There's been a fear that if a genetic component to homosexuality were discovered people would abort "gay" fetuses. In some insanely PC places it's even against the law to abort them (before any certainty can be found) but nobody else.

But there's another possibility. There does seem a genetic component, especially since the condition crops up in all historical periods in all cultures -- suggesting it's no simply an environmental product. Also, even though it tends to work against reproduction and in some societies can cause the gay person to be killed outright, it still exists. The probability, it seems to me, is that it's an aspect of some useful property.

Suppose a gene was in fact found and simply removed from sperm or egg cells or from the fertilized cells that were then re-implanted. Then suppose the persons so "treated" -- say several millions over a few years -- turned out to be lacking in some quality: no ability to express emotion, no understanding of are or no ability at all to understand symbol use despite normal intelligence, or no sense of time, and so on.

Then what....? What will people do...but accept the occurance of gayness in order to be completely human. Or will there be more intense research on eliminating it?

There seems little likelihood of immediately finding advanced space aliens, so searching for a companion species has to be turned back to the species we have here.

Aside from advancing the intelligence of dogs, which I think should be done, we should also consider some other primates. They wouldn't have as far to go as canids and have a structure we know is suitable for larger brains.

I would consider some monkeys, but first the apes should be candidates. Not chimps, though. Chimps are trash primates, always squabbling and fighting, cheating their own relatives, even, and have seemingly unpredictable emotional states.

Instead, I think orangs would be better. They are slow and deliberate, usually good natured, able to live independently on their own or to form larger groups and so are socially versatile -- neither dependent on company nor incapable of organizing. They appear to have a good deal of mechanical ability, and while they can be dangerous or even murderous, they appear less so inclined than our closer, trashy relatives.

Further, they are somewhat more removed from us genetically, and so may prove more interesting as a companion species.

For the next superintelligent species I'd recommend orangs even if we can one day clone a neandertal or two.

It seems to me that biology is the best means of terraforming Venus. While Mars is more amenable to engineering as it is now, Venus might be made habitable by carefully designed organisms that might disrupt the planet's current weather and geology.

The first might be microorganisms that consume sulpheric acid and convert it to water and some sulphur byproducts. They could multiply wildly in the clouds, causing furious rainstorms and clearing out clouds -- which would recycle as clouds because of surface temperature, but with less and less of the sulphur. The process of clearing the clouds and cooling the surface might take a hundred thousand years -- but so what? The "germs" would probably adapt, might be supplied with genes that can be useful under changed conditions, but we will also continue to speed up the bio development from outside.

With enough information about Venusian conditions some rogue group might even design the organisms and small craft to transport them there outside government approval to start the process, which might become pretty quickly detectable. It would probably be impossible to stop once under way. Indeed, this is a goal for some here to begin pondering....

Bad-tempered women 'can blame it on genes'
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 1:56am GMT 10/03/2007

Ever wonder why some women seem to be more ill-tempered than others? The answer may partly lie in their genes, according to a study that suggests a blood test could one day be developed to detect feminine belligerence.

Genes as well as the environment - in the form of provocation, annoyances and miscellaneous bugbears - could have played a role in angry outbursts, say University of Pittsburgh researchers.

They report that anger, hostility and pugnacity may be genetic, rooted in variations in a serotonin receptor gene, that is the gene responsible in the protein that picks up the brain messenger chemical serotonin, one which plays a variety of roles, including in personality disorders. These findings "may aid in establishing a potential marker for certain conditions associated with aggression and anger", the team adds.

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Dr Indrani Halder of the Cardiovascular Behavioural Medicine Programme at the University of Pittsburgh, will present the findings at the American Psychosomatic Society's Annual Meeting, held in Budapest, Hungary.

Previous studies have associated the hormone serotonin with anger and aggression in both humans and animals and have shown that increased activity of serotonin is related to a decrease in anger and aggression. In the study being presented by Dr Halder, researchers sought to determine if this relationship was genetically determined.

