Evolution News

Cat Parasite Makes Humans Horny

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Scientists discover a cat parasite can make women sexier and men more reckless and dumber. I often say, germs rule the world. It also is probably why bimbos and Favios flourish. Who wants sex with a dour duchess? Evidently this bug reproduces by getting us to have sex like crazed cats in heat.

&hearts Courtesy of Blues:

By Jane Bunce

A COMMON parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid, an Australian researcher says.

About 40 per cent of the world's population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, including about eight million Australians.

Human infection generally occurs when people eat raw or undercooked meat that has cysts containing the parasite, or accidentally ingest some of the parasite's eggs excreted by an infected cat.

The parasite is known to be dangerous to pregnant women as it can cause disability or abortion of the unborn child, and can also kill people whose immune systems are weakened.

Women should not clean out kitty litter boxes when pregnant. Also, people have been known to die of cat scratches. This is due to pre-existing weaknesses. Still, it has to be considered. All animals carry dangerous germs and this includes humans. A human bite is worse than any other animals' except if it is rabies. And humans with rabies can bite, too.

"Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.

"On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.

So this parasite makes women sexier and men dumber? Sounds like Mother Nature is having a lot of fun. Actually, this is how all germs and other single celled organisms survive: they pass themselves around by making their victims want to do things that make them spread further just like rabies makes its victims want to bite anything they see.

Parasites affect the behaviors of many creatures. There is a very wide variety of parasites in nature, many of them have evolved alongide their 'hosts' and some are so intertwined, neither organism can exist without the other. Many survival behaviors of various creatures are atuned to preserving and spreading their parasites.

One curious feature of many parasites is how they control behavior. Grazing animals will eat the parts of the plants the parasites prefer, for example. What is eaten is prefered by parasites so if they lodge in the stomach or intestines as so many do, they create desires for foods that benefit themselves. Some parasites completely take over their host's minds and occupy the entire body, leaving a shell.

The world of parasites is very interesting because of this ability. It is no surprise to learn that a parasite that excites certain behaviors in cats does the same to humans. Our biology as well as psychology is very intertwined with the animals we domesticate. Humans love to think we have 'free choice' and we 'decide' how we will be yet everyone knows they are prey to their own inner impulses that are controlled only after tremendous effort.

the sexual attributes of this particular parasite which probably came out of Egypt, are heavily intertwined within our religions, our society, everything. When the Egyptians domesticated cats, they instantly fell in love with them. Museums preserve the many tiny cat woman statues which were icons of sexual domestic happiness. Wearing a tight skirt, big ear rings and carrying a basket of eggs, she was the embodiment of easy going, happy sex.

One not so curious fact about all sexual diseases is, they enhance sex. This is why clap itches. The desire for more sex overwhelms bearers of sexual diseases. Perhaps the evolution of sex itself is based on this sort of irritation that can't be relieved without passing the germs (semen) to another?

No wonder young girls think sex is dirty. Eeew.

&hearts Humans and dogs have evolved social skills together.

Genetics aside, a new behavioral study shows that dogs have developed a better ability to understand human behaviour than wolves or chimpanzees - at least when it comes to finding food hidden by people.

A team led by Brian Hare at Harvard University, US, found that dogs raised with little human contact were better than wolves raised by people at reading human cues about which of two containers held food.

Even puppies as young as nine weeks old out-performed adult chimpanzees at the task.

It isn't just dogs, cats can read faces. And unlike their wild cousins, they show facial expressions. I know it is often a look of disgust unless one is servicing the cat's needs properly. Actually, my cat Fluff can make big baby eyes when he wants to be picked up. When we want him to vacate a chair, he gives an expression that clearly communicates annoyance.

One thing I notice with all my domesticated animals is they all strive to read my face, my voice and gestures. It isn't merely taming, they can read me with deadly accuracy. This includes when I am distressed about something. If they think it is something not due to themselves, they are very solicitous and loving.

If they figure out I am upset about them tipping over the garbage cans or messing up the bed or knocking down one wall of the stable, they watch me approach with wariness, ready to take off. If I direct my ire on only one of them, the other animals of all species, horses, dogs, cats, chickens or sheep, will draw closer to watch with fascination. They will literally trip me up, trying to get a nice, close look.

