Not really pointing at wealthy humans but I would wager that there are a variety of probable microbe combinations that predictably influence human behavior
Between toxoplasmosis from cats that give us more affinity to them at the expense of human relationships, and other unknown gut microbes, its very likely that even selfish behaviors or perhaps empathy are driven by these things
Adds another dimension to the “nature” part of the nature vs nurture observation
This bit was not too much of a stretch of the imagination.. "The uninfected workers in parasitized colonies, they realized, were laboring harder. Strained by the additional burden of their wormed-up nestmates, they seemed to be shunting care away from their queen. They were dying sooner than they might have if the colonies had remained parasite-free. At the community level, the ants were exhibiting signs of stress,"
First of all, every time a tornado struck and the roof was blown off, instead of running like hell, the infected would stop to stare upward in amazement, possibly waiting for the arrival of a giant bird.
On the first question, my guess is that it activates queen like behavior on a default ant. So it's not actually giving it powers beyond its species, just reconfiguring the particular setup.
According to Wikipedia, in larger colonies most ants are sterile, wingless females:
"Larger colonies consist of various castes of sterile, wingless females, most of which are workers (ergates), as well as soldiers (dinergates) and other specialised groups."
There's a Futurama episode that anticipated this. Fry eats an egg salad sandwich from a truck stop restroom vending machine and acquires a parasitic worm infection that gives him super powers.
Symbiotic just means two species living close together. That may be positive (mutualistic), neutral (commensal), or negative (parasitism). However, mutualistic and parasitic may not be mutually exclusive. For examples, see:
2. Zaccone, P., Fehervari, Z., Phillips, J. M., Dunne, D. W., & Cooke, A. (2006). Parasitic worms and inflammatory diseases. Parasite immunology, 28(10), 515-523, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3024.2006.00879.x
Viruses are a little different, though. Retroviruses aside, viruses spread as much and as fast as possible; any mutation that makes them spread more slowly is crowded out, evolution style.
So long as it can spread between hosts well enough, a deadly virus is a very successful virus – up until it's driven its host species to local extinction.
The deadliness of a virus doesn't assist its spread. The deadliness doesn't make it more or less successful, everything else being equal, but usually dead hosts are hosts that don't continue to spread the virus, so things aren't equal. In most cases deadliness in viruses is selected out precisely in order to increase their spread.
Deadliness of the virus is just a side effect of its fast spread - the major part of the spread is replication which damages the host. The virus is an optimization problem - replicate and spread as fast as you can as long as the associated host damage and deaths result in the spread decrease smaller than the gain from the replication intensity increase causing that damage and deaths.
>"The tapeworm-laden ants didn’t just outlive their siblings, the team found. They were coddled while they did it. They spent their days lounging in their nest, performing none of the tasks expected of workers. They were groomed, fed, and carried by their siblings, often receiving more attention than even the queen—unheard of in a typical ant society—and gave absolutely nothing in return."
I wonder if there is a human equivalent tapeworm that the Kardashians have ingested?
If you don't like the Kardashians, fine. I don't either. But clearly some folks do and are willing to help propel them to fame (or notoriety).
I know your comment is being glib, but it's emblematic of HN crowds saying, "I don't like this thing, therefore this thing is funny/bad." It costs you nothing to post your comment and just let people like the things they like.
Let people criticize things. I doubt you'd apply your comment toward your favorite political pet causes. Why are the Kardashians the one thing in our society that is not allowed to be criticized? This whole "let people enjoy things" is cynical, usually coming from the types of people who don't let anyone enjoy anything unless it is degenerate and mind-rotting.
> Why are the Kardashians the one thing in our society that is not allowed to be criticized?
They aren't, and I didn't say that. You can criticize the Kardashians all you want. Saying, effectively, "Kardashians are like these ant parasites, amirite guys?" isn't critique.
> I doubt you'd apply your comment toward your favorite political pet causes.
I think you dramatically underestimate how much I enjoy being critical of things I support, in fact much, much more so than things I oppose. Things I oppose I find easy to not discuss and write off/move past, generally.
> This whole "let people enjoy things" is cynical, usually coming from the types of people who don't let anyone enjoy anything unless it is degenerate and mind-rotting.
