-Debayan
Kolkata

I’ll take a scientific look at the bible and present some things that jumped out at me in both and stretch things my dropping other possibilities.

If you suck a protozoan into an eyedropper it will find its way out.. If you suck it up again, it gets out faster. That is learning.

Bacterial intelligence is a good read. It looks at how separate microbes act as a group and make joint decisions.

In lepidopteran metamorphosis the caterpillar is essentially broken down entirely, and its component cells reorganized into a butterfly or moth. Yet it retains associations learned as a larval. That is that it’s entire nervous system breaks down yet retains learned information.

Perhaps chemical compounds inside of cells can store associations and perhaps they can be copied or added by intercellular parasites. Note a helpful behaviour, and MIHOP the behaviour in another host.

I will take the presupposition that perhaps T. Gondii had some intelligent even if only in the brain and explore that.

Jesus, killed by Rome and then then Rome decides to wipe out all Christians.
How?
They fed them to –>lionshttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2303829430302112921

rats( no fear symptoms)
cats
humans (jealous, suspicious symptoms = war)
back to rats again (eating the raw meat of dead soldiers.

Makes you wonder.

It is also very difficult to evaluate this study without a better breakdown of the data. For example, each data point on the scatterplots represents one country, but in the statistical analysis of the data is each country given the same weighting, even though they may represent much larger populations? For example, is the data from China (1 billion people) weighted just as much as the data from Sweden (9 million people)? Are the sample sizes collected the same? Are they the same cross section(s) of society that the data on personality was collected from? Why is Japan, a country of 127 million people, such a big outlier in the data in terms of infections (they are neurotic but not very infected)? The point is, collapsing millions or billions of people by national border seems sort of arbitrary.

Also, to what degree can we trust the personality assessments? Do we believe in the validity of the instruments which test for uncertainty avoidance? If so, why is Greece so much more averse to uncertainty than, say, Spain?

Still, T. gondii cysts infecting a human have nothing to lose, evolutionarily speaking, in trying manipulative strategies adaptive in other intermediate host species.

I wish this had been phrased more like, “Still, T. gondii cysts infecting a human may retain similar nervous system disruptive effects as those seen in other intermediate host species with similar nervous systems.” This takes the sense of intention on the part of the parasite out of it.

The second cringe came with:

This begs the question: could aspects of human culture result from a parasite selected to predispose its host to predation by cats?

It’s the “begs the question” error. Just plain annoying.

Yes, I’m pretty sure you can find out if you are infected. You get a serology test to detect the antibodies specific to toxoplasma gondii, apparently it’s pretty routine so I bet you could ask your doctor for it, but we all know how some doctors are….

It is possible to cure a latent infection with antibiotics, according to various things I have read including the wikipedia article. But of course doctor’s aren’t likely to be too enthusiastic about that because of antibiotic resistance (etc.?). Neverthless, intelligence decrease over a lifetime is going to have serious adverse consequences so I think treatment for those who want it shouldn’t be out of the question. Personally I consider this right up there with heart disease at the very least… To often people forget that living well now is most important of all. And toxoplasma causes many other changes, and probably thus problems for the long run, as well.

Your best bet is to avoid getting infected, of course. Apparently even ready to eat ham is infected with active cysts about 1.6% of the time (there’s a pdf on toxoplasma by the new zealand government that mentions the study….I think it has “datasheet” in the title”) . I don’t know any actual numbers for other meats, but pork esp. must be cooked well and for long enough. Apparently it’s possible to kill the cysts in meat by freezing them for long enough at the right temperature. What temp? How long? Nobody really knows, apparently. I’ve found many official websites with contradicting info from -4 C overnight to -21 C for a week.

In case I wasn’t clear, I also agree with the above posts that there should be MUCH more fuss about this, but there is some sort of cognitive dissonance that seems to occur when a widespread problem should have something done about it… as we can also see with problems like lead that took so long to be acknowledged and still aren’t really by the population at large. Or maybe people don’t think it can happen to them (groan).

He said “don’t vary” because the effects of the virus could only be seen on large unreliable “testing fields” or whatever you call em.

Toxoplasmosis doesn’t go away. If you’ve ever had it you will have antibodies to it for the rest of your life that show up in your bloodstream.

I think you could kill it and remain free of it if you don’t have a cat or ingest raw meat or contaminated water. H Clark recomends taking a weekly dose of the antiparasitic herbal formula to keep all parasites at bay after you’ve done the full paracleanse. I have to say again that I’ve never felt better in all my life than immediately following the big paracleanse.

On a more spiritual tack, what concerns me most is what ‘lives within the heart of man’. The Bible says that the heart of man is desperately wicked-this is undoubtably because of the wicked one, that serpent-satan whose evil genius has mankind in its parasitic grip. The ‘treatment’ for man’s sick condition?. Confess your sins to God, believe in the Lord Jesusu Christ and you will be born again! [Jn 3:3] Refuse this and you will be marked for eternal destruction, just as the mouse was marked for the cat. I have no fear for what can only kill the body but cannot kill the soul, [Mat 10:28] I say unto you, fear Him who when He has killed has power to destroy both soul and body in hell.

It appears that the authors began with a data set consisting of averaged personality profiles of several different national populations (others have pointed out the hazards inherent in this) and found a weak but non-negligable correlation.

He then “pared down” the list of countries by excluding considered the “non-Western” ones (with only a hazy justification for doing so) and found a much stronger correlation.

Does anyone else see the danger here?

This particular “paring down” operation appears to have been chosen ex post facto, its appropriateness established by the fact that the restricted set of countries displays a larger correlation than the original one. But does this not beg the question?

Given that the list of countries is rather short, and that there is a rather large number of other equally plausible ways of paring down the list (Anglophone/non-Anglophone, Latin/Non-Latin, New World/Old World, democratic/authoritarian, social democratic/neoliberal, religious/secular) and different possible ways of handling ambiguous cases in each of these (Is Turkey non-Western? Is Brazil Western?) is it not likely that some combination of the above would reveal a large correlation, regardless of whether any strong causal link actually exists?

As to the “Culture War” issue, this is quite a valid concern. A great deal of rather dubious “science” has been foisted on the public of late by a damnably uncritical mass media. While I see no evidence that this study or its authors are politically motivated, the degree of coverage afforded these rather preliminary findings (as compared to say, the nigh-invisible media reaction to Robert Altemeyer’s work on authoritarianism) is certainly suggestive of a confirmation bias at work.

Our current society with its multitude of opportunities for self-destruction (risk-taking sports, junk food, recreational drugs) allows this parasite to destroy us, but only if we let it. I imagine that the many constructive symbiotic parasites in our body must have been at this turning point at one time, but our food choices didn’t include cheetos and diet pepsi like they do now.

It’s extremely exciting to me that we can recognize organisms like this as the cause of large scale psychological dysfunction. By knowing what it feeds on we can starve it to death or divert it to our benefit. It means health and wellness may be IMPERATIVE for our social survival, in addition to it personal benefits. My excitement is tempered only slightly by the fact that a symptom of the infection is denial. I’ve been verbally assaulted quite ferociously and irrationally by biologists when I mention this subject.