The very cells in our bodies are cobbled together from various organisms that at the beginning of life, melded together. And so it continues: parasites, germs, bacterium, all the oldest life forms mold our own bodies, behaviors and desires.

Next time you see someone having problems, you can literally say, 'What is bugging you now?'

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Early Flying Mammal Found In China

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The earliest flying mammal has been discovered in China. Anthropologists find cave in Africa with huge rock out-cropping that was altered to look like a snake by the earliest Homo sapiens sapiens. And the gene for autism is discovered by French scientists.

&hearts The early history of mammals revealed with even more fossils from China.

V. antiquus had elongated limbs, like modern flying mammals, and its skeleton suggested the presence of a stiff tail, which would have acted as a rudder in flight.

The researchers believe the creature was tree-dwelling, nocturnal and, because of its sharp teeth, most likely feasted on a diet of insects.

This new find places the V. antiquus as the earliest known flying mammal. Dr Jin Meng, an author on the paper and palaeontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, said he believed the creature lived between 130 and 165 million years ago.

With the earliest known flying bird, Archaeopteryx, dating to about 150 million years ago, this could mean mammals flirted with air travel before birds.

The earliest record of a bat, capable of controlled flight, dates to about 51 million years ago; while, before this discovery, the earliest known gliding mammal was a rodent that lived 30 million years ago in the Late Oligocene period.

The variety and astonishing traits already showing before the tremendous Permian Extinction contines to astonish us. During this time, the biggest creatures were not mammalian. Though many larger ones were. The smaller mammals didn't leave many traces because perserving their bones intact like this amazing find, is very rare just as the preservation of the earliest birds are also a miracle. The right kind of mud has to cover them to preserve these delicate bones and details of feathers and fur.

We should now assume the jungles of those ancient times teemed with a wild variety of mammals. They didn't bounce back like the dinosaurs who filled many of the ecological niches after the Permian deaths.

But even during the dinosaur's reign, many mammalian species continued to evolve which is why many branches of this large family stretch back to before the great extinction, not after. The creatures which flew through the air were insect eaters.

The mammals that had big eyes, sensitive, very little hair on the ears, grasping hands, liked to live in tree tops and ate insects....is our own family. So I bet this animal is rather related to us. We didn't follow that lineage or we would all be flying like Superman, I suppose. Rats. I think I would have liked that, actually.

&hearts Throughout human history and prehistory, we worshipped and feared snakes.

The discovery of carvings on a snake-shaped rock along with 70,000-year-old spearheads nearby has dramatically pushed back the earliest evidence for ritual behavior, or what could be called religion. The finding, which researchers have yet to formally publish, comes from a cave hidden in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, a mecca of sorts for the local people, who call it the Mountain of the Gods.

"It's very big news," says Sheila Coulson, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo in Norway and leader of the study. Prior to the discovery, researchers had identified signs of ritual practice going back at most 40,000 years from sites in Europe.

Researchers believe that anatomically modern humans emerged from East Africa perhaps 120,000 years ago. "The difficulty was always this incredible time lag between that occurrence and any more complex aspect of the culture other than just basic survival," Coulson says. Although some carved ornaments and wall markings from another African site are as old as the new find, they seem to have had no obvious ritual significance.

A chief of the local San people invited Coulson and her colleagues to study the cave in Tsodilo Hills. They were unprepared for what they found when they entered: a six-meter-long rock that bore a striking resemblance to a snake, including a mouthlike gash at the end. "My first words I remember saying are, 'My god what is that?'" Coulson says. "I'd never seen anything like it."

Fear of snakes: deep inside of the brains of all mammals is this fear. It is part of our most primitive parts of the brain, the Amaglada. The flight or fight center. I had this realistic rubber snake I used onstage years ago. My daughter took it out to the barn to play with her friends and she forgot to bring it back into the house.

That night, a terrific racket broke out in the barn and I ran outside with the flashlight. I raccoon was in deadly battle with the rubber snake. He tore the snake to shreds and when I shone the light on him, he ran out the door, fur bristling.

When breaking horses, one has to first let them know the rope isn’t a snake. If you drag a rope past a horse in tall grass, the horse will take off, eyes rolling with fear. Drag a rope past a cat and it will attack. Cats, large and small, don’t fear snakes because they evolved into hunting snakes. Turkeys, for example, and eagles, eat snakes. Watching a flock of turkeys surround and then rip apart, snakes, is most awe inspiring. They will literally play tug-of-war with the snake.

