doesn't actually infiltrate the ant's brain! Autopsies found the fungus spreads all over the ant's body, but not its brain!

Have you seen the documentary that came this year, think it's called "Last Of Us" - fungus can turn humans into zombies :)

But yeah, fungus directly controlling ant muscles, while it's brain is helpless is quite terrifying. Also terrifying is the raise of fungus infections in humans recorded in hospitals in India and UK in the recent years. If they do adapt to living in a warm human body we will have a major problem - fungus are killing more trees, bugs and reptiles than viruses and bacteria combined, the air in our cities is full of their spores.

More humans is more human food source

is dna hardware? software?

it's both! it's neither! oh, and it's also the runtime!

The DNA code is software, the hardware and the runtime are RNA and proteins.

But those are encoded by the DNA as well. That isn't how software works (which runs on hardware that exists independently of it) I suppose you could argue that it is similar to a FPGA, where entire CPUs can be created in software, but even there there is still underlying hardware that can't be modified by software.

DNA exists physically, and the way the software "runs" is not just dependent on the abstract genetic code, but also the particular way it gets folded in 3D space. In this sense, DNA is both software and hardware. Arguably a lot of things at the cellular level defy the distinction between code, data, hardware and runtime.

Evolution isn't very good at separating its concerns.

In which context?

It’s basically an ASIC.

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