Let people enjoy things comes from a space of "We're all from different backgrounds, who are you to be the arbiter of what's fun?" Whether you are a furry or a larper or a reality tv show junkie or a gun nut.... who the fuck am I to tell you that you can't enjoy that? Obviously, there are limits when other people are involved (like, no, it's not an endorsement of enjoying murdering people), but I'm not out here trying to say that only lowest common denominator things are allowed.
Well said. HN likes to think of itself as a paragon of virtue and goodness, but it's a thinly layered veneer on top of a lot of bullying, nastiness, envy, and hate and fear of the unknown and those who are different.
Your reasonable live and let live comments are downvoted, while the absolutely pointless and off-topic empty vitriol bullying some completely unrelated people in a topic supposed to be about a scientific discovery is not. Amazing.
Yeah, I understood the analogy just fine, thanks. Obviously the parent was drawing a parallel between the pampered do nothing ants and the Kardashians.
But critique implies an analysis and some thought, not just a pithy one liner.
I have pretty devoutly hated celebrity my entire life, but in recent years I've come to realize that the real "job" of these kinds of "celebrity for celebrity's sake" types is pretty simple:
1. Be society's mirror
2. Be society's punching bag
The Kardashians obviously fill both of these jobs. I don't think it's fair to say they're above reproach – in fact, I hear tons of criticism of them any time their names are brought up around me. They're hardly taboo to criticize.
All of that said, I still think you're 100% right that we shouldn't stop people from hating on them. If we take these two "jobs" away from these sorts of celebrities, then at that point they become actually pointless. As much as I'd like to live in a world without them, at least for now the Kardashians and others are serving their purpose – provoking conversation about what we value as a society.
For some folks, lionizing the Kardashians is a way of saying what they think "perfection" (physically/financially/socially/some or all of the above) looks like in America right now. Others want to look at them and see everything that is wrong with us. For as much as I agree with the idea that criticism of celebrities is fundamental to their role in society, I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that celebrity has a real social function.
The Kardashians have actual jobs, though. "Celebrity for celebrity's sake" is a role the American public assigned to them, as is the role of American societal scapegoat. That isn't a fundamental role they fill, Americans just enjoy hating rich women. You never see the same degree of contempt levied at rich men.
Elon Musk says hello? I hear a lot more hate towards him than I do the Kardashians.
Anyone who's ever used a Windows PC had probably joked about murdering Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos receives a fair bit of flack too.
Where I live, Karl XIV Gustav is similarly divisive as the above figures, some hate him and everything he represents, others love him for... I'm not exactly sure why actually, Google it.
There are oooh so many more examples too.. I'm not saying we live in an equal society, but men get hated on too,I promise
Sure, there are plenty of rich men who people dislike, but they aren't hated so much that hating them becomes a meme the way hating the Kardashians or Paris Hilton has. Even the FOSS community and the people who think Bill Gates wants to inject them with Illuminati roofies don't demean him personally, meanwhile "Kill the Kardashians" is a t-shirt.
Even the few male equivalents of "famous for being famous" that I could find (the lists are almost exclusively female for some reason) like Kevin Federline and the lesser known Baldwins seem to be given a greater degree of respect by popular culture.
Very fair point - they do have jobs. I certainly don't mean to diminish the legitimate work of people doing social media, etc. It is work. I guess my point more broadly was that there are certain types of celebrity (sports, acting, music) which take a lifetime of dedication to a craft, which at least to my mind is more justifiable than folks who become famous on reputation/relationship/inherited status alone.
But of course, now that you have me interrogating my own biases, that's also true of someone like Lebron James. What other reason does he have to perform well on the court other than to maintain or improve his celebrity? Is he fundamentally different than someone like Kim K? I usually would say yes, but I'm not entirely sure now. I'm sure you're right that to some extent gender comes into play. The ways by which women become famous are scrutinized much more than the ways that men become famous, and that is pretty fucked up. I still believe that the "job" of celebrity has a lot to do with being mirror/punching bag for society, but I think the way in which I said it probably fell into some gender bias issues.
Your points are really good ones, and I appreciate you saying it!