Humans, coming from trees, fear snakes just like small birds and all rodents. This goes back to when we were lemurs during the age of the Great Dinosaurs. One of the early differences between humanoids and chimpanzees was the desire to carry a stick at all times. Instead of picking up sticks and then dropping them, carrying a stick, putting a rock at the top of the stick, making the stick straight and smooth and using it to kill.

The very first creature Adam and Eve met that had them enthralled was a snake. Seems even ancient writers knew instinctively, the first God was a snake.

&hearts Good news: one of the genes responsible for the tremendously difficult syndrome of autism has been discovered.

ASD, which affect six out of 1,000 children, range from mild to severe forms. The disorders are caused by chromosomal rearrangements in 3 to 6 percent of cases.

In people with cognitive deficits and with autistic behavior a part of their chromosome 22 is often affected. That region contains the SHANK3 gene.

In all three families identified in the study, the researchers found they had various types of mutations in the gene. Two brothers in one family had small deletions, while another child in a different family had significant deletions.

A girl with a deletion of SHANK 3 in the third family suffered from autism while her brother, who had an additional copy of the gene, had a mild form of autism called Asperger syndrome.

Asberger kids can grow up to be quite good at many things, some are geniuses like Einstein. But the children who suffer from the worst forms of autism have very difficult lives and once we know what genes are causing this or missing genes prevent this, we might be able to craft a fix. I have known several profoundly autistic people. Some of them are very sweet but entirely in their own worlds. Some had real problems enduring life, small things irritating them beyond endurance.

This is good news if it leads to better therapies.

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Evolution of Motherhood And Psychopathic Humans

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Human evolution has two faces: successful mother/daughter ability to raise intelligent children coupled with the love/hate factor: humans are very dangerous and deadly and we not only kill any and all living things, plant and animal, we wish, we also kill each other. Understanding why we do this and understanding how this is at work today all over the planet as the struggle for survival leads to the deaths of so many children and their mothers. War is hell and we are addicted to it because many humans are psychopaths.

&hearts A study confirms what early chimp observations have observed, namely, older chimp mothers are held in higher esteem within their own clans than younger mothers.

Evolutionary biologists such as the University of Texas' David Buss have widely documented this preference among men worldwide for younger women as mates. Youthful looks, goes the scientific argument, signal that younger women are more fertile than ones approaching menopause. A hard-wired evolutionary attraction explains Playboy bunnies, trophy wives and the curious popularity of Paris Hilton.

Not so in our close primate cousins.

"Although it's easy to imagine that male chimps would like to mate with whatever female is available, it turns out they really have strong preferences" for the older females, says anthropologist Martin Muller of Boston University, lead author of the Current Biology study. "We've seen them just ignoring younger females who are all over them."

In the study, Muller and colleagues analyzed eight years of mating observations of the Kanyawara. chimpanzee troop in Uganda's Kibale National Park. Chimpanzees pursue a promiscuous lifestyle, and "male courtship signals" are not very suave ones ("branch shaking" is the most polite.)

In the study, the research team split the chimp troop's females into three categories: pubescent, mothers under age 30, and mothers over age 30. And then they compared the data.

Male chimps at Kibale, it turns out, more often made courtship signals, clustered near ovulating females, fought over mates and saw alpha males initiate mating, with the oldest females. In fact, the male chimps were just about as likely to choose a less-fertile pubescent female as mothers in the under-30 crowd. "Male chimpanzees do not merely disdain young females, but actively prefer older mothers to younger mothers," says the study.

Older mothers are more successful at raising the young. In human communities, when a young female has a baby, the first thing she tries to do is get help from her own mother. And in 'uncivilized' communities, that is who steps in to take charge of the grandchildren. If it is a paternalist society, the mother-in-law or older female sisters or aunts step in. In other words, a human female can raise a child alone but the ones who raise children in large family clusters tend to thrive and have more progeny. The fact that this information is hard wired into the brains of chimpanzees, it not being a 'learned' attitude, is interesting.

