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Trust Growth
● Anchored Life › Anomalies

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Anchored Life
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Anomalies
Entries in Anomalies
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  • Discoidea ilusium, a cellular slime mold named for the celebrity D. discoideum amoeba. On an apparent course to extinction.
  • 1. Cellular slime mold
  • A mass of disc-shaped amoeboid cells. Its Earth analogs spend most of their life alone, gathering into slug-like masses to search for new food.
  • 2. Retroviral breakdown
  • Something is wrong with the trust growth's genome. The retroviral inserts (copies of the Proteavirus passed from parent to child) present in all Protean life are unusually aggressive, mangling the regulators and silencers that control the expression of the virus. The evolved trust between host and virus has been breached.
  • 3. Bloom-adjacent pathology
  • Trust growth cells spawn Proteavirus until they eventually rupture under the strain, forming a crust of dead cells which attract scavengers for infection. This may represent an early or failed form of the behavior seen in the bloom virus, Proteavirus β.
  • 4. Ideological example
  • Communities of equal elements with perfect trust are vulnerable to exploitation by greedy self-replicators. Greater competitive freedom within the Discoid elysium slime might have prevented this evolutionary failure state.
  • 5. Koala konnection
  • Earth's koala, Phascolarctos cinereus, was infected by the immune-destroying retrovirus KoRV-A in the 18th century. This virus entered the koala genome, passing from mother to child. Infected koalas produced KoRV-A virions, spreading the disease. The successful treatment of KoRV-A using untainted genes from Kangaroo Island was an early triumph in species-wide gene therapy.
  • Assessment: possible insight into the evolution of the bloom virus.

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