While theoretically that would be an interesting hypothesis (even though the disabled humans started to get treated decently only recently and only in well-developed countries, so that puts serious limitations on "we" like "we" != "human race"), the decent treatment of disabled ants isn't known:
"There seems to be a threshold for rescue. Wounded ants on the battlefield are triaged carefully by their comrades. Ones with one or two legs missing are often rescued, but the severely injured are seldom retrieved. The ants do not seem to be counting legs directly, instead badly damaged ants may not be able to adopt the correct position for battlefield rescue. And even if they can get back home, severely injured ants are removed from the nest, cast out to their doom."
Not a biologist, but my impression is that in some of ways, individual ants behave more like cells in a multi-celled organism than individual animals. The hive is the organism. (The analogy is certainly not perfect.)
Considering that, I don't find this paradoxical at all, still very fascinating. Please correct me if my understanding is wrong, but I think cancer also in some sense helps the individual cell at the cost of the organism. For example, cancers induce the formation of cappilaries to get more nutrients -- not so dissimilar from these infected ants inducing other ants to feed them.
This does make individual hymenopterans less like individuals of other species, which are in competition with others of the same gametes for the privilege of breeding and the survival of their offspring.
Hymenopterans are more individual than slime molds: they're multicellular, have their own organs, and so on. But less individual than any other form of multicellular animal life. It isn't altruistic, in a Darwinian sense, for a drone to give its life for the colony, because it isn't able to breed, the only way it can pass on its genome is by protecting the queen.
I'm pretty confident what was meant is "than more individualistic animals".
But most of our cells can "breed". Inability to divide happens only where it's necessary, like blood cells. It's not a social feature on its own. So I'm unsure why this is important about ants.
Is "can breed" the ultimate clue of individualism? But again, this makes most of our cells... "individuals".
Our cells will die when we die. Most of our cells have no future, but the ones that become our children and recombine with somebody of the opposite sex do have a future.
That doesn’t mean the rest of our cells don’t exist in a state of genetic indifference. They have evolutionary pressure to improve the fitness of the individual, otherwise it’s a dead end for all genes involved.
Competition between reproductively capable individuals is different. An ant that acts selfishly will reduce the fitness of the hive with no genetic reward. It’s a losing strategy. But in a society, a selfish person can reap the rewards while taking advantage or damaging the society they belong to.
The fact that humans exhibit behaviors like self sacrifice and loyalty points towards the idea that humans’ evolutionary strategy is somewhat mixed. Selfishness and selflessness coexist because our fitness is to some extend, dependent on the society, or to the hand that feeds us.
To think of an analogy people could die when planet earth dies, or people could die if their tribe gets wiped out, as they can't any longer fence for the resources individually.
Or people will die if a bad actor will launch nuclear bombs for their own selfish gain, pollute the earth etc.
I imagine some cells like cancer cells also act selfishly while damaging the host and reaping temporary rewards themselves.
So it seems like analogy of people and few bad actors makes even more sense in terms of cells as opposed to ants who all act only towards the greater good.
Tldr; In order to succeed and survive you need many working together, however it is possible to get ahead temporarily acting selfishly, not caring about the greater good, but having too many of those bad actors will end bad for everyone. Which happens with both, people and cells.
Breeding is sexual reproduction. Parthenogenic whiptail lizards lay eggs and reproduce themselves, but they don't breed.
Only our gametes can undergo meiosis and recombination, the necessary processes for breeding. Our other cells can engage in mitosis, duplication. There are only the two processes, which is why I say this is fundamentally incorrect.
The queen and drones are the gametes of hymenopterans in a very real sense. They have cells which can undergo meiosis and recombination, workers do not.
In fact, in some unusual species of ant, there are motile and fertile workers, in addition to and sometimes instead of the sessile queen. These are called... gamergates.
This is glossing over some of the weirdness found in various hymenopterans, it's an ancient and diverse clade.
Individual ants are animals, that's not controversial. Eusocial animals are less individual than any other animal, and their social groups are more like a single organism than the social groups of any other sort of animal. This, too, is not controversial.
Ant queens mate only once in their lifetime and can live for 20+ years. All the individual ants born in a colony in that time are from the same genetic material.
There's some linguistic ambiguity here. We can talk about "individual things" as in individual grains of sand, etc. and we mean "one instance of multiple similar".
