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by ncgl 753 days ago
I love stuff like this, but I can't help but wonder much of this is simply editorialization on top of natural selection.

Do infected wolves really take more risks? Or are we just connecting two dots with a thin bro science understanding of evolution? It seems impossible to know when you're looking for a broad narrative that fits how genes are spread
4 comments
rossdavidh 753 days ago
No doubt it could be over-interpreted, but seeing toxo correlate with risk-taking behavior in enough different species, does seem to increase the plausibility, otherwise we need special pleading that we have several different spurious correlations all pointing in the same direction.

However, and maybe this is what you're getting at, it could be that risk-taking individuals are more likely to get infected with toxo? Telling the difference between those two ideas would be harder, although in lab rat experiments you could control for it.

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chasil 753 days ago
Not at all, this is hard science.

"This asymptomatic state of infection is referred to as a latent infection, and it has been associated with numerous subtle behavioral, psychiatric, and personality alterations in humans.

"Behavioral changes observed between infected and non-infected humans include a decreased aversion to cat urine (but with divergent trajectories by gender) and an increased risk of schizophrenia. Preliminary evidence has suggested that T. gondii infection may induce some of the same alterations in the human brain as those observed in rodents. Many of these associations have been strongly debated and newer studies have found them to be weak, concluding:

"On the whole, there was little evidence that T. gondii was related to increased risk of psychiatric disorder, poor impulse control, personality aberrations, or neurocognitive impairment."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii#Risk_facto...

However:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10317747/

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colechristensen 753 days ago
There is a lot of evidence out there for diseases and specifically parasites modifying host behavior, toxo does indeed settle in the brain, and there is quite a lot of evidence for toxo specifically modifying behavior in different host species.

Doubt is always healthy but this one is not at all hard to believe.

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ekianjo 753 days ago
yeah. there could be confounding factors.
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