Slashdot Mirror
The Taste of Pain
An anonymous reader writes "The more the human genome is unraveled and previously non-genetic based attributes are now associated with a specific genetic function, such as physical and emotional pain and taste, it seems, to me, that our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes." A related article links your sense of taste to your risk for cancer, heart disease, etc.
fp from the papa_m
eat my shizzle!
the sense of goatse is also genetic
... of a first post?
down bitch!
Could there be a gene responsible for making people submit dumb articles to slashdot?
...ducks and covers in anticipation of the whole "nature vs nurture" argument
I don't know why but images of Sarah Kozer from "Joe Millionaire" comes to my mind...
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
The Moron
Remember to Vote To Impeach The Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal
Cheers,
W00t
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
...should try the PainStation!
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Of course, this correlation is based on an increased taste for pork products and heart disease... might not be strictly genetic.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
The taste buds on your tongue are simply sensors, like your eyes, ears, nose, and hands. In fact, taste buds represent the least of all complex sensors of the human body. A taste bud is simply a receptor, waiting to bind to a molecule in solution in your mouth. Once the receptor binds to the molecule, it generates a signal that says, "bitter!" or "sweet!". Combinations of types of "bitter" and "sweet" represent the taste of the food, excluding molecules in the gas phase which are picked up by the nose. I read there were 27 or so types of "bitter" and only two types of "sweet".
Even a human nose is more sensitive than human taste buds. There are over a hundred different types of receptors in the human nose. (And thousands in the dog nose.) Looking at one's ears or eyes, the complexity involved in generating a highly analog signal, over time, and having that signal correctly analyzed is incredible.
And..we are not yet even talking about cerebral functions like reason, imagination, moods, memory, or even behavioral instinct!
Yes, finding the genes that code for the receptors of the tongue is really great. But do not assume that the amazing complexity of the human body, even excluding the brain, will be fully understood for quite a bit of time.
Salis
Favorite
It seems to me, on a philisophical note, that as the genome continues to be explored, we will continue to be surprised at what's found. However, the really interesting part will be when the project is finished, and we discover what was NOT found.
_Am
These articles seem to want to blame all of the worlds ills on genetics.
OJ wasn't a murder because he is a rotten individual, his genes made him do it!
Oh and my favorite...gays are born that way.
It seems that everytime someone experiences abnormal behavior, these scientists want to blame it on genetics. Give me a break.
you heard me. throw a discus at my dick, like plato used to.
let's mention quantum physics and the illusion of free will. Of course your genetics have something to do with emotional pain, etc, for your genetics blueprint your life's development, and your particles are destined to spin in a decipherable pattern (of course only after you die can we decipher the pattern)...
this is not a sig.
So does this mean that people who smoke and thusly have lost most of their sense of taste run no risk of heart disease now? :)
(I am God). Nature determines the quantized machinery around the center of sentience. Nurture generally forms the nonquantized storage of the center of sentience. Nature in the end is trivial as the center of sentience is what's really important. In our unevolved state, however, the filters in the quantized realm become important.
I still lean towards nurture myself, but there is obviously a lot of complexity that we'll need to unravel before we know exactly where the balance lies.
The thing that worries me most about tagging personality to genes is that it gives some scientific justification for being racially prejudiced. I mean, if a certain genetic pool is genetically predisposed to a certain personality trait, then it only makes sense to assume that people of that group are likely to have the same traits. There's unlikely to be any hard tie between appearance and a trait, but any limited pool will harbor all traits equally, I think.
One could argue that "nature" gives rise to a similar argument - that a given culture is predisposed to give rise to certain personality traits. This even seems quite likely. So what's the difference between being prejudiced against a genetic family or a culture?
Well, to me the difference is critical. I can't escape my genetic makeup, but I can escape my culture if I choose to. (And personally this is something I've done, to an extent). Criticizing a culture is not as damning as criticizing a gene.
In any case, I do still lean towards nurture being the prime factor, and I feel that much of the research in neural networks supports this. I certainly hope we're not doomed to live out our genes. My guess is that genes provide the interface to the world, but the mind interprets it based on experience.
Cheers.
During grad school, many of my classmates had to take anti-depressants and other forms of medication in order to continue living a fairly normal day-to-day life.
Their concern over grades led to a very skeptical viewpoint on life, but my how their entire personality was changed simply by taking 1 pill per day.
Don't forget *nix either.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
You scientist schmucks.
Ack, I really need to quit watching mob movies.
(FYI: This was meant to be funny, it's saturday ... loosen up a bit ...)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
to me, that our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes
Ok, so if our personalities were more influenced by Genes, then why aren't all Australians violent people that steal, rape and kill?