Then there's "individuality", which for social animals means that a member of society is largely self-sufficient. Take any human and besides a sexual mate, they can pretty much survive, even thrive, by themselves. But take an ant, unless it's a queen, and it'll run around confused and die. The ant is inseparable from its hive. It is not an individual. It's a physically separate body from other members of the hive, but unable to exist on its own.
Yes this is basically cancer, minus the "middle class" ants being infertile. There are virus-induced cancers too, which we should probably reconsider as a form of selfish mutualism in light of this.
Note that all sexually reproducing organisms are like this: a single individual cannot reproduce. And for social animals like humans, a single mating pair cannot reproduce in the wild. (If you doubt this, watch a couple of episodes of "Naked and Afraid.) The minimal viable reproductive unit for humans is a tribe or village of a few dozen individuals.
And coming at it inversely, I've also seen some hypotheses that neurons are a bit more autonomous than many think, and that the brain could be seen as a complex colony of billions of single-celled organisms working together, with some analogies to aspects we see in large-scale human coordination problems and game theory.
The use of the word "parasite" seemed odd to me: at first blush they seem symbiotic: the ant gets the tapeworm; what it eats feeds the tapeworm too, and the ant gets a long and pampered existence. This, truly, is a symbiotic, not parasitic relationship.
However, it may be good for a single ant, but if you view the entire colony as an organism, what the tapeworm does is transform its host into a parasite upon the colony (this is mentioned in the article too). Thus, by transitivity, one might consider the tapeworm a parasite, not upon its host organism itself but upon the colony. Quite interesting.
BTW parasite was an actual job in Roman times, though a non-medical one.
I’ve thought humans have been a plot for the microbiome to procreate for a while now, in essence you’re just a safe place for various bacteria to keep you alive. Have no illusions about how important they think you are ;-)
>> The worms’ MO is subtle and ingenious. They are agents not of disaster, but of an insidious social sickness that sets reality only slightly, barely perceptibly, askew. Infected workers get a taste of invincibility and status, swaddling themselves in youth and the benefits it brings. They also form resource sinks that sap the energy of those around them. They become echoes of the microorganisms they harbor. They are, in the end, parasites themselves.
Wait this is a parable, right? The ant colony is human society, the worker ants is all of us and the parasitissed ants are the celebrities that we feed and adore and give nothing back except feelsies.
There was an article yesterday about the spitfires engine and there were a number of comments about long form journalism, and I'd like to comment on that even though not directly about the subject matter.
I stopped reading the other article quite quickly but read this one completely. I feel the writing style was night and day, the other article felt antagonistic and full of personal politics while this one had that sense of wonder at science and knowledge.
I'll try not to give any spoilers for those that have not watched it.
Bunch of human were infected by some kind of plant, they became super healthy but content. The episode deemed the infected ones unproductive, but I think that's some life worth living.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadBetween toxoplasmosis from cats that give us more affinity to them at the expense of human relationships, and other unknown gut microbes, its very likely that even selfish behaviors or perhaps empathy are driven by these things
Adds another dimension to the “nature” part of the nature vs nurture observation
That was easy.
Also what effect does it have in the birds that carry it?
"Larger colonies consist of various castes of sterile, wingless females, most of which are workers (ergates), as well as soldiers (dinergates) and other specialised groups."
Futurama foretold it.
But then the ant isn't the reproductive unit.
1. McKay, D. M. (2009). The therapeutic helminth?. Trends in parasitology, 25(3), 109-114, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pt.2008.11.008
2. Zaccone, P., Fehervari, Z., Phillips, J. M., Dunne, D. W., & Cooke, A. (2006). Parasitic worms and inflammatory diseases. Parasite immunology, 28(10), 515-523, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3024.2006.00879.x
So long as it can spread between hosts well enough, a deadly virus is a very successful virus – up until it's driven its host species to local extinction.
I wonder if there is a human equivalent tapeworm that the Kardashians have ingested?
If you don't like the Kardashians, fine. I don't either. But clearly some folks do and are willing to help propel them to fame (or notoriety).
I know your comment is being glib, but it's emblematic of HN crowds saying, "I don't like this thing, therefore this thing is funny/bad." It costs you nothing to post your comment and just let people like the things they like.
