6 ms·
"The big question here is how the wasp mother can control the ladybug, transforming her into a zombie babysitter... The answer is that the wasp mother injects t
by proc0 7y ago
"The big question here is how the wasp mother can control the ladybug, transforming her into a zombie babysitter... The answer is that the wasp mother injects the ladybug not just with the egg but also with a virus. "
This strengthens my belief that insects are like tiny little robots.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoMaybe, but that just makes us bigger, more complicated robots because we too have our behavior influenced by parasites and viruses.
- gwern 7y agoThe really interesting question is why don't we see these amazingly detailed and precise parasitic mechanisms elsewhere, like in mammals? Are we just doing a terrible job of finding them, or is there something more interesting going on? Del Giudice recently published a paper arguing that the baroque complexity of non-insect nervous systems may in part be an anti-parasite mechanism, by making it too hard for a distributed group of small simple parasites to find hacks: "Invisible Designers: Brain Evolution Through the Lens of Parasite Manipulation" https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2019-delguidice.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2019-delguidic... , Del Giudice 2019 (discussion: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/19/maybe-your-zoloft-stopped-working-because-a-liver-fluke-tried-to-turn-your-nth-great-grandmother-into-a-zombie/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/19/maybe-your-zoloft-stop... ).
- woliveirajr 7y agoToxoplasmosis is (not) your friend here [0] [0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/toxoplasmosis/symptoms-causes/syc-20356249 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/toxoplasmosis...
- gwern 7y agoToxo is the exception that proves the rule here. Toxo is perhaps the best known example of any parasite having human behavioral effects, yet the causal role of toxo is still not accepted, and what it's postulated to affect is pretty random: schizophrenia, car accidents, that sort of thing. That doesn't look like any kind of planned behavioral control which might affect toxo reproduction. It just looks like a parasite causing some damage post-infection. It's unclear if it even manages to replicate the mouse effect of making humans more attracted to cats (since we contract it mostly from cats, obvious confound). You certainly cannot compare its capabilities, in rodents or primates, to the astonishingly precise and complicated behaviors that insect parasites can orchestrate. And it's not like humans in the wild don't host plenty of parasites!
- samstave 7y agoWhat if Psychopathy is a Virus?
- gwern 7y agoUnlikely. That would be inconsistent with the heritability, for one thing, for which no genetic correlations with immune-related things have ever been reported that I've seen, and with the best attempts at finding a physical cause landing on things like under-reactive amygdalas and other things one might describe as general brain damage (like toxo) rather than any kind of cunning plan to spread a particular virus/parasite. (How would psychopathy spread a virus? It'd have to be an STD, I guess, except symptoms of psychopathy often show up in childhood and long before individuals have ever had sex, which is also problematic.) Psychopaths do seem fairly fertile, though, which is why theories sometimes invoke an evolutionary life-history explanation: it's a hawk-dove kind of strategy (adaptive if there are enough suckers around, and weak enough social constraints on psychopathic behavior, which would explain why it seems rarer in traditional rural environments and more common in modern urban environments).