I seriously think that enviorment has alot more to do with it than anything. Perhaps there are Genes that make people lean slightly more towards agressive behaviors. But I think it's much more enviormental than anything else.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I still think it's a combination of the two. My cousin and I attended the same private school as children, yet she completed K through 12 at the school, while I only spent 4 years there. Our IQ's are nearly identical, but she had the better learning environment.
She's currently a doctor, while I work as a civilian for the government.
I wish luck would've been more on her side. Poor girl.
Sadly, I must cut this post short; I need to file a grievance with the Union, blame my co-workers for my ineptitude, and take the rest of the day off.
Dammit, someone changed my Freecell settings again... I'm taking a coffee break.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
>"...it seems, to me, that our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes."
The hardware, that is shared between us all, is fuzzily defined by the genetic side
All the rest ( I see it as the software ) probably comes from education, culture, experiences... but is influenced by the hardware, as any implementation would be
Ideas ?
If I were you, I wouldn't go around admitting I watch crap like that.
If we have learned anything from movies it is that we most protect the future from Biff, and prevent Biffco.
Yeah.. if it tastes like a bacon double cheeseburger with a side order of curly fries and onion rings, then I can pretty much guarantee that it certainly won't help your ticker.
:)
If however, it tastes like fresh fruit or vegtables then i'd say you will fare slightly better
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Favorite quote from the last linked article:
"This is genetic -- what you taste determines what you like to eat," chief researcher Linda Bartoshuk, an experimental psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., told United Press International. "What you like to eat determines your diet, and your diet is a risk factor for all kinds of diseases."
So, dieting is like a form of gene control? Maybe gene therapy could be the basis for a new Weight Watchers... the profit making potential is limitless!
"...it seems, to me, that our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes."
What made it seem like that to you? Genes, I guess.
Not to be confused with The Smell of Fear.
They just don't make movies like that anymore (and some would say with good reason).
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
If the right kind of scientists figure out a way to genetically alter what people like, we could get rid of all those people who like velvet paintings, garden gnomes, and NASCAR racing!
Of course there is the darker side . . .
He really likes the taste of michael's shit-encrusted tiny cock.
If he hadn't left us so prematurely, I'm sure the recent spate of genetic determinism would have given him enough material for another edition or two of The Mismeasure of Man .
RIP, Mr. Gould. You tried.
Chicken, pain tastes like chicken..
my sig
Most of the genes that play a role in behavior are explored in mice, and were discovered in the mouse genome project; in mice, you don't need to worry about inflicting only tolerable amounts of pain. So, most developments in neurogenetics come from the mouse genome project, or the C. elegans (a little tiny worm my colleagues upstairs like to study) genome project, not the human genome project.
The human genome project, as yet, has not produced a stirring new mandate for nature vs. nurture. In fact, since human beings have less than half as many different individual genes as was expected (we have less than 50,000; before the genome came out 100,000 was the most popular prediction) a great deal of our complexity/diversity must arise from something other genetics. That is to say, more complexity arising during our development, less complexity "pre-programmed". The behavior of little tiny worms is almost entirely controlled by genetics, but I wouldn't generalize from that.
Of course, we are going to find genes that influence our behavior in complex ways. There is no doubt about this; it was already known, for example, that some genes existed that impart a predilection for alchoholism. Finding such genes, individually, and further clarifying what they do should NOT be taken as an indicator of what role genes, in general, may play in specifying the diversity observed in human consciousness and behavior.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
You don't have comments enabled.
In this case it's well worth it to RTFA:
She's lovely
Maybe it's just in my genetic makeup to fancy raven haired beauties who lick lollypops... Rrr.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
Environmeent has been scientificly proven to be the most important factor in one's personality development for a long time. I could point you a any number of twin studies that confirm thst, but you all know how to use google, so I won't waste my time.
You haven't tasted Pain til you try my wife's cooking. /me passes slashdot he salt.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
In Soviet Russia, pain tastes you!!
If genes were not far more important that environment you could teach a frog differential equations.
Yummy. Who doesn't like the taste?
stripe-2
Have you actually tried this, or are you just assuming that it won't work?
Assumption is the brother of all fuckups.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
"Far more women than men are 'super-tasters', as the 25% of people who are especially sensitive to bitterness are formally known."
So that's the excuse now eh? "Sorry honey, I can't because I am a Super Taster"
"I disagree w/ 1 thing U said, I can't take ANYTHING U said seriously = I don't like bulldogs, I hate all animals
This gave me a good laugh, as it reminded me of something from the online comic wigu. In the nurses office of the elementary school there's a poster which says something along the lines of "Hitler is bad. Drugs are bad. If you do drugs you're like Hitler!".