The study, the first to look at the relationship between variations in the serotonin receptor 2C gene and anger and hostility, focused 550 unrelated women of European descent. In order to find normal variations in genes and behaviour, the women were not prescreened for behavioural type.

Researchers found that those who had one or both of two alterations in the promoter region of the serotonin receptor 2C gene - the part of the gene that turns it on - were more likely to score lower on two common tests for anger, hostility and aggression.

Testing for these markers could have wider implications. "Aggression and hostility are predictors of hypertension, glucose metabolism and heart diseases," said Dr. Halder. "The genetic marker we found for hostility also may be useful for predicting a person's predisposition to such diseases," adding that this will be the subject of follow up studies.

But the work was greeted with some scepticism. "It's wildly premature to envisage the serotonin receptor 2C gene, or any gene, being used as a test for a tendency to angry aggression," commented Prof Terrie Moffitt of the Institute of Psychiatry, London. "However, this study fits another key piece into a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle: why are extremely emotional people more likely to develop heart disease?"

"Individual differences in aggression and anger are influenced by genes -- as are all personality traits -- but progress in identifying the genes has been slower than researchers expected," added Prof Robert Plomin, deputy director of the Social, Genetic and Development Psychiatry Centre, London. "Thousands of reports of this gene or that gene being related to complex traits or common disorders in the end fail to replicate, not just for behaviour but also for medical problems such as dementia and heart disease." Rather than looking at one gene at a time, most researchers have moved on to more systematic approaches that scan the entire human genetic makeup - genome - with hundreds of thousands of DNA markers, he said.

"In addition, most researchers now assume that we are looking for many genes of small effect which implies that very large samples with many thousands of subjects are needed in order to detect these associations of small effect size."

Prof Plomin is also sceptical. "Because the Halder paper looks at only one gene in a relatively small sample, I bet that this report will join the ranks of thousands of other reports that fail to replicate. On the other hand, in dozens of studies of humans and rodents, serotonin has been shown to play a role in emotional responding so it is not unreasonable to consider DNA variations in the serotonin transporter as a source of individual differences in aggression and anger. I would just need a lot more convincing."

Dr Halder told The Daily Telegraph: "I agree that our study needs replication in larger samples, but a genomic scan does not negate the necessity of testing known candidate genes, one at a time if necessary, to understand exactly how the gene causes/influences a trait. We were not scanning the genome, rather attempting to investigate how variations in one particular gene influence a personality phenotype, based on certain hypotheses regarding the function of the gene."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/09/nwomen09.xml

Dr Paul Irwing: 'There are twice as many men as women with an IQ of 120-plus'
Interview by Nick Jackson
Published: 30 November 2006
Dr Paul Irwing is a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University. He claims that men are more intelligent than women.

All the research I've done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women.

I don't know why this is, all I can say is that we have a huge amount of data.

In my 2005 paper in the British Journal of Psychology we looked at 22 surveys sampling 20,000 university students. In 21 out of the 22 studies males always had an advantage. That's a lot. We ignored the survey from Mexico because the results were consistent with a university that was extremely selective with respect to females. Why did Steve Blinkhorn call our research "flawed and suspect"?

The results of both studies were a shock to me. I find prejudice abhorrent. I've always taught sex differences from a left-wing point of view, that women are every bit as good as men. My findings don't fit my view of the world at all. Girls often do better than boys at school. There has to be some female compensating factor, most importantly the ability to process speech sounds, which means women read faster and more accurately and have an advantage in basic writing tasks. And women work harder than men and are more conscientious so they do things technic-ally correctly. Men are often quite original but deficient in what is technically demanded.

Historically women have been discriminated against. They've made tremendous progress and some people feel findings like this are a kick in the teeth. I have sympathy for that, but only people who know virtually nothing about IQ tests claim they have a cultural bias. All IQ tests are thoroughly tested and adjusted for bias, so if anything IQ tests are biased in favour of women not men.

