Elle
Your reply brings up another thought for me, Dr. Falconer. Our bodies are a balanced system and we stay healthy when we can keep our bodies as balanced as possible. Of course, nothing is balanced all the time, as for instance, the process of flying a plane on auto-pilot. The plane is on course part of the time, but the rest of the time, it's going off course, catching itself and then correcting itself. I believe this might be the way the body functions.
Of course, there are more than numerous variables involved, but in an effort to keep this brief, I'd like your thoughts on these "bad guys". Do you think we need them to stay balanced? In other words, perhaps they have roles that we've yet to determine in keeping the "good guys" in balance.
If we took out all the "bad guys", would our bodies really be healthy? It seems that we need both positive and negative polarities for balance.
Maybe we need both the good and bad guys without letting either overrun the other for any length of time. And it would follow, if that were true, that our animals' bodies would function in the same way.
Your thoughts?