They aren't, and I didn't say that. You can criticize the Kardashians all you want. Saying, effectively, "Kardashians are like these ant parasites, amirite guys?" isn't critique.
> I doubt you'd apply your comment toward your favorite political pet causes.
I think you dramatically underestimate how much I enjoy being critical of things I support, in fact much, much more so than things I oppose. Things I oppose I find easy to not discuss and write off/move past, generally.
> This whole "let people enjoy things" is cynical, usually coming from the types of people who don't let anyone enjoy anything unless it is degenerate and mind-rotting.
Let people enjoy things comes from a space of "We're all from different backgrounds, who are you to be the arbiter of what's fun?" Whether you are a furry or a larper or a reality tv show junkie or a gun nut.... who the fuck am I to tell you that you can't enjoy that? Obviously, there are limits when other people are involved (like, no, it's not an endorsement of enjoying murdering people), but I'm not out here trying to say that only lowest common denominator things are allowed.
Your reasonable live and let live comments are downvoted, while the absolutely pointless and off-topic empty vitriol bullying some completely unrelated people in a topic supposed to be about a scientific discovery is not. Amazing.
The implication is that the Karashians sit around recieving undue attention and prosperity while providing nothing in return to their sociey.
Regardless of whether you agree with that assessment, it does qualify as critique and not just name calling.
But critique implies an analysis and some thought, not just a pithy one liner.
1. Be society's mirror
2. Be society's punching bag
The Kardashians obviously fill both of these jobs. I don't think it's fair to say they're above reproach – in fact, I hear tons of criticism of them any time their names are brought up around me. They're hardly taboo to criticize.
All of that said, I still think you're 100% right that we shouldn't stop people from hating on them. If we take these two "jobs" away from these sorts of celebrities, then at that point they become actually pointless. As much as I'd like to live in a world without them, at least for now the Kardashians and others are serving their purpose – provoking conversation about what we value as a society.
For some folks, lionizing the Kardashians is a way of saying what they think "perfection" (physically/financially/socially/some or all of the above) looks like in America right now. Others want to look at them and see everything that is wrong with us. For as much as I agree with the idea that criticism of celebrities is fundamental to their role in society, I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that celebrity has a real social function.
Anyone who's ever used a Windows PC had probably joked about murdering Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos receives a fair bit of flack too.
Where I live, Karl XIV Gustav is similarly divisive as the above figures, some hate him and everything he represents, others love him for... I'm not exactly sure why actually, Google it.
There are oooh so many more examples too.. I'm not saying we live in an equal society, but men get hated on too,I promise
Even the few male equivalents of "famous for being famous" that I could find (the lists are almost exclusively female for some reason) like Kevin Federline and the lesser known Baldwins seem to be given a greater degree of respect by popular culture.
But of course, now that you have me interrogating my own biases, that's also true of someone like Lebron James. What other reason does he have to perform well on the court other than to maintain or improve his celebrity? Is he fundamentally different than someone like Kim K? I usually would say yes, but I'm not entirely sure now. I'm sure you're right that to some extent gender comes into play. The ways by which women become famous are scrutinized much more than the ways that men become famous, and that is pretty fucked up. I still believe that the "job" of celebrity has a lot to do with being mirror/punching bag for society, but I think the way in which I said it probably fell into some gender bias issues.
Your points are really good ones, and I appreciate you saying it!
https://theconversation.com/these-ants-have-evolved-a-comple...
"There seems to be a threshold for rescue. Wounded ants on the battlefield are triaged carefully by their comrades. Ones with one or two legs missing are often rescued, but the severely injured are seldom retrieved. The ants do not seem to be counting legs directly, instead badly damaged ants may not be able to adopt the correct position for battlefield rescue. And even if they can get back home, severely injured ants are removed from the nest, cast out to their doom."
Considering that, I don't find this paradoxical at all, still very fascinating. Please correct me if my understanding is wrong, but I think cancer also in some sense helps the individual cell at the cost of the organism. For example, cancers induce the formation of cappilaries to get more nutrients -- not so dissimilar from these infected ants inducing other ants to feed them.
