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9fingerwonder t1_iye0575 wrote

Reply to comment by Where_Da_BBWs_At in 'Mind control' by parasites influences wolf-pack dynamics in Yellowstone National Park | CNN by irkli

One aspect i think thats understood is it impacts the fear response center of the brain of rats, disabling certain triggers related to fear of cats, like the smell of cat piss.

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Cruxion t1_iye3mlr wrote

More importantly, parasites that didn't cause these behaviors failed to reproduce so it seems like there's more deliberate action than there really is.

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professorDissociate t1_iyeimz5 wrote

Right, and stuff like this very easy to misconstrue. Think of all the ways that life survives here on Earth. Looking at an individual case almost always makes it seem like there is intent in the design. Scaling back your perspective though, it’s more clear that nothing makes intuitive sense. It’s like biology threw everything it had at the wall, saw what stuck, and kept it going until it didn’t stick anymore. Most adaptations are odd ball solutions when looking at the big picture, like a virus surviving by infecting rats -> making the rats fear less -> rat eaten by a cat -> virus reproduces in cat tummy -> cat poops out baby virus -> rat eats poop -> rinse and repeat.

Fun fact: had we evolved to use copper instead of iron in our blood… our blood would be green. Why did we evolve to use iron? The reason Iron is used is because it holds a very specific place on the periodic table which makes it stable enough to be held by your cells, common enough to be ingested from organisms in your surroundings, and reactive enough that oxygen will readily latch on to it.

There are copper-based oxygen-carrying pigments, such as haemocyanin, found in some crustaceans & mollusks. They are only about a quarter as effective in carrying oxygen, molecule for molecule, than haemoglobin, because they do not have the steric interaction of the haemoglobin subunits that confer a sigmoid saturation curve upon haemoglobin.

So it’s likely we adapted to using iron to support our need for utilizing more oxygen within our blood. More oxygen supports a huge array of other things.

We also cook our food to break it down more and extract more calories from it. This supports, among other things, our “big brains”. Did you know cows have four stomachs to support digestion of raw grass?

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Where_Da_BBWs_At t1_iye7dfg wrote

That makes sense. I have heard the theory that toxoplasmosis in ancient Egyptians is what led to the first cats being what led to domestication.

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Bison256 t1_iyecjn3 wrote

Cats were domesticated in Iraq not Egypt. They know because domestic cats are more closely related to wild cats from there. But it makes sense, that's were the first cities were.

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Additional_Ad_6976 t1_iye8ffg wrote

Or crazy thought, domestication of cats lead to the rise of the Egyptian civilization.

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