Comments on: Love Is A Virus

By: Is an inner autopilot controlling your brain? « Xenophilia (True Strange Stuff)

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:18:04 +0000

[...] unconscious with conscious responses and showed that a reward-judging region of the brain, the ventral palladium, became active in both [...]

By: The Brain Could an Inner Zombie Be Controlling Your Brain? - PoliticalGroove Forums

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:02:13 +0000

[...] unconscious with conscious responses and showed that a reward-judging region of the brain, the ventral palladium, became active in both cases. Mounting evidence of our inner zombie at work has led some [...]

By: Francis Hitching

Francis Hitching — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 17:21:13 +0000

The Times of London recently carried an articlw which said that mountain voles had the highest rate of sex (in the mating season) in the animal world. Do you know if this is true? And can you help with an e-mail address, even if not as entertaining as yours?

Thanks, FH.

By: Alice

Alice — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 02:34:33 +0000

The shift from female promiscuity to female fidelity because of male guarding is a result of evolution only if genes mutated to produce guarding behaviour, isn’t it? Were there genes inclining males to guarding behaviour?

Also, it was mentioned that the vaso-aphrodisiac is probably not going to work on humans because we do not have a highly developed sense of smell. But perhaps vasopressin released will still allow couples to form deep attachments because of the visual memory of one’s partner, probably no less unique in sight than a praire mole is in smell, during mating? Well, if visual associations do not work, perhaps a personalized blend of perfume during sex does?

By: Carl Manaster

Carl Manaster — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 04:20:22 +0000

Thanks. I wish more of this were available online wihout subscription.

By: Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 04 Jul 2004 19:51:51 +0000

The vole paper in Nature brings this autism connection up, and cites the following paper:

Mol Psychiatry. 2002;7(5):503-7.

Transmission disequilibrium testing of arginine vasopressin receptor 1A (AVPR1A) polymorphisms in autism.

Kim SJ, Young LJ, Gonen D, Veenstra-VanderWeele J, Courchesne R, Courchesne E, Lord C, Leventhal BL, Cook EH Jr, Insel TR.

Laboratory of Developmental Neuroscience, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, University of Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

Impairment in social reciprocity is a central component of autism. In preclinical studies, arginine vasopressin (AVP) has been shown to increase a range of social behaviors, including affiliation and attachment, via the V(1a) receptor (AVPR1A) in the brain. Both the behavioral effects of AVP and the neural distribution of the V1a receptor vary greatly across mammalian species. This difference in regional receptor expression as well as differences in social behavior may result from a highly variable repetitive sequence in the 5′ flanking region of the V1a gene (AVPR1A). Given this comparative evidence for a role in inter-species variation in social behavior, we explored whether within our own species, variation in the human AVPR1A may contribute to individual variations in social behavior, with autism representing an extreme form of social impairment. We genotyped two microsatellite polymorphisms from the 5′ flanking region of AVPR1A for 115 autism trios and found nominally significant transmission disequilibrium between autism and one of the microsatellite markers by Multiallelic Transmission/Disequilibrium test (MTDT) that was not significant after Bonferroni correction. We also screened approximately 2 kb of the 5′ flanking region and the coding region and identified 10 single nucleotide polymorphisms.

By: Carl Manaster

Carl Manaster — Sun, 04 Jul 2004 19:29:45 +0000

> Mutations that knock out most of the microsatellites
> have even been linked to autism

Can you point me to some literature on this, please? Do you mean mutations that knock out microsatellites across the entire genome? Fascinating if so, but a quick Google didn’t find anything. And I think I must misunderstand, because knocking out all microsatellites would make linkage analysis (which would direct us toward the mutations) next to impossible.

By: Jason South

Jason South — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 20:15:22 +0000

Re gwangi:

Perhaps the finding that monogamous mammals exhibit extra-pair paternity isn’t surprising…but then the challenge becomes explaining why they bother with social monogamy (living with a partner on the same territory beyond mating periods) at all.

By: gwangi

gwangi — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 14:32:08 +0000

Is the finding that most “monogamous” mammals aren’t really that monogamous all that surprising? That’s been known in birds for years. Did we really expect mammals to be all that different?

By: Stentor

Stentor — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 03:12:52 +0000

It’s interesting that the monogamy/promiscuity difference is framed as a difference between the males. Did they look at how the female voles feel about monogamy? Being able to create monogamy by only treating the males suggests that the female meadow voles aren’t interested in the promiscuity scene, and are thus happy when these scientists get ahold of their mates, but out of luck otherwise. In which case I feel sorry for most of the world’s female meadow voles.