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Parasites Makes Us Dumber or Sexier
odie_q writes "It has long been known that the Toxoplasma gondii parasite alters its host's behavior, but now it seems the way it alters it depends on the sex of the host. From the article: 'A common parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid, an Australian researcher says ... Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women. On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.'"
Clearly, this is a textbook case of toxoplasmosis. You should keep your hands out of the litter box.
Do you like German cars?
A scientific explaination of Jocks and blondes.
So THAT's what happened to me. Suddenly everything makes sense, and it's all Smokey's fault.
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
The whole thing sounds like a load of cat crap to me.
They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.
Hum, if you add "addicted to an internet news site" it would perfectly match the Slashdot syndrome.
Do you think HR will buy my parasite excuse for what I did to that girl? I know where to get a phony doctor note.
Table-ized A.I.
What are the odds that guys with low IQs, short attention spans, and an affinity for risks are just more likely to eat undercooked meat, and that the more outgoing promiscuous women catch it because of them.
Wheres the damn Goa'uld tag when you need it?
Seriously. He used to be quite articulate. I just saw a youtube snippet of him talking fast, articulate, and using big words in the mid 90's. It was like a different man. Something changed him into a stubburn bumbler. Some speculate drug abuse, but everyone around him says he swore off substance abuse decades ago.
Table-ized A.I.
I found this piece of news very interesting. Is it known how the parasite affects our behavior? If it secretes a chemical that has the effect, I'd say this could be used for treatment in a variety of medical conditions. If it "attacks" specific areas of the brain, it may reveal interesting things about it.
Things such as this hints to how our minds work, which is possibly one of the most fascinating things in the universe (:
Hey oog, make sure to give back the OoGhiJ MIQtxxXA super computer before hurling yourself off the tall building.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Maybe it is the next phase, of mind evolution? Snowcrash popularized tower of babel, where humans evolved through infection by a meta-virus, that had real life counterpart with same effects(Nam-shub evolution into real world). The virus broke down barriers between clearly separated brain parts and made them more equal in reasoning on how to behave.o usness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind
;)
links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consci
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
Also if you haven't read snow crash, you must do so immediately.
I can deal with being stupider as long as I can play the holophoner.
So how come I can't play the holophone?
barack to the future?
Correlation != causation.
Even since the last time this came up, I haven't seen anything done to differentiate between "symptoms of infection" and "traits of average cat owners."
I believe this is one of those news stories that sits around waiting for a slow news day. The original paper was released in November. It's written by Kevin Lafferty and was published in Proc. Roy. Soc. B.
It's a really quite fascinating paper - I recommend tracking it down if you can get access. Here's how it goes: Toxoplasmia gondii is adapated to live in cats and reproduces in felid intestinal cells & is shed, encysted, in their feaces. Then it can directly infect cats who come into contact with the cysts, or it encysts in brains of smaller mammals, and moves up the food chain as they get eaten until it hits a cat, and can reproduce again.
Fascinatingly, T.g. appears to affect rodent behavior to increase predation risk - i.e. the rodents become more active, less fearful of cat/cat smells, and have increased dopamine levels (which supposedly leads to novelty seeking behavior and neuroticism-type behaviors, or at least, they do in humans).
Despite humans not having any major cat predators, it could still affect us as a byproduct type of thing. Particularly that whole dopamine increase - this is should increase neuroticism levels.
So - the big question - does prevalence of T.g. correlate with cultural variation in neuroticism in humans? Lafferty finds a fairly strong correlation ( r2 of 0.38 ) between population aggregate neuroticism (as measured by the fairly standard NEO PI-R personality inventory ).
Unfortunately I think the populations he uses for his stats are a little bit suspect (always the problem with worldwide analyses though), but it's definitely worth a read. You should also keep in mind that so far it's only an interesting correlation and not a direct demonstration that T.g. causes large scale cultural differences.
henry -- the human evolution news relay
Is there any parasite that makes MEN more attractive?
As if we didn't have enough biological disadvantages in the mating game, this one is nature's way of applying the final curb stomp.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Based on the description, this parasite will turn that ugly girl next door into a hot, promiscuous girl who might stop pepper spraying me! Sign me up for two!
"A common parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid"
What do you mean by more stupid?
www.isoHunt.com
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence".
I so hoped that George W. Bush would win the 2004 elections to make sure he is still president when the failure of his presidency becomes more clear. So no one can blame the ongoing breakdown in Iraq and the reappearing Taliban in Afghanistan to a liberal and weak Democrat administration which messes anything up the Bush Administration has started.
I was starting to wonder if the strategies of the Bush administration might just be based on complete incompetence and ignorance after them closing in on Iraq in connection to 9/11. I had a teacher who was in Iraq on a development project in the 1970ies with still some connections there, and according to her Iraq had a mainly agnostic government based on arabic-nationalist and socialist ideas (e.g. arabic nationalsocialism). Tariq Aziz, the former second man in Iraq, is a maronite christian, not a muslim after all. So all alleged connections to a fundamentalist muslim group were doubtfull at best. Saddam Hussein was trying to play the muslim card after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, because Socialism was no longer fashionable, but with the Gulf War in 1992 the Muslim Card also failed because all neighboring states (both baathist/fascist like Syria and fundamentally islamic as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Sheikdoms) were telling him off.
In the end Saddam Hussein seemed to me just a dictator which tried to cling on power with all means, and I guess he was completely unideologic except for the ideology that he was not to be toppled.
A big hint to the complete misinterpretation of the situation in Iraq was to me that the development of the war was so different from the predictions. The South, which was considered pro-intervention and expected to greet the U.S. troups with flowers and celebration, was fighting hard, and the Sunni Triangle, which was suspected to be strongly defended and determined for a last stand, was taken within the matter of days. When the toppling of Saddam's statue in Bagdad was mainly watched with lethargy by the people (compare the video footage with that of the Berlin Wall in 1989!) and only a U.S. tank managed to pull it down finally I knew: The invasion was utterly botched, and the Iraqi population was at best waiting how it would work out in the end. The plundering and looting in the following weeks might have finally tilted the balance against the U.S., and at this very moment I was sure that the cause of "bringing democracy to the Arab world" was lost.
It just took two hundred thousands dead Iraqis, the Abu Guraib scandal, the Guantanamo disaster and another three years of ongoing insurgence in Iraq to let the U.S. electorate figure out the same thing. And the Bush administration seems only to have changed course to avoid a complete election catastrophe in November 2006. So this movement seems not to be not based in a thinking process within the administation, but just a tactic maneuver to stay in power.
I've got two cats at home and I do .NET programming at work!
...infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to menPerhaps it's just me, but my first thought after reading the summary was that the best and brightest the world of cosmetics marketing has to offer are probably working on the advertising campaign right now. "New, from L'Oreal: toxoplasmosis, the only parasite derived from cat shit that's /guaranteed/ to make you MORE ATTRACTIVE to the opposite sex. Because you're worth it!"...
Given the crap they already get women to shell out fifty quid for a couple of ounces, parasite-infected cat shit would be a relatively easy sell.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
A parasite that might be able to change my behaviour.
:)
A lot of them do. For example, Enterobius vermicularis will have you scratching your butt all day and all night. I supect that this behaviour will render you definitely UNSEXY to most people, as well as rather smelly and angry
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Damn you're sexy, you have parasites don't you ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
It doesn't look to me as this is a terminal illness, the infection is gone in a few weeks to months, so it's hardly an explanation for the world's stupidity.
Why UNIX?
I, for one, welcome our new Toxoplasmosis overlords.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Or is the behavior being interpreted differently based on gender?
It sounds like the parasite simply amplifies the affects of certain sex hormones in both sexes, and lowers inhibitions... In civilized men, too much of a good thing. (For less civilized men, it means "Jackass: The movie".) As for women, it's hard to draw conclusions about the intelligence of someone who's "more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous". Some would consider that to be potentially more "risky," regardless of the fact that most men like the end result.
Since the rat study indicated that the parasite changed rat behavior to increase its own chances of survival (while putting the host rat at risk of being eaten by a cat), I wonder if the results of the behavior modification in humans could potentially result in more pregnancies and might therefore be a failed attempt by the parasite to insure survival as well.
If the parasite works by increasing dopamine levels in the brain, that would most certainly not decrease attention span or reaction time, it would in fact improve them, as can be seen when you take any dopaminergic drug. Higher dopamine doesn't hinder academic achievement, nor will it lower your IQ. That is ridiculous-- most of the mental benefits from cardiovascular exercise come from increased DA levels. Further, the effects of dopamine are not so sexually dimorphic in humans, the only real difference is that estrogen increases DA sensitivity. The archetypal drugs for increasing DA levels? Ritalin and Adderall.
These are low quality studies and an abomination of science to conclude that correlation = causation. Nothing is further from the truth! The main way toxoplasma is spread in humans is in eating undercooked meat. Considering the actual effects of dopamine on the brain, doesn't it seem more likely that perhaps a low IQ, low educational achievement, and risk taking/promiscuous behavior predispose one to eat or undercook meat? But even that is untested.
Actually, Toxoplasma gondii is a eukaryote and is not a bacteria.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
First thing I thought while reading the title was "hey great more Futurama news!"
Get my wife a cat!
This sig only exists because you are observing it.
I remember reading a few months ago that some reseachers had a found a higher incidence of schizophrenia among persons who, when small children, had had cats in their households, leading some to believe that Toxoplasmosis gondii may be a causal factor. Apparently, it is claimed that new research has confirmed this. This is of personal interest to me because my 14 year-old son was infected by Toxoplasmosis a couple years ago during a vist to Trinidad. Physicians suspect that the most likely source was my wife's aunt's home-made yogurt, which my kids love. My wife's aunt is an animal lover, and keeps numerous dogs and cats, as well as feeding hosts of wild birds that descend on the house every morning.
It was discovered after he complained about spots in his vision, and an opthalmological determined that there was a lesion on his retina which was flaking away. A blood test confirmed the presence of Toxoplasmosis gondii. Now he has to have an annual examination to ensure that the parasite is being kept under control by antibiotics, but it's always an extremely apprehensive time for us.
I can't believe nobody's made the obvious and obligatory Futurama reference.
Tom Geller