Chimp females don't have menopause but human females do. This means they can focus on the larger family unit for a third of their lives. Since childbearing in humans is also very dangerous and stressful, this also means a lifetime of collecting information, experience, wisdom and knowledge of how to do complex things like make pottery or fish hooks, isn't lost in childbirth. Because transmission of vital cultural information is so important, the sex stuff was relegated to the younger females while the nurturing of the community lay in the laps of the elder, wise women.

Young men, for example, don't listen to their wives in many cultures but you can bet, they all listen to MOTHER. The older woman has truly big powers over the family and usually rules that roost even in paternalist societies. In many modern, Western societies, the bond is strongest with the mother/daughter relations. Woe betide a husband who doesn't understand that!

&hearts In Africa today, the overpopulation in the sub-sahara desert regions is causing huge human tragedies as women and children, excess population, are being butchered.

UNITED NATIONS - The conflict in Darfur has spread to two neighboring countries and is now in "free fall" with six million people facing the prospect of going without food or protection, the outgoing U.N. humanitarian chief said Tuesday.

Jan Egeland, who steps down on Dec. 12, told The Associated Press in an interview that one of the most difficult problems he has faced was convincing countries of the dire situation in the western region of Sudan.

"I think some of the Arab countries and Asian countries have not really understood we're in a free fall. It's not a steady deterioration. It's a free fall and it includes Darfur, eastern Chad, northern Central African Republic," he said.

I predicted, 40 years ago, when the UN dug all those wells in Africa, the overpopulation of herds would lead to desertfication and the various UN development programs will mostly produce lots of children which will become a hazard, not a blessing, and if the climate goes sour, the massive excess population will crash. As we are now seeing.

The birthrate in the Middle East is soaring, too, and violence is growing. Saudi Arabia has a very high birthrate, for example. China has taken tremendous measures to prevent this, the one child policy being the most famous. Young women lose value if there is overpopulation or derth of resources. The need for more children drops and the need to cannibalize grows.

I see no way to 'fix' the Darfur disaster short of relocating most of the refugee population. Maybe they can all come to Europe and America? Indeed.

We depopulated Africa in the past...as slaves. Now, we want nothing of any of them.

And the ability to enslave or cannibalize is deep within our brain structure. This is why we are able to tame and control wild species. And thanks to the violent past of humans, we have a significant population that is psychopathic. Namely, capable of brutally killing without mercy or any feelings.

&hearts Bush is a classic psychopath, like when he would put firecrackers in frogs and then blow them up while shouting happily.

Criminal psychopaths are people with aggressive and anti-social personalities who lack emotional empathy.

They can commit hideous crimes, such as rape or murder, yet show no signs of remorse or guilt.

It has been suggested that people with psychopathic disorders lack empathy because they have defects in processing facial and vocal expressions of distress, such as fear and sadness, in others.

Professor Declan Murphy and colleagues set out to test this using a scan that shows up brain activity.

They showed six psychopaths and nine healthy volunteers pictures of faces showing different emotions.

Both groups had increased activity in brain areas involved in processing facial expressions in response to happy faces compared with neutral faces, but this increase was smaller among the psychopaths.

By contrast, when processing fearful faces compared with neutral faces, the healthy volunteers showed increased activation and the psychopaths decreased activation in these brain regions.

The researchers said: "These results suggest that the neural pathways for processing facial expressions of happiness are functionally intact in people with psychopathic disorder, although less responsive.

"In contrast, fear is processed in a very different way."

In nature, when one animal shows fear in a herd or group, all others feel fear and respond the same way. But humans have evolved fighting not only other animals but each other. And clans always needed at least 20% of the population to be immune to the genetic command, 'if you see a fearful face, feel fearful too' because the ones lacking this would not run from danger but confront it. They also often were killed so the genes couldn't dominate the population. Just enough of them survived to keep it as part of the genetic heritage.

If this gene is expressed in a human that is coddled and protected we get Bush: a coward who is a bully and who cannot fathom the fear he inspires, he sees only hate and responds violently, himself, via proxies, if possible.

These sort of psychopaths are very dangerous. They can and have killed millions and millions of humans. And not shed a single tear or responded to any cries of pain. And times of ecological stress are when these sorts become powerful. The ability to coldly kill is very human just as the ability to understand pain in even other species is also very human.

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