131–140 of 189 posts
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Surely causation. Farmers store crops which attract rodents which attract felines. Wild cats that mind their manners do better in this environment. Eventually wild cats become the kitty cats we know today.
I think they were suggesting that causality could run the other way.
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This is a fascinating and unexpected piece of information. I would be very intrigued to read your source.
Here's CNN's exit poll for November 2022: https://www.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls/national-result... Unmarried women vote Democratic, 68-31. Unmarried men vote Republican, 52-45. Married women, Republican, 56-42. Married men, Republican, 59-39. Here's an image purporting to describe the Reuters-Ipsos poll of 2012: https://i.imgur.com/I3ycNpC.png . (I haven't been able to find the actual poll.) It only gives the…
Anyhow, the quoted figures doesn’t exactly show that married people “barely vote Republican”.
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I can see the headlines now "you won't believe this one weird trick for bigger gains and better performance in bed".
What is the legal framework for a product that infects people with "beneficial" parasites ?
It’s impressive to see T. Gondii evolve to influence their hosts to write positive PR. Joking aside, it makes sense to me that higher risk behavior on the host’s part would increase a parasite’s spread, since some of the energy that drives risk also increases the rate of physical interaction with the world; like a free roaming particle with a lot of momentum on a substrate. It is good to see more research looking int…
Ha! It's good research but there is a major caveat I didn't see it in this press release. Before they answer questions like yours they need to have tracked when infection occured. Simple conundrum are wolves who are infected with t. Gondii more likely to leave their pack? Or are wolves that leave their pack more likely to get infected? Similarly for pack leaders. It might seem obtuse to ask for this but it is importa…
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There are other studies that link Toxoplasmosis to increased risk taking. Here one on increased likelihood of getting into car accidents: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC117239/#__ffn_s... . It's widely known for many years now. Twenty years ago there was a huge report about it on German public radio. The article I looked references research from the seventies. It's been a strange philosophical point to…
What's the medical system going to do about a parasite that often doesn't cause any symptoms that can pinpoint the particular pathogen? Most healthy people clear the infection without ever knowing anything happened. We don't have any way to undo whatever the parasite did while it was active. It's probably possible to create a vaccine, but the full impact in humans is still being explored and a vaccine for a pathogen…
"Risky business: linking Toxoplasma gondii infection and entrepreneurship behaviours across individuals and countries" ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30051870/ ) >Among professionals attending entrepreneurship events, T. gondii-positive individuals were 1.8× more likely to have started their own business compared with other attendees (n = 197). Finally, after synthesizing and combining country-level databases on T…
I can see the headlines now "you won't believe this one weird trick for bigger gains and better performance in bed".
Sure, why not.
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Age, socio-economic status, and other confounding factors. Not to mention, according to him, 40% is "barely".
He probably didn't have the stat off the top of his head, so it was exaggerated based on assumptions. But the underlying intuition had a kernel of truth and applies to any political party, or any institution, really. For example, if an organization dedicated to the poor mainly draws support from poor people, they have a kind of incentive to subtly maintain poverty. This theory that institutions kind of have a tendenc…