"There's a parasite known as toxoplasmosis that lives in the bodies of rats. But it gets passed on when the rats get eaten by cats. And then it ends up in the cats' feces and then it ends up back in rats. If you are a rat and you have toxoplasmosis, you are perfectly healthy except for one thing. The toxoplasmosis rewires your brain and it makes you less afraid of cats. Now, again, this is not some sort of bizarre quirk of a humorous god. Rather, it's because this is a perfectly — this is the adaptive strategy of the toxoplasmosis virus.
In fact, a real powerful virus would skip the respiratory system altogether, even better than a cold virus. What it would do is it would take over the brain and it will make people want to run around and have sex with other people and kiss them on the mouth. And in fact, there is some evidence that this happens. There's some evidence, for instance, that one of the effects of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis is it arouses the libido, makes people more sexually engaged, because this is part of the strategy through which these viruses replicate themselves. Imagine a virus, for instance, that captured an animal's brain and then modified the animal's brain such that the animal would run out and bite other animals so as to pass on the virus. And then, of course, you would call that virus "rabies." Along these lines, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins took the general step of suggesting that animals are the vehicles through which genes exploit to reproduce. From this perspective, an animal is just the person's — is just the gene's way of creating another animal."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology
[link]
In fact, a real powerful virus would skip the respiratory system altogether, even better than a cold virus. What it would do is it would take over the brain and it will make people want to run around and have sex with other people and kiss them on the mouth. And in fact, there is some evidence that this happens. There's some evidence, for instance, that one of the effects of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis is it arouses the libido, makes people more sexually engaged, because this is part of the strategy through which these viruses replicate themselves. Imagine a virus, for instance, that captured an animal's brain and then modified the animal's brain such that the animal would run out and bite other animals so as to pass on the virus. And then, of course, you would call that virus "rabies." Along these lines, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins took the general step of suggesting that animals are the vehicles through which genes exploit to reproduce. From this perspective, an animal is just the person's — is just the gene's way of creating another animal."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology
[link]
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