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The hyperparasites in Tierra are strictly speaking not parasites of parasites, rather they’re host "species" that evolved a resistance against some parasite typ
by Sharlin 3y ago
The hyperparasites in Tierra are strictly speaking not parasites of parasites, rather they’re host "species" that evolved a resistance against some parasite types and, critically, a trick that causes the parasite to actually make a copy of its host when it tries to copy itself using the host’s replication code. So essentially the hyperparasite steals the parasite’s CPU time and still has its own timeslice left to replicate itself.
The whole thing relies on the fact that the Tierra "organisms" live in a flat memory space where you can jump anywhere, including into the middle of other individuals, and just merrily keep executing code from that point. I wonder if something like that was possible in the (hypothetical) RNA world, before cell membranes developed, but I don’t think cell-based life can have a precise equivalent of Tierra hyperparasites. The closest analogue is probably mutualistic relationships that have evolved from parasitic ones.