Altruism, empathy and morality

Recent research shows that when you do something totally unselfish, the same regions in the brain that responds to food or sex lights up. The study, originally published in October 2006 by Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman, got a lot of publicity in the press lately. Some good summaries could be found in the Washington Post and Science Daily, and also in some blogs from people interested in this topic.

My personal uneducated take on altruism is that I know it feels good. My brain rewards me when I help someone, when I make someone else happy. The evolutionary benefit from this is a bit harder to pinpoint, but the articles mentioned above has some good theories. Scott Huettel draws the following conclusions from his study:

"Our findings are consistent with a theory that some aspects of altruism arose out of a system for perceiving the intentions and goals of others."

and

"To be altruistic, you need to see that the people you’re helping have goals, and that your actions will have consequences for them."

The also studies show that people with damage to a specific part of the frontal lobe lacked empathy and would solve tricky emotional problems in a cold "the-end-justifies-the-means" way. This sounds a lot like Asperger's syndrome to me. Now every other kid with a slight communication problem seems to get this diagnose, but I wouldn't be surprised if this condition has something to do with them having a slight error in parts of their frontal lobe.

Marc Hauser has done psychological experiments showing that people all over the world process moral questions in the same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human brain, rather than a product of culture. That morality is comparable to language in the way that they are both intrinsic in humans. He suggests that people reach moral conclusions in the same way they construct a sentence without having been trained in linguistics. A quote from this excellent summary of a Nature article:

Thus, the findings confirm the notion that there are at least two neural systems involved in making moral decisions: one in which emotions are involved, and one which performs a cost-benefit analysis. [... ...] It is believed that the emotion-based system for making moral decisions evolved first, perhaps in a situation where small numbers of people lived in kin groups. [Antonio] Damasio says, “A nice way to think about it is that we have this emotional system built in, and over the years culture has worked on it to make it even better”.

A consequence of this kind of study is that we might have to rethink what is immoral and not. If morality is automatic and unconscious process, why are we so quick to differ on what's right or wrong in a moral dilemma? The Washington Posts article says:

U.S. law distinguishes between a physician who removes a feeding tube from a terminally ill patient and a physician who administers a drug to kill the patient. Hauser said the only difference is that the second scenario is more emotionally charged -- and therefore feels like a different moral problem, when it really is not: "In the end, the doctor's intent is to reduce suffering, and that is as true in active as in passive euthanasia, and either way the patient is dead."

The difference sounds clear at first thought since it feels like an active choice to administer a lethal drug. But removing a feeding tube is equally active and the two situations should defintely be equal before the law.

Anyway, I guess we should try to think more about the end results instead of moral. A good comment on this from an interesting blog called Atheist's Wager:

"Morality is about doing the right thing when no one is watching."

Let's all do the right thing.

Classifying species

There's been a lot of articles, blog posts and news about the 300 year anniversary of Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) lately. He was born today, May 23:rd 1707 in Älmhult, Småland in southern Sweden as the son of a preacher.

In 1735 he published the first version of his now world famous Systema Naturae. It was 11 large pages that classified the natural world and humans were for the first time grouped together with other primates. The eleven pages in the first edition grew to three thousand pages in the final and thirteenth edition, published in 1770.

The system that made him famous was a simple two part naming system based on the physical attributes of the organisms. The two terms are the genus name and the specific descriptor.
The so called Linnaean taxonomy is the base for the system of scientific classification used in modern biology. Linnaeus hierarchy started with the division into three kingdoms, Animals, Plants and Minerals. The Kingdoms were divided into Classes and the Classes into Orders, which were divided into Genera, which were divided into Species. The classifications have changed a lot since Linnaeus' first version and only the groups in the Animal kingdom remain to this day, although heavily updated.

There have been some discussions about improving this centuries old classification style to something more modern, like a tree based nomenclature based on the recent discoveries from DNA studies. It's quite clear that even if animals or plants look the same, they can come from families very far apart. A classic example is the Hyrax that looks like a big guinea pig, but the closest relative is actually the Manatee. (It's also closely related to the Elephant but that's not the closest relative, even if they share the same ancestor.)

A system called PhyloCode grew out of a workshop at Harvard University in 1998 and it's still in the draft stage. Maybe the simplicity of the Linnaean system will prevail anyway. It seems to have worked quite well for the last 272 years...

Parasites

Parasites are scary and fascinating at the same time. It's disgusting to have a creature living and breeding inside another living animal, but the tricks they have to control their hosts can be surprising, weird and most of all scary.

There's been some talk about Toxoplasma gondii again because of this soon to be published paper. The paper describes how Toxoplasma gondii removes all fear of cats from rats infected with it. The reason for this is that the parasite only reproduces in cat bellies and of course the way to get there from the rat is to make it's host get eaten by one. The rats still had their normal anxiety and could learn to get frightened of other things.

It's strange how the the tiny parasite can control something so very specific. It's a common parasite too, about half of all people on earth are carrying it. It's not dangerous to humans unless you have a very weak immune