People should have equal opportunities but if you want a society where everyone feels satisfied you're not going to find men and women doing the same things in the same proportions. It would help if we recognised that.

Dr Paul Irwing is a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University. He claims that men are more intelligent than women.

All the research I've done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women.

I don't know why this is, all I can say is that we have a huge amount of data.

In my 2005 paper in the British Journal of Psychology we looked at 22 surveys sampling 20,000 university students. In 21 out of the 22 studies males always had an advantage. That's a lot. We ignored the survey from Mexico because the results were consistent with a university that was extremely selective with respect to females. Why did Steve Blinkhorn call our research "flawed and suspect"?

The results of both studies were a shock to me. I find prejudice abhorrent. I've always taught sex differences from a left-wing point of view, that women are every bit as good as men. My findings don't fit my view of the world at all. Girls often do better than boys at school. There has to be some female compensating factor, most importantly the ability to process speech sounds, which means women read faster and more accurately and have an advantage in basic writing tasks. And women work harder than men and are more conscientious so they do things technic-ally correctly. Men are often quite original but deficient in what is technically demanded.
Historically women have been discriminated against. They've made tremendous progress and some people feel findings like this are a kick in the teeth. I have sympathy for that, but only people who know virtually nothing about IQ tests claim they have a cultural bias. All IQ tests are thoroughly tested and adjusted for bias, so if anything IQ tests are biased in favour of women not men.

People should have equal opportunities but if you want a society where everyone feels satisfied you're not going to find men and women doing the same things in the same proportions. It would help if we recognised that.

http://education.independent.co.uk/higher/article2024763.ece

There are a number of traditional beliefs about survival after death and while I doubt there's any survival in any real sense without continued bodily existence a couple of the older ideas seem to be within the realm of remote possibility because they can be investigated scientifically.

I'll admit that this was brought to mind by qewl's forum thread on ghosts, but it is something I thought about some time ago.

Most official traditional beliefs are based on someone's "vision" or hallucination involving a visit to the afterlife. There are problems with this even though such visions have similar elements even when from different traditions. Nearly all of them are from hundreds if not thousands of years in the past, making any questioning of the visionary impossible (not to say dangerous in some places). This means that while one can compare accounts of different visionaries scientifically one cannot directly investigate the content of the visions. It's still outside our scope to directly share someone else's subjective experience, let alone that of someone long dead. External comparison of literary accounts is the most we can do. Further, many such accounts, even if the original person was sincere, are edited and changed for the purpose of supporting some authority.

Spiritualism, contacting the dead through mediums, has been thoroughly investigated and exposed. Professional magicians can tell how many of their illusions are accomplished. I've seen mediums and imitated them with some success (long ago and not with any purpose but to see if I could).

Ghosts actually are remotely possible simply because different individuals can investigate them objectively, not relying on another's subjective account as "proof." This is what's been done with mediums, of course, except that one needn't be or pretend to be a medium to investigate ghosts. Haunted places can be wired with instruments and witnesses can await the haunting. I'm not claiming there are ghosts or even that if there are they are really disembodied dead people, I'm just saying that the ability to investigate them, try to measure what might happen, to duplicate others' sightings, and to publish the results places them in the realm of possible. Maybe 1% possible.

The same, oddly, goes for reincarnation. A person's claim of past lives can in theory at least be investigated objectively. Someone in a hypnotic state says his name is Joe Blow and he's an insurance salesman in Omaha in 1932 and dies of a heart attack at age 68 in 1944. One can go to the Omaha library and look in old phone books and city directories for Joe Blow and go through graveyards seeking his marker. Of course it would be more credible if a 9 year old girl in Ulan Bator made the claim. Modern records make it more possible to investigate such claims, though there are people within living memory who left almost no record: my father had a brother who died at age 12 in 1918; only family histories have any record of him because he lived in rural east Texas and his grandfather and uncles were ministers who must've seen to his funeral, the doctor's name hasn't come down to me, and his grave marker as far as I could tell has disappeared. Still, if  centuries go by in N. America without serious upheaval there should be many ever more precise records (also useful for fraud).

