African malarial mosquitos use to track us down at night.

On the left here you see the bites by the Dutch malarial mosquito on this person.

These are mosquitos who carry the malarial parasite which infests our blood when the mosy has had a free meal at our expense.

But over the past year or so, researchers in Cambodia have discovered that what's happening is the malarial parasite is developing a resistance.

In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it's the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths.

In a way, much more powerful than the kind of tools we're looking at, because most of what's being done today is to rely on things like anti malarial drugs.

And the example I want to deal with is, or the idea I want to deal with, the question is, what can we do to try to get the malarial organism to evolve to mildness?

In contrast, the African malarial mosquito had a very strong preference for biting the ankles and feet of this person, and that of course we should have known all along because they're called mosqui toes, you see?

And we know that, although it's great to make those anti malarial drugs available at really low cost and high frequency, we know that when you make them highly available you're going to get resistance to those drugs.

That means that in a population where malaria has gone down all the way, and there's few people remaining with parasites, that the dogs can find these people, we can treat them with anti malarial drugs, and give the final blow to malaria.

What I'm suggesting here is that we could get evolution working in the direction we want it to go, rather than always having to battle evolution as a problem that stymies our efforts to control the pathogen, for example with anti malarial drugs.

There's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness.