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Genetic Switches Behind 'Love' Identified In Prairie Voles
ananyo writes "Researchers have shown for the first time that the act of mating induces permanent chemical modifications in the chromosomes (epigenetic changes), affecting the expression of genes that regulate sexual and monogamous behavior in prairie voles. Prairie voles have long been of interest to neuroscientists and endocrinologists who study the social behavior of animals, in part because this species forms monogamous pair bonds — essentially mating for life. The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans (abstract)."
The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans
A good model for ideal human behavior, sure, but actual behavior?!? One wonders if the researchers have met any actual human couples.
Of course they haven't met actually human couples. They're researchers.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
"This is a study I myself wanted to do years ago,” says Thomas Insel, who heads the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “...This study for me really is the first experimental demonstration that the epigenetic change would be necessary for the long-term change in behaviour.”
Insel continued. "Unfortunately, due to a scandalous bit of contrived fiction, we here at NIMH have been prohibited from doing this kind of work for decades. Every attempt to work on a rodent model is sabotaged, with a Frisbee left at the scene and the words 'REMEMBER NICODEMUS' spray-painted on the wall. Police never found a suspect, and eventually Congress pulled the funding. Hopefully our colleagues at Florida State can continue this valuable work without such interference!"
Everything is better with chainsaws.
"a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans"
Are humans that close to prairie voles? Because bonobos, our closest actual relation evolutionary speaking, are highly sexualized and totally polygamous.
http://brembs.net/bonobos.html
Of course, if one is seeking to bolster some culturally-determined myth of monogamy (so as to uphold property rights and inheritance, perhaps) then you've got to look pretty far afield for examples of monogamous species.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans
A good model for ideal human behavior, sure, but actual behavior?!? One wonders if the researchers have met any actual human couples.
People like the vole model because prairie voles are(somewhat atypically) pair-bonded; but there is at least one closely related vole flavor that isn't. Makes narrowing down the elements involved (comparatively) pleasant and straightforward, by biology standards. Plus, 'vole' is pretty close to 'lab rat' in terms of size/cost/lifecycle-length/animal-rights-activists-setting-fire-to-your-lab, which makes it preferable to larger, more unwieldy, comparison animals.
Indeed. Primate monogmay correlates fairly well with proportional testical size - by which measure humans fall about midway between gorillas (where the females will reject advances by anyone but their troop leader) and chimpanzees (who use sex for a wide variety of social purposes and demonstrate almost no prolonged sexual pair-bonding).
I would be inclined to suggest that holding long-term monogamy as the "ideal" human behavior is itself the source of the vast majority of the problems our species encounters in that domain. There are (were?) considerably advantages to such an arrangement when trying to establish stable sociological institutions upon which empires can be built, but those advantages come at the expense of trying to distort our basic natures into something that they are, generally speaking, not inclined to be.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There is minimal evidence to suggest that humans are biologically predsposed to long-term pair bonding at all, in fact there's considerable evidence to the contrary. Oxytocin does however seem to be a significant agent in the amount of pair-bonding we are predisposed to.
The problem is that researchers like these try to use species that are biologically inclined to long-term monogamy as models for an unrelated species (us) that are sociologically biased towards it. Because the basic fact is that sociological behaviors operate on an almost completely different set of rules, and changes on timescales that genetics can't hope to respond to effectively.
So how about for a change instead of trying to shoehorn human behavior into some sort of arbitrary "moral ideal", we instead take a good hard look at what we actually are, and adjust our sociological and moral norms to be in line with our basic natures. Socially enforced monogamy was a useful solution to support child-rearing as our societies grew beyond the scale where tribalism was effective, but it was hardly the *only* solution, and irrationally clinging to it as the ideal today, when pretty much everything else about our society has been utterly transformed, is intellectually questionable at best.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.