

Parasites That Brainwash Their Host - mark-t
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/08/brainwashed_by_a_parasite.php

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sungam
Cysticercosis (pork tapeworm) can cause marked personality changes in humans
when cysts form in the brain.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cysticercosis>

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river_styx
I think I saw that on an episode of House M.D.

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jcl
As the Wikipedia article notes, it was the pilot episode.

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andrewl
Robert Sapolsky has a fascinating article on this topic called "Bugs in the
Brain." I couldn't remember the article title, but I just had to google for
the terms:

sapolsky french kiss polar bear

and that did it. Read the article and find out why. It's classic Sapolsky.

<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=bugs-in-the-brain>

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jasonlbaptiste
hmm, no comments yet? I'm assuming its one of those articles that speaks for
itself. I know I read it last year, but watching it/reading it all over again
was just as fascinating. The fact that similar proteins were used in the
fungi, which coordinated with the actual organism was pretty amazing. It's
almost as if evolution hacked itself to brainwash an organism. Kind of nuts...

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time_management
There are some who believe that fungi and plants like marijuana and psilocybin
mushrooms actually co-evolved with mammalian nervous systems, as opposed to
the more common theory that their psychoactive chemicals evolved as pesticides
(like caffeine, which is deadly to insects). For example, one theory is that
psilocybin developed to inspire herbivorous animals to break out of their
routines and seek new ranges, defecating over a wider area and creating a
larger habitat for the mushrooms. Terrence McKenna, though it should be said
that he was far from a skeptical researcher, believed that psilocybin actually
drove human evolution; for example, drug-induced synesthesia, mapping concepts
to symbols, is his explanation for the emergence of language. (However,
language has been shown to emerge naturally in the absence of psychedelic
chemicals, so I find this to be particularly far-fetched.)

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lacker
Language has been shown to emerge naturally? I'm not sure what you're
referring to, could you provide a link?

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a-priori
One major example that has stuck with me in the case of Nicaraguan Sign
Language, which was spontaneously developed by a group of deaf schoolchildren.
Wikipedia has an article on it, and Stephen Pinker discusses the phenomenon at
length in his book _The Language Instinct_.

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lacker
Yeah, but that doesn't show how language evolved, it just shows that language
is innate in modern humans rather than a purely social construct.

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a-priori
That's not what you asked. You asked for evidence that language "has been
shown to emerge naturally". The case of NSL is such evidence.

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andyking
Could someone have said "that page starts off with a huge close up of an
insect"? I freaked as soon as it popped up and had to close my eyes.

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zasz
Gross. This stuff's used in Chinese medicine. My parents have a friend who
drinks a tea made from this fungus.

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illicium
Mushrooms are fungi, you know.

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zasz
I do know. The mushrooms on my pizza, however, weren't grown by planting
spores in a poor animal's head and growing and growing until its exoskeleton
cracked.

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Allocator2008
This is an awesome example, as the article says, of the extended phenotype of
Prof. Richard Dawkins. The genes of the worm parasite for example, produce
proteins which manipulate the central nervous system of the grasshopper, ergo,
one has the genes of one organism affecting the behavior of another organism.
I'm a big Dawkins fan, ever since I got 'The Selfish Gene'. I am particularly
intrigued by the ability of the parasite to escape once its host has been
preyed upon, so if a frog eats a grasshopper that has a worm in it, the worm
can escape both the carcass of the grasshopper and the frog. In the end, the
grasshopper becomes nothing more or less than the worm's mechanism of
replication. One could view this as a restricted class of cases, however, I
think one can generalize this by saying as some do, that in fact all life from
parasites to ourselves is simply a form of intermediaries to preserve a
relatively restricted set of phenotypes, i.e., we are indeed, like the
grasshopper, "gene carrying robots". Of course I think I take a certain geeky
pleasure from this knowledge, to be able to disabuse people of their quaint,
deluded notions of life having mystical attributes, when in fact it is finally
speaking a fancy chemical process brought about to preserve genomes, this, and
nothing more! :-)

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time_management
* Of course I think I take a certain geeky pleasure from this knowledge, to be able to disabuse people of their quaint, deluded notions of life having mystical attributes*

1\. Evolution does not disprove a vitalistic or "mystical" explanation for the
origin and progress of life.

2\. The "mystical" position has lost no ground to scientific advances,
although rigid systems of belief (e.g. creationism) have. Atheism has existed
for thousands of years; presumably, it's as old as theism. The partial retreat
of Christianity from mainstream Euro-American life has to do with cultural
forces, not science.