Reincarnation can be investigated objectively according to the same principles as ghosts because external records now exist of most people that are accessible public records. Again, that doesn't mean I'm asserting it happens or could guess why it would, only that the fact it can be checked by others, the checks duplicated and published, and examined  by anyone else.

Incidentally, if either of these could be shown to actually happen they would not in my opinion be supernatural but rather would be natural phenomenon.

Most mammals seem to have a built in social sense that enables them to sort into hierarchical groups based usually on agressiveness and size, but in some on intelligence and the ability to scheme and size up others' psychology. Of course the abilities involved vary within a species.

One of the ways in which humans are more efficient is in being omniverous and having no totally instinctive food preferences. People have to learn what to eat and this seeming liability has enabled us to exploit many more foods than other life forms, even to those needing elaborate preparation and now even to manufactured foodstuffs. Thus what seems a liability in the biological world, not automatically knowing what to eat, is a tremendous asset.

Humans to various degrees have to learn social behavior, though there's an instinctive core in most. People who are deficient in it are nerds or even autistic -- a few years ago they were considered "alienated" along with criminals, though criminals are actually highly social. Could autism or at least "nerdism" actually in the long run prove beneficial?

Consider how the innate social behavior skewed reason and held people back by causing them for tens or hundreds of thousands of years to think that storms were signs of some huge being's anger or that by pleading and bargaining with the sky or the river one could insure a good harvest. They weren't able to distinguish social interactions from the physical world. The ability to do so, meaning freedom from the grip of percieving the world through social instincts, would have and probably has in the long run resulted in deeper understanding of reality.

Thus persons who aren't automatically social may be at an advantage or confer on their group a survival advantage by having a superior outlook, though they have also likely often been killed for asking logical questions about a leader's pronouncements.

Possibly combined with extremely long lives during which people can learn social interactions by example and by logical thinking and by instruction whatever factors result in autism would be beneficial to humans. That seems unlikely, but the survival of a human infant compared to a baby deer also seems highly unlikely. With thirty years of childhood and another thirty or so as adolescents, people who live for centuries would benefit by being born almost totally asocial; though the social world would be entirely a construct (as leftists must insist by doctrine that it is) it would also be far more powerful and nuanced a tool than one partly inborn.

Just as people with scant food instincts but high intelligence have become able to exploit many more resources than chimpanzees, so such persons would build much more complex and beneficial societies.

Thus not only extreme intelligence and enormous life spans, but total alienation from others should be a goal of human improvement.

Bulletin -- Men Invented Humanity
By William Tucker
Published 10/10/2006 12:07:42 AM

Time magazine did one of those Evolution updates last week, "How We Became Human," on its cover. There wasn't too much new -- just how little we differ genetically from chimpanzees.

Yet there was one sentence that stood out like a lightning bolt. It has enormous implications for understanding how human societies evolved and why they sometimes find it difficult to get along with each other. Here it is:

[T]he principle of gene-by-gene comparison [between species] remains a powerful one, and just a year ago geneticists got hold of a long-awaited tool for making those comparisons in bulk. Although the news was largely overshadowed by the impact of Hurricane Katrina... the publication of a rough draft of the chimp genome in the journal Nature immediately told scientists several important things. First they learned that overall, the sequences of base pairs that make up both species' [i.e., humans and chimps] genomes differ by 1.23% -- a ringing confirmation of the 1970 estimates -- and that the most striking divergence between them occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome, present only in males.

Did you see that? It deserves much more attention than Time was willing to give it. Basically, the point is that, in crossing the little evolutionary distance that exists between chimps and humans, most of the changes occurred in males. In other words, what differentiates us from our mammalian relatives is changes that have occurred in the male of the species.