We put them in jail because they bother us. It is as simple as that. Society defends itself. What's wrong with that. I don't see how people may not be entirely responsible for their actions means that significant parts of our goverment, society, and justice system are flawed. It isn't their job to determine responsibility is it?
There seems to be a drive to explain persons solely through their genes. Anyone who feels that way: This is a dangerous road to Nazism. The believe to be able to identify criminals by their genes before they even committed a crime, indeed before they're even born has the potential for Nazi scale horrors.
One last thing: The human genome is a few hundred MByte. The human brain's capacity is estimated in the Petabyte region. That alone should dispell the myth that the genes are everything.
Yea, I can only wish. My father is quite the ladies' man while I am reading slashdot.
"It tastes like burning!" -Ralph
http://www.codebushido.com
its a website!
if you think the major facets of your personality are based on how much you feel pain and how well you taste things. I'd like to think that human personalities have a bit more depth to them than that.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
This is a link to a story about an schizophrenia gene. And here is an article about the search of autism genes.
It was the first comment making such a statement!
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
They're really starting to understand how people feel about things.
But to know you is to know your weaknesses. And to know your weaknesses is to have power over you. And having power over you makes you less of a free human being and more of a tool.
But it's all academic, isn't it? People who can't come to this conclusion on their own, do so because they're unable to recognize it. And if they can't recognize it, they won't understand it, even if carefully presented to them. So this is merely a nod to the people who also find it interesting that people believe they've finally stumbled on reality through "reality" television.
What I'm trying to say, is that one person's enlightenment from reality television, is another persons opportunity for enlightenment in reality reality.
Dendrite count and branch order (depth of the "threads) is been known to have some genetic basis. More branches is thought to mean that learning takes place (in the hypocampus, a memory center of the brain), and it seems that some people are genetically dumb. If not people, then certainly lab rats that can't learn to navigate a maze for a reward (such as food or an addictive drug).
I suggest you read Slashdot
In fact, this correlates with one twin study I read a long time ago- the two brothers were separated at birth, one was somewhat well off, the other grew up poor (and was raised in an orphanage). The poor one was an introvert, while the other was an extrovert. Of note, however, was that both smoked the same brand of cigarettes, and used the same obscure, imported toothpaste.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Exactly.
Which is why, for example, it is NOT valid to let someone like O.J. Simpson go with the excuse that, "He was abused! He killed two people but that's ok because he was abused!" That's a bunch of bullshit.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that:
O.J. Simpson
*D*I*D*
kill two people. In my opinion.
Take a look at the dept, noob.
They've had a song "Taste the Pain" since before 1989.
Those guys are brilliant.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
How you turn out is due to: 90% genetic factors 5% upbringing and life experience factors 5% luck
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
This has linked COMT with a gene. (for those who didn't read the article it "cleans up" after a dopamine chemical linked in sensing pain)
Is it really all that revealing that COMT production is genetically based. Anymore than it is to say insulin production is genetically based.
Regardless, the whole "nature v. nurture" debate is a futile argument when it comes to explaining individual action and the personality that defines those actions.
Esp. when one has a much more reliable and immediate explanation for one's actions, which is to say conscious "choice." Something which we have a much more intimate connection to.
(Sure it's easy to say our conscious choices are mere illusion created from a chain of causation in a reductionist universe... of course doing requires that "illusion" to believe in the reality of reductionism.)
At best genetics and enviorrment are probability guidelines in judging the possible future actions/personalities of an individual. However they are a piss poor way to explain human actions as a whole.
Odyssey, a show on NPR, just had a discussion about some of these same issues and the realaudio link can found here:
e du le/hd_sched_light.htm&BodyURL=/schedule/odyssey/od yssey_v2.htm
http://www.wbez.org/frames.asp?readerURL=../sch
It was quite good, and I think the consensus of their panel (an MIT chemical biologist, a University of Chicago geneticist, and another panel member, I forget from where) was that we are a long way off from reducing human behavior to genes alone.
jeff
"They taste like burning." -Ralph
my kids, my cousins, and my siblings.
Three different age groups that grew up in completely different surroundings.
At a recent wedding I watched as my cousin sat and ate EXACTLY like my son and sister do.
they walk with the same heavy foot steps.
they whine about the same thing.
they have the same low pain thresholds
they basicly suck.
Not only do they look alike they act alike such that they could easily pass off for each other (save for the age differences.)
freaky freaky freaky.