So while you're right to call them acting like cells in organism, I'm uncertain what "than individual animals" would mean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality
This does make individual hymenopterans less like individuals of other species, which are in competition with others of the same gametes for the privilege of breeding and the survival of their offspring.
Hymenopterans are more individual than slime molds: they're multicellular, have their own organs, and so on. But less individual than any other form of multicellular animal life. It isn't altruistic, in a Darwinian sense, for a drone to give its life for the colony, because it isn't able to breed, the only way it can pass on its genome is by protecting the queen.
I'm pretty confident what was meant is "than more individualistic animals".
Is "can breed" the ultimate clue of individualism? But again, this makes most of our cells... "individuals".
That doesn’t mean the rest of our cells don’t exist in a state of genetic indifference. They have evolutionary pressure to improve the fitness of the individual, otherwise it’s a dead end for all genes involved.
Competition between reproductively capable individuals is different. An ant that acts selfishly will reduce the fitness of the hive with no genetic reward. It’s a losing strategy. But in a society, a selfish person can reap the rewards while taking advantage or damaging the society they belong to.
The fact that humans exhibit behaviors like self sacrifice and loyalty points towards the idea that humans’ evolutionary strategy is somewhat mixed. Selfishness and selflessness coexist because our fitness is to some extend, dependent on the society, or to the hand that feeds us.
I imagine some cells like cancer cells also act selfishly while damaging the host and reaping temporary rewards themselves.
So it seems like analogy of people and few bad actors makes even more sense in terms of cells as opposed to ants who all act only towards the greater good.
Tldr; In order to succeed and survive you need many working together, however it is possible to get ahead temporarily acting selfishly, not caring about the greater good, but having too many of those bad actors will end bad for everyone. Which happens with both, people and cells.
Breeding is sexual reproduction. Parthenogenic whiptail lizards lay eggs and reproduce themselves, but they don't breed.
Only our gametes can undergo meiosis and recombination, the necessary processes for breeding. Our other cells can engage in mitosis, duplication. There are only the two processes, which is why I say this is fundamentally incorrect.
The queen and drones are the gametes of hymenopterans in a very real sense. They have cells which can undergo meiosis and recombination, workers do not.
In fact, in some unusual species of ant, there are motile and fertile workers, in addition to and sometimes instead of the sessile queen. These are called... gamergates.
This is glossing over some of the weirdness found in various hymenopterans, it's an ancient and diverse clade.
Individual ants are animals, that's not controversial. Eusocial animals are less individual than any other animal, and their social groups are more like a single organism than the social groups of any other sort of animal. This, too, is not controversial.
One is not an individual or a group inherently, it is solely based on the concepts you are using to create the context.
Then there's "individuality", which for social animals means that a member of society is largely self-sufficient. Take any human and besides a sexual mate, they can pretty much survive, even thrive, by themselves. But take an ant, unless it's a queen, and it'll run around confused and die. The ant is inseparable from its hive. It is not an individual. It's a physically separate body from other members of the hive, but unable to exist on its own.
Literally part of the article.
Why not? Because this is exactly right.
Note that all sexually reproducing organisms are like this: a single individual cannot reproduce. And for social animals like humans, a single mating pair cannot reproduce in the wild. (If you doubt this, watch a couple of episodes of "Naked and Afraid.) The minimal viable reproductive unit for humans is a tribe or village of a few dozen individuals.
However, it may be good for a single ant, but if you view the entire colony as an organism, what the tapeworm does is transform its host into a parasite upon the colony (this is mentioned in the article too). Thus, by transitivity, one might consider the tapeworm a parasite, not upon its host organism itself but upon the colony. Quite interesting.
BTW parasite was an actual job in Roman times, though a non-medical one.
Wait this is a parable, right? The ant colony is human society, the worker ants is all of us and the parasitissed ants are the celebrities that we feed and adore and give nothing back except feelsies.
I stopped reading the other article quite quickly but read this one completely. I feel the writing style was night and day, the other article felt antagonistic and full of personal politics while this one had that sense of wonder at science and knowledge.
I'll try not to give any spoilers for those that have not watched it.
Bunch of human were infected by some kind of plant, they became super healthy but content. The episode deemed the infected ones unproductive, but I think that's some life worth living.
Yep, I think we are talking about the same episode where star fleet officers do naughty things.