Actually, this is not news. Evolutionary anthropologists have long been aware of it. As far back as 1972, Elaine Morgan, a feminist, writing in The Descent of Woman, noted that in fact the role of females hadn't changed much from chimp to human. Mothers nurse and care for their offspring in basically the same way chimps do. In terms of social role, there really isn't much difference between human females and other animals.

What has changed is the role of males. Among chimps, males hang out in groups, form alliances, forage together, and do a lot of bickering over status. They do not participate at all in child rearing. By the time hunting-and-gathering tribes arrive, however, men have been folded into the family. Monogamy predominates and both parents participate in child rearing. The extraordinary innovation is "fatherhood," a role that doesn't really exist elsewhere in nature.

Last March in The American Spectator I wrote an article entitled "The Alpha Couple and the Primal Horde," speculating how this transformation might have taken place. Without recounting the whole argument, let's review some of key ways in which chimp society is unique among other mammals and how it might have evolved into human society.

One very unusual quality about East African chimps -- our closest relatives -- is that they are patrilocal. While females usually form the backbone of most mammalian societies, chimp troops are built around closely related males. They form a "brotherhood" that defends territory and keeps a population of females within its borders. (Interestingly, dolphins, the other species that most closely matches human intelligence, do the same thing.) Females usually stay within their native group but sometimes migrate to other troops -- something that males never do. In addition, these male bands occasionally go to war with neighboring troops, expanding their territory and capturing other females.

This social pattern does not even predominate among other chimp species. The notable example is the bonobo or "pygmy" chimps, a slightly more distant cousin of ours that lives in the deepest jungles of Central African. Among bonobos, females predominate and males out-migrate. The "sisterhood" of females is the core structure -- just as in most mammalian societies. Males even draw their rank from their mothers and are often physically defended by them, even after reaching maturity.

Bonobos are an easy-going species that indulge constantly in sex, both heterosexual and homosexual. In fact, ethnologists describe bonobo sex as a form of social conviviality that keeps tensions at a minimum. Frans de Waal, a Dutch scientist who has written extensively about bonobos, continually holds up this female dominance and the relative placidity among bonobos as a negative contrast to human society. Writing in Scientific American, he says:

At a juncture in history during which women are seeking equality with men, science arrives with a belated gift to the feminist movement. Male-biased evolutionary scenarios -- Man the Hunter, Man the Toolmaker and so on -- are being challenged by the discovery that females play a central, perhaps even dominant, role in the social life of one of our nearest relatives. In the past few years many strands of knowledge have come together concerning a relatively unknown ape with an unorthodox repertoire of behavior: the bonobo.

In fact, the discovery of bonobo society proves just the opposite. It is precisely because females play a dominant role and males are so passive and unambitious that bonobos did not produce an evolutionary line that led to human beings. Instead, they remain a relatively minor, underpopulated species holding their orgies deep in the jungle. The larger East African chimp, where males predominate, produced the line that led to humanity.

What is it about this "male brotherhood" that points the way to human evolution? First of all, male chimps have learned to work with each other in co-operative effort -- something nearly all other species don't do. Chimps have very rigorous rules about sharing females. Each male is allowed to mate with each female. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of The Woman Who Never Evolved, has pointed out, this "confuses paternity," allowing each male to think that a female's offspring might be his own. This dampens sexual jealousy and eliminates the very cruel practice in other species where an alpha male will kill off any rival male's offspring in order to put females to work in producing his own.

Most important, male bonding enables chimps to practice cooperative hunting. Meat constitutes about 10 percent of their diet -- a figure that would rise steadily as humans evolved. Jane Goodall describes a scene where a troop of male chimps was foraging in the trees among a group of monkeys. Almost imperceptibly, without any overt signals, the chimps moved into positions where they had one young monkey isolated on a tree branch. Suddenly they pounced and killed him, sharing the meat. It is easy to see how chimp troops could have taken such skills onto the East African savannah, where the earliest human evolution occurred. Human tribes did not become big-game hunters for millions of years but they probably survived as scavengers and hunters of small game in the earliest stages. In an environment where rivals and predators were swift and common, this male cooperation was the only hope of survival.