It was this realization that allowed me to see why and how my son drives me up the wall. He has the same exact mannerisms as my oldest brother and baby sister.
You cannot fight genetics!!!
comment directly in my journal
A related article links your sense of taste to your risk for cancer, heart disease, etc.
Ok, enough stretching here. That has to do with EATING habits. The sense of taste only affects health as a behavior modifying agent. Don't make more of it than it is.
and it tastes like chicken!
Researchers believe that further investigation may lead to revealing the source of ALS (Advanced Lawyer Syndrome), which is manifest by a high level of insensitivity to feeling their clients' pain. ALS is a recessive trait currently thought to be caused by one or several genetic mutations on Chromosome 7.
"...it seems, to me, that our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes."
Are not our genes influnced by our environment, all be it in a longer time line? So really this complicates the whole nature vs nuture matter even more. Just my two cents.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
This is such drivel. That score of one is horrid.
Trying to prove their ideas "scientifically" is an idea that has been taken up by the far left and the far right in the past, and many of the scientific conclusions of both left and right have over time been shown to be ridiculous. On the left you have the Marxist tradition of "scientific socialism" that "scientifically proves" that there is a dialectically material force of history that will lead to the unstoppable triumph of communism. On the right you have eugenics, the Bell Curve, and "science" proving socially darwinistic ideas, and that human behavior is genetically determined. These ideas, both the scientific socialist and eugenic science ideas were very popular in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but time has shown massive gaps in both of these body of ideas, and they both also lead to some extent to the massive exterminations carried out under Hitler and Stalin. But aside from the toll of ideas, is the simple fact that I think time has shown that many of these so-called scientific ideas have a lot of holes in them.
When a scientist points his telescope at the sky, it doesn't really have much of a social effect on earth nowadays (although centuries ago, Galileo Galilei was convicted of heresy for touting the Copernican system, and Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his works on Copernican astronomy). When the lens is pointed at humans however, especially human behavior, you are sure that there will be plenty of people grabbing "scientific" research and using it to push their social agendas. So much so, that I have an enormous amount of skepticism about virtually any "scientific" model of human behavior, including psychiatry and psychology. That someone has "scientific" proof of some aspect of human behavior, in this case, that it's predetermined by genetics, really has to be taken with a grain of salt. As do anthropological and sociological studies that show humans are generally better off cooperating and working for the greater good (social anarchism) as opposed to competing (capitalism). These kind of ideas usually break down into left wing and right wing people either supporting or disputing the theories, breaking down among political lines, and so on and so forth, I can't think of anything more unscientific than that. That it's been scientifically proven that "our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes" is the epitomy of what sounds like political propaganda - the nurture versus nature debate is an ancient philosophical debate, and from my discussions with scientists who know more about the genome project than I do, they are barely able to use the information they have cataloged to solve medical problems (despite the hype - which is needed for funding), never mind have scientifically set in stone the answer to a fundamental philosophical question about human nature. I take this news with a huge grain of salt.
>"Ethnobotanist Timothy Johns, of McGill University in Toronto, found Bartoshuk's work..."
Talk about inspiring confidence in the sources.
McGill is in Montreal, it has two campuses, but neither is in Toronto, just goto McGill, look up Timothy Johns in the directory, then consult a campus map - his office is in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec (~10 miles South-West of downtown Montreal).
Why not write "MIT is in New York City"?
I bet fear tastes like chicken.
People do the same things because they are similar and are in similar environments.
You said: "Blaming a person does just as much good as blaming their genes."
If people have no free will, why shouldn't they be treated like objects? Discarded if useless, defective or don't meet standards.
Who decides what's defective? How about those who have free will? Or you might say those who have an illusion of free will.
If you say you have free will, we can blame you - it's your responsibility.
If you say you don't have free will, the rest of us have the responsibility of what to do with "you" (there is no you after all). If you are defective we can choose to restrict "you" or discard "you". I say discard not kill because you are a dead or lifeless object.
Of course a dead object that once lived might be treated with a bit more respect than an object that never lived.
Why such loaded words? According to the research cited, subjects felt different amounts of pain from the same stimulus. If I feel pain that I'd rate at 6 on a scale of 0 to 10, and after the same stimulus someone else rated their pain a 3, all that says is I am feeling more pain than the other person. It does not say anything about how well I can withstand pain.
It extremely common for people to believe that the same amount of tissue damage causes the same amount of pain for anyone. However, pain researchers knew long before this study that this belief is a fallacy. [Pain: The Science of Suffering by Patrick Wall, Columbia University Press, 2000.]
