I suggest that the most important question to ask about any parasite is this. Are its genes transmitted to future generations via the same vehicles as the host’s genes? If they are not, I would expect it to damage the host, in one way or another. But if they are, the parasite will do all that it can to help the host, not only to survive but to reproduce. Over evolutionary time it will cease to be a parasite, will cooperate with the host, and may eventually merge into the host’s tissues and become unrecognizable as a parasite at all. Maybe, as I suggested on page 237, our cells have come far
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