As I outlined in "The Alpha Couple and the Primal Horde," in the new savannah environment, the crucial key to keeping a group of males together while avoiding sexual jealousy would have be monogamy. The chimp ritual of having every ovulating female mate with every male -- which often takes more than a week -- would be too distracting and time-consuming in the much more dangerous savannah environment. Nor would reverting to polygamy solve the problem. Polygamous species such as the gorilla form "harems," where a dominant male collects a large number of females while subdominant males are pushed into an isolated "bachelor herd." This works for the powerful gorilla, which has no natural predators. But it would have been impossible for a diminutive species of three-foot-tall chimpanzees trying to survive on the savannah. The advantage of monogamy is that it keeps the group together, since each member is guaranteed a mate.

Coincidentally (or was it perhaps Intelligent Design?), this conversion to monogamy also offered irreplaceable advantages in child rearing. The enlistment of males to child rearing made possible the development of human intelligence. The combination of enlarging brains and the new upright stature made birth more difficult for protohuman females. As a result, all humans are born premature -- earlier than body size would dictate and in a much greater state of helplessness than other creature in nature. The evolution of human intelligence would have been impossible without the change in male role and the adoption of monogamy. For that reason, it is not at all surprising to find that the key genetic changes have occurred on the male chromosome.

So what does all this suggest for the present? First, it says that feminism, in its most obviously primitive forms, is undermining human evolution. Everywhere in the Western world, the emancipation of women has initially led to rising divorce rates and plummeting births. After intelligent consideration, however, many "second-generation" feminists have been able to handle both careers and families, which means the human family may be able to reconstitute itself on a more equitable basis.

The real changes are on the other side of the world, however, where Muslim societies have regressed to polygamy, a form of marriages that was not present in the earliest stages of human evolutionary history. This has led to a re-creation of the "bachelor herd" -- a disgruntled population of excess males, which Islam has always handled very skillfully by turning it into an army of jihad warriors.

The brotherhood of males, the invention of "fatherhood," the creation of monogamous marriage within a larger social unit -- these have been the pathways to human evolution. Sustaining the family while keeping rival brotherhoods from becoming too murderous in their competition will be the key to keeping the experiment going.

William Tucker is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.

   http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10470

Source: University of California - Santa Barbara

Posted: August 4, 2006
 
Cat Parasite May Affect Cultural Traits In Human Populations
A common parasite found in cats may be affecting human behavior on a mass scale, according to a scientist based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

While little is known about the causes of cultural change, and biological explanations often stimulate social and scientific debate, a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey published in the August 2 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biology, indicates that behavioral manipulation of a common brain parasite may be among factors that play a role.

"In populations where this parasite is very common, mass personality modification could result in cultural change," said study author Kevin Lafferty, a USGS scientist at UC Santa Barbara. "The geographic variation in the latent prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii may explain a substantial proportion of human population differences we see in cultural aspects that relate to ego, money, material possessions, work and rules."

Although this sounds like science fiction, it is a logical outcome of how natural selection leads to effective strategies for parasites to get from host to host, said Lafferty. Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite of cats, both domestic and wild. While modern humans are a dead-end host for the parasite, Toxoplasma appears to manipulate personality by the same adaptations that normally help it complete its life cycle. The typical journey of the parasite involves a cat and its prey, starting as eggs shed in an infected cat's ***, inadvertently eaten by a warm-blooded animal, such as a rat. The infected rat's behavior alters so that it becomes more active, less cautious and more likely to be eaten by a cat, where the parasite completes its life cycle. Many other warm-blooded vertebrates may be infected by this pathogen. After producing usually mild flu-like symptoms in humans, the parasite tends to remain in a dormant state in the brain and other tissues.

Evidence for subtle long-term effects on an individual's personality, reported by researchers in the Czech Republic, inspired Lafferty to explore whether a shift in the average, or aggregate, personality of a population might occur where Toxoplasma has infected a higher proportion of individuals. Infection with Toxoplasma varies considerably from one population to another; in some countries it is very rare, while in others nearly all adults are infected. To test his hypothesis, Lafferty used published data on cultural dimension and aggregate personality for countries where there were also published data on the prevalence of Toxoplasma antibodies in women of childbearing age. Pregnant women are tested for antibodies because of the serious risk posed by toxoplasmosis to fetuses, which lack their own immune systems.

The results of previous work suggested that Toxoplasma could affect specific elements of human culture. Toxoplasma is associated with different, often opposite, behavioral changes in men and women, but both genders exhibit guilt proneness (a form of neuroticism). Lafferty's analysis found that countries with high Toxoplasma prevalence had a higher aggregate neuroticism score, and western nations with high prevalence also scored higher in the 'neurotic' cultural dimensions of 'masculine' sex roles and uncertainty avoidance.

"There could be a lot more to this story. Different responses to the parasite by men and women could lead to many additional cultural effects that are, as yet, difficult to analyze," said Lafferty.

Lafferty suggested that because climate affects the persistence of infectious states of Toxoplasma in the environment, it helps drive the geographic variation in the parasite's prevalence by increasing exposure risk. The parasite's eggs can live longer in humid, low-altitude regions, especially at mid latitudes that have infrequent freezing and thawing. Cultural practices of food preparation such as rare or undercooked meats, or poor hygiene, can increase exposure to infection, as can having cats as pets. Lafferty added, "Toxoplasmosis is one of many factors that may influence personality and culture, which may also include the effects of other infectious diseases, genetics, environment and history. Efforts to control this infectious pathogen could bring about cultural changes."

"This is not to say that the cultural dimensions associated with T. gondii are necessarily undesirable," noted Lafferty. "After all, they add to our cultural diversity."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060804085444.htm

Science can be compromised by openness and there needs to be a way around this without directly compromising freedom of expression. This idea was brought to a head for me by musing on the possibility of recovering neandertal DNA and the inevitable possibility of clonng them and the equally inevitable wailing and whining by religious leaders, "ethicists," and the sociopolitical left who won't oppose it so much as exploit the results with much public display. Somewhat the same happened with so-called "test tube babies," whose rights were worried over and whom religious authorities claimed would be "born without souls." No, they are normal individuals. Clones, once the technology is mastered, will be normal individuals even if the twins of persons older, even much older, than themselves and not "soulless" humanoids committing all manner of perversions. Since neandertals would likely appear sufficiently different from us as do blacks to whites and whites to blacks and either to yellows, certainly some social problems will be invented involving them, especially if they are generally less intelligent than humans.

Which brings me to my point, that science and research need to be carried on with a moderate amount of secrecy to keep it slightly beyond the reach of neurotics, professional malcontents, scandalmongers, and political agents. As I see it this will help protect unmistakeably beneficial advances such as in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering until they can be applied effecively.

The use of an artificial language for scientific papers, Esperanto or, better, lojban, would help. Latin was once the language used by Western scientists and scholars since it was known throughout Europe by educated persons. An artificial language (as opposed to a natural language which would be accessible to at least fairly sizeable populations) could serve the purpose of scientific privacy. Nobody would be prevented from learning the language outside scientific fields, but few people would take the trouble. There might be legislation in different countries for the purpose of protecting science from interference by the media and the aforementioned undesirables. Ultimately, all research must be required to be revealed openly.

There should be contracts but not external laws requiring a certain amount of secrecy, with violators losing funding and employment or pensions.

Again, there will not be total secrecy as in some spy agencies, and this wouldn't serve too well. No doubt much urban legend and folklore will then surround science -- but such is the case anyway.