Perception of pain is a complex event, modified by genetics, culture, experience, anxiety level, perceived purpose of the pain, expected duration, etc. This study is looking at a single variable, and the only thing really interesting is that it suggests that some of the inherited variability is tied to a alleles of a specific gene.
Denise
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. - Epictetus
For me pain has a smell. The worse I hurt myself the stronger it is. Sometimes I can even smell it when I'm just thinking about getting hurt. Or when I'm about to do something stupid that is likely to get me hurt. Yeah.
(nt)
1.) Underpants.
2.) ???
3.) Pain.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
did you just say your son sucks? Man if he grows up and inds this post, imagine the therapy bills.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
They have video of lesbian mice? Man those scientists have some freaky fetishes.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
"[I]t seems to me that our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes."
:-P
I can vouch for that. I am very outgoing and musical and into drama and acting, like my mom. My sister is very serious and intent and driven, like my dad. Both grew up in a normal family with both parents present, but we are very different from one another, but much like one of our parents.
Aside from my personal experience, I have seen many studies that show that twins, raised separately, such as twin orphans adopted by different couples, will grow up to have very similar personalities.
If anybody can find these studies online, post a link. I'm tired.
If everything was genetic then we'd all have the same culture and customs. Just because modifying a gene creates an effect doesn't mean that same effect can't be created by other non-genetic means.
Everyone and his dog knows that behavior tends to run along cultural/social lines.
Ask any modern psychologist and they'll tell you that the only people who talk about Nature versus Nurture are Psych 101 students. The concept is old and buried (as the field has come to the realization that psychological principles are more unified in nature).
A correlary would for someone to say that big iron and dumb terminals are the way of the future because your Comp Sci 101 handbook published in 1978 says so.
Someone else mentioned the pseudo-science of eugenics and social darwinism. Both are known to be BS. The problem is that it took a long time for the field of psychology to shake them and become a formal science.
The problem is that most people think it is so "obvious" that the field can be mastered in a sixteen week freshman level course. People like that are the Script Kiddies of the psych world.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Hmm to me pain can only have a smell if something's burning ...
.. ...
and
It's a feeling of AUCH,
It's a smell (and probably the taste) of burned flesh
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
If you believe all the reductionist crap that comes out of genetics today, you should also believe there is a gene that determines whether you'll fall prey to absurdly reductionist pseudo-scientific theories like genetic determinism.
When you reach your teenage years, you're programmed to tend to irritate and be irritated by what your relatives to. That's part of what is supposed to urge the youngsters to leave the village more and more...and in the process keep it safer by harrassing the nearby lions. Their feeling of invincibility also helps them to more effectively harrass the lions...
DAF (Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft) wrote:
Willst Du schön sein
musst Du leiden
und Leiden ist schön
What's the logic of these researchers?
...most male supertasters enjoy fatty, sugary
> Most [supertasters] shun foods rich in sugar
> and fat...As a result supertasters tend to be
> thinner...
>
>
> foods and tend to be heavier
F*cking idjits. I would hate to think this is the researchers who wrote results like this and that it's some typically scientifically illiterate hack writer.
I recall a study from over 20 years ago where fat people tended to like foods heavier in fats than in sugars. Thinner people preferred sweeter foods. This was because fats packed more calories per unit than sugars, believe it or not. Fat people don't sit around on sofas eating cakes and donuts -- they sit around on sofas eating cheeseburgers and pizzas.
Did they have any other, less esoteric foods you might actually have around the house you could test yourself with?
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
It's kind of a scary thought knowing that perhaps things in life are more natural than nurturing.
--If only there was a license required to use a computer.
Taste and pain, crucial traits that our ancestors must have needed in order to survive are genetically related? Wow. I'd never have guessed that.
Next you'll be telling me gender is genetic...
Dave.
As to whether the system which we call "consciousness" is in fact determinate.
You've already assumed a universal cause and effect relationship in a reductionist world (That is to say one's consciousness is formed from determinate features, therefor it too must be determinate.)
Assuming every effect can be traced to a determinate cause is a useful assumption to make. However it is unscientific on its own, *especially* when dealing with non-linear dynamic systems where wholly new and previously unpredicted properties can emerge (the whole is more than the sum of its parts). In humans this thing we call consciousness can be said to be such a system, and thus can not be explained via the prosperities of its parts alone, but rather the properties of its whole.
At best when dealing with such systems we can only suggest probabilities in human action. As such, even if there is a gene that makes people have a tendency to be lazy, some can still act to over come it. Because complex human behavior is an assortment of genetic parts, environmental factors *and* consciousness feedback.