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| Wednesday |
the Tenth of December, 2003 |
And some facetious pop-sci effects of toxoplasma on human
personality - researchers claim that the cat-borne parasite makes
women easy-going, promiscuous and likely to spend more money on clothes,
while turning men into "aggressive, undesirable loners". Only a
very, very slight increase in the chance of a human host being
eaten by cats, then. Give it another 50,000 years.
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Some theories of behaviour-modifying
parasitism, boiling down to a
cloudy mix of increased parasite fitness (changing host behaviour to make it
more vulnerable to predation) and increased host fitness (changing behaviour to
slow the growth of, or kill, the parasite).
There's also a wonderful (if rather unproven) theory of evolved host
suicide, whereby increased vulnerability to predation stops the
host's kin from becoming infected.
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| Tuesday |
the Ninth |
Doctors are prescribing gutworm eggs to calm
human immune systems - brilliantly, the picture of "Dr Alan Brown", three photos down, gives away their true reason for working together. ("My wife's horrified - she's totally convinced that one day I'm going to infect the whole family.")
There also been "recent" research about
a common toxoplasma parasite slowing reaction times in the human
brain, which I'm sure I've heard before. But I didn't know that it's
more than twice as common among the French, makes rats fearless as
an evolutionary-useful-behaviour-changing trick (although it's not
a patch on dicrocoelium
dentriticum) and is impossible to remove.
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| Monday |
the Eighth |
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| Underground London - an alternative Beck's-style
map of sewers, forgotten underground rivers and the Post Office
Railway. ("But this was not the Post Office's first experiment with
underground deliveries. In 1863, they had built a pneumatic railway
at Euston, shooting mail compartments fast below the city.")
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