Next up: how the cows may be controlling the dairy farmerhttps://twitter.com/Psychobiotic/status/1061305014784794626 …
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Replying to @Plinz
Fecal microbiota transplants can cause a recipient to crave foods their FMT donor regularly ate. This is likely due to the transfer of microbes that prefer living on certain substrates (types of starch, sugar, etc.). Do you consider it "control" if one listens to these urges?
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Replying to @AbstractMonkey9
Fecal transplants probably don’t work because better gut flora is more invasive. They are breeding stock. If the new breeds use different nutrients, they may create demand and deficiencies, which the organism registers and tries to compensate for.
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Replying to @Plinz
Yes, and regarding those demands/deficiencies - would you consider these signals resulting from the new breeding stock to be a method of influencing their host's behavior? Is that control? Because I absolutely believe microbes influence their hosts' behaviors.
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Replying to @AbstractMonkey9
Imagine that a goat farmer gets a cow transplant. The farmer measures the amount of milk being produced by each, and as a result begins to breed mostly cows. He will also have to learn to switch from goat feed to cow feed. Does that mean that the cows control the farmer?
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Replying to @Plinz
Of course one's initial impulse is to say no, but I think this may be a matter of semantics. Speaking literally, receiving the cows caused the farmer to modify his behavior. And speaking less in metaphor, the ability of microbes to influence host behavior is well established.
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Replying to @AbstractMonkey9
I think that toxoplasmosis makes people more impulsive and flu makes people more interested in social interaction. Both changes are maladaptive. Due to the way evolution works, our organism will trend towards the right level of impulsivity and sociality by itself.
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Replying to @Plinz
Both changes have negligible effect at the level of the individual, are adaptive at the level of toxoplasmosis and the flu, and are only maladaptive at the level of human society. However, there is rarely a cost to an infector for infecting people... 1/2
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Replying to @AbstractMonkey9 @Plinz
So infecting people with toxoplasmosis and the flu will rarely affect one's reproductive fitness, and so there is little genetic push on the part of humans against their spread. Humans may trend towards healthy impulsivity and sociality sans pathogens, but not with them. 2/2
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There are estimates that the increase in erratic behavior due to toxoplasmosis leads to more deaths than malaria.
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Replying to @Plinz
It probably also leads to more unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancies
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