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irkli OP t1_iydo43r wrote

This is fairly terrifying.

It makes one wonder if something similar could be behind some of the more virulent human extremists.

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windingtime t1_iydo7qu wrote

They’re all barking something about “audit the fed?”

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AudibleNod t1_iydoicx wrote

Way to clickbait the title, CNN.

It's Toxoplasmosis. The same thing that influences risk taking behavior in cats, rats and people.

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Spiff426 t1_iydpmqv wrote

Wait, Yellowstone wolves are Qanons now??

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TirayShell t1_iydrue8 wrote

How do the parasites know what the wolf is doing?

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Famous-Shower9335 t1_iydstnm wrote

Replying to irkli (#814,105)

There's a train of thought that toxoplasmosis infection was the reason for a rise in schizophrenia cases when cat ownership increased in Paris. I'll add the link when I can find it.

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Where_Da_BBWs_At t1_iydsu42 wrote

Replying to TirayShell (#815,336)

Toxoplasmosis can only reproduce I'm the guts of cats, so when rats get infected with it, they actually start behaving in ways which appear to observers as attempting to get caught by cats.

I don't think science has ever explained how toxoplasmosis is capable of doing this.

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irkli OP t1_iydtk5a wrote

Replying to TirayShell (#815,336)

They don't. Evolutionary biology has no concept of intent. There is no "because". Of the zillions of tiny and arbitrary changes/mutations organisms undergo, some confer advantage or disadvantage, usually little tiny ones, essentially unmeasurable. They add up (or not) over long periods of time. But there is no plan, no purpose, etc.

This is essentially the point where (edit: some) religious folk cannot accept evolution theory.

Order arises from the rules of physics. It's only taken a few billion years....

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sugar_addict002 t1_iydtkmy wrote

This is interesting. I wonder if there is any correlation between these or other parasites and human cult behavior. Why some people and not others engage in cults.

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pegothejerk t1_iydtshx wrote

Replying to TirayShell (#815,336)

It’s likely a watershed of biological changes that start with the small parasites and some toxins they release block expression in some protein folding that radically changes behavior much like changes in our gut simply because we are lacking food or some other necessary elements triggers a behavioral response that we experience as hunger and even aggression (hangry).

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longesteveryeahboy t1_iydujn6 wrote

Replying to sugar_addict002 (#815,892)

I study toxo, although not the behavioral side of things but there are associations between infected humans and partaking in risky behavior. They’re not incredibly strong correlations or anything, but things like being more likely to be an entrepreneur, or even associations with schizophrenia. It’s pretty cool stuff

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irkli OP t1_iyduscz wrote

Replying to Famous-Shower9335 (#815,694)

Wow that's nuts! (Lol I h8 podcasts but the transcript feature is great). Thanks!

I'm not the paranoid type but you gotta wonder at how much we are all (all animals etc) affected by bugs and chemicals natural and otherwise. There's this western idea that each of us stands alone! and suchlike. But we're all organisms in this big soup of a planet...

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Palendrome t1_iydv89w wrote

This must by why they wandered onto the Dutton ranch.

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JumpingJacks1234 t1_iydyscl wrote

The best part of the article was the scientists wondering if the affected wolves broke off to form a new pack because they were bold or because they were assholes in the old pack and were actively expelled.

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Deago78 t1_iye3p3n wrote

Replying to Rulare (#817,575)

You are correct. It is curable with antibiotics. It occurs primarily in immunosuppressed patients. (Primarily poorly managed HIV patients, in humans.) That said, it doesn’t mean the brain function lost or alerted is going to go back to its pre-infection baseline.

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longesteveryeahboy t1_iye3ral wrote

Replying to Rulare (#817,575)

So I study toxo, basically there are two forms of the parasite, one that actively replicates and infects new cells and another that holes up in a bubble inside your cells and basically does nothing. There are drugs to kill the active form, but once any of the parasites shifts into its passive form it’s basically untouchable by your immune system or by medication. And by the time most people realize they’re infected (if they do at all) you would be well past this point.

The passive form will reactivate from time to time, if you’re healthy your immune system shuts it down very easily, but there are always other cysts containing passive parasite, so you never get rid of it. If you’re not healthy you can keep it in check with medicine. So absolutely treatable, but generally not curable.

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longesteveryeahboy t1_iye4o4b wrote

Replying to DownvoteDaemon (#819,170)

It’s not super well known, but it has been associated with schizophrenia and suicide. It’s also associated with being more likely to partake in risky behavior. Lots of interesting stuff, but definitely a lot of work is needed to fully understand.

That being said these are just associations. Almost a third of the human population has toxo, and obviously a third of humans don’t have schizophrenia. So not something to panic about if you are infected

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Gerryislandgirl t1_iye60xf wrote

“ The study team found something startling: “A wolf that is positive for toxo is 11 times more likely to disperse than a wolf that’s negative,” said wildlife biologist Kira Cassidy, a research associate at the Yellowstone Wolf Project and co-lead author of the study. “And then becoming a pack leader was even more of an impact: A wolf that was positive was 46 times more likely to become a pack leader than a wolf that was negative.”

Some pack leaders are born & others are groomed by their parasites!

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Jon_the_Hitman_Stark t1_iye6h6m wrote

“The parasites enter the intermediate host’s brain and muscle tissue and change its behavior in a way that boosts its chances of getting eaten by a cat. Even humans can be affected. Some behavioral changes — including taking risks in business”

I never knew cats were such a danger in the business world.

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Sinhika t1_iye7mm8 wrote

Replying to irkli (#815,890)

Mainstream (i.e., not far-right evangelicals) Christians do accept evolutionary theory. We just don't get press, because being boring and average doesn't make for click-bait headlines.

So, mainstream Christian acceptance of evolutionary theory would probably be classed as "intelligent design": God created the universe, God defined the Laws of Physics and set things in motion with the intent that they work out this way.

Mainstream God has a far longer view and is far more terrifyingly Other than evangelical's 4000-year-old toddler assembling a world exactly as it is now who throws temper fits if his creations don't follow the rules he supposedly wrote, even if he made his creations in such a way that they can't follow the rules perfectly.

Fortunately, in spite of being incomprehensibly Lovecraftian, Mainstream God loves ALL his children, and periodically sends prophets to explain things in comprehensible terms. Then a game of telephone ensues and we get garbage like evangelical anti-Christianity out of "Love your neighbor as yourself, that is the Second Commandment"

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longesteveryeahboy t1_iye8je2 wrote

Replying to Deago78 (#819,092)

No, antibiotics won’t clear the parasite in most cases. It has a quiescent form that it spends most of its time in that is almost untouchable. You can only target the active parasites that cause disease, so you can treat active infection, but the parasite is mostt with you for life

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longesteveryeahboy t1_iye9nd1 wrote

Replying to TKG_Actual (#820,409)

Lol not sure what oryctocantropy is, but the parasite can essentially infect any part of your body so an immunocompromised person who is untreated would develop a typical infection for whatever part of the body the parasite is in, so like pneumonia or meningitis. And this can worsen or involve other organs until it eventually becomes fatal.

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DaysGoTooFast t1_iyedt1t wrote

The parasite class are turning the alphas into betas! And the betas into gammas. Just like in human society! /s

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professorDissociate t1_iyefvin wrote

Replying to Sinhika (#820,271)

I will never understand why god went through all the hard work of creating a universe that operates in such a manner. The means do not align with the end. Like if he cared so much for humans, why make it so that humans only occupy a tiny speckle within history. A single grain of sand within our entire solar system has more significance in terms of scale, than the existence of humans within all of time. It’s kind of like if we decided to build houses by waiting for natural flowing water to cut out cave systems for us (except that would still be much more efficient than spinning up an entire universe for humanity’s sake).

At what point is it safe to say this stuff just doesn’t make sense anymore?

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professorDissociate t1_iyeimz5 wrote

Replying to Cruxion (#819,070)

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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laforzadimente t1_iyejuvw wrote

Replying to Sinhika (#820,271)

I mean, this sounds more enlightened at face value, but does it even mesh with Biblical Christian lore? At what point is man created in God's image during his development? At what point is a homosapien ancestor considered an animal that doesn't need salvation vs a man that does? How do Adam and Eve and the birth of sin fit in with man developing gradually from other species? If it's just a fanciful allegory or one of the things that got lost in the game of telephone, then why take anything the book says seriously?

This meeting in the middle just seems like an admission that the older views aren't supported by evidence paired with an unwillingness to walk away completely. The things once attributed to be in the direct control of God have now been relegated to be what he's indirectly in control of. Seems to me God is just the ever-shrinking bubble of ignorance we slowly chip away at.

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shaka893P t1_iyejzay wrote

Replying to professorDissociate (#822,070)

Most cats have it, if you have a cat, you most likely have it. Of you get it while pregnant you can have a bigger risk of miscarriage, but if you already have it and get pregnant you don't have the higher risk

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shaka893P t1_iyekfi8 wrote

Replying to professorDissociate (#824,645)

You need a lot of these things, for example, all humans always have e coli in their guts helps us digest food and we would die without them. We have more bacteria than human cells in us, and that's ok, it's how we evolved.

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professorDissociate t1_iyel8j4 wrote

Replying to shaka893P (#824,732)

I’m okay with them in my gut, I guess. I eat food, then they eat my chewed up food, then they shit out good nutrition and I digest the worm shit. That’s a-okay in my book. But little worms just swimming around for fuck-all’s sake, no thank you.

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statslady23 t1_iyetcnb wrote

Replying to longesteveryeahboy (#819,376)

People with three or more cats are much more likely to have toxoplasmosis. I always wondered if that then made them want to collect more cats (toxo mites grow in cat stomachs). Crazy cat ladies may just be toxo bots.

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RandomChurn t1_iyex3d2 wrote

Replying to longesteveryeahboy (#820,960)

> an immunocompromised person who is untreated would develop a typical infection for whatever part of the body the parasite is in, so like pneumonia or meningitis. And this can worsen or involve other organs until it eventually becomes fatal.

It's in Trainspotting. It's what killed the friend who got AIDS. He got a kitten to try to get his gf back but she refused it and the kitten killed him

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j8stereo t1_iyez0lb wrote

Replying to TirayShell (#815,336)

Evolution is driven simply by what didn't get you killed in the past; intent doesn't have to exist in order for high level "design" to emerge.

It might be easier to understand after watching the process here.

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TucuReborn t1_iyf0582 wrote

Replying to laforzadimente (#824,525)

The way I've seen most describe it is a divine intent. That, instead of outright making mankind in a moment, the divine intent was for mankind to come to being through a selected path.

Kind of like when you build a character in an RPG. When you start out in a game, you may decide you want to be an archer. So you pick perks, talents, items, whatever that compliment becoming an archer. Over time, you may realize some of those choices were mistakes and redo them(a species dying out) or add in new things to help(Evolution or hybridizing). Eventually, though, you reach the end build and are now an archer.

So basically, God had a plan for humans to exist, and so set down a path for them to exist.

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NozE8 t1_iyf06v3 wrote

Wolves aren't lead by a matriarch. They aren't even lead by an "alpha." Turns out that the concept of alpha wolves is wrong and packs are lead by their parents. A father and a mother. Either way definitely not a matriarchal hierarchy.

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podkayne3000 t1_iyf1v0k wrote

Replying to professorDissociate (#823,046)

One possibility: There is a G-d, or god equivalent, but our human understanding of G-d is based on our own wishful thinking, not on what G-d is actually like.

We may think of our Creator as being all-powerful, all-wise, and all-good, but maybe our Creator is really just an ordinary fallible bonehead in a universe that happens to be a trillion trillion times bigger than our universe. That fact that we want G-d to be perfect, and can conceive of G-d being perfect, does not actually mean that G-d is perfect.

Or, maybe G-d does exist and is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good, but what we think of as life is simply an educational simulation. Maybe the anxiety and the terror are just part of the educational experience

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hazpat t1_iyf64gs wrote

Replying to shaka893P (#824,732)

These things? You are lumping symbiotic bacteria with parasitic organisms as if microscopic size make them similar. That's like saying pet elephants ate cool because cats are cool. Two totaly different "things"

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laforzadimente t1_iyf7byt wrote

Replying to TucuReborn (#830,934)

Yeah, I get the concept, like I said though, once you think about it for a bit it's an idea that doesn't mesh with other parts of the story, whether it's a modern interpretation of it or not.

If the creation days aren't days but are instead eons capable of letting evolution take place. Then creating plants eons before the sun makes no sense. If we came from aquatic life, but humans and land animals were created either days or eons after aquatic life, that doesn't make sense. If things were getting tweaked along the way and the ability to directly intervene exists or is needed then there's little point in waiting on the long process in the first place and indirectly defining the laws of physics to do their thing. It also raises questions about being all-knowing or all-powerful. And if the answers to these are based on problems with how the Genesis story is told, why trust the rest of the book?

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TucuReborn t1_iyfaq4p wrote

Replying to laforzadimente (#834,151)

So lets take a moment to step back a bit.

A lot of modern Christians take the first few books as mostly being creation myth. As in it's a story made thousands of years ago to explain things, not hard and fast truth. Stories meant to inspire and make the world easy to understand.

Most Christians consider the parts afterwards to be more factually based, though even then it depends on the church and individual which parts and how much so.

The part to also remember, and in fact related to your last sentence, is that the books were written by differing authors sometimes hundreds of years apart. The bible is basically an anthology of related works from people who believed in the the same god(and to some degree, potentially intermarrying similar religions in the area). They all believed in the same god, and combined the literature into a single book. So, really, it's not one book. It's dozens, written by different authors for different purposes aimed at different people/cultures.

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Rulare t1_iyfcsy6 wrote

Replying to longesteveryeahboy (#819,110)

Thanks for the informative response! I've been around way too many kittens in my life so I assume I have it, so it being completely curable was a nice lie to tell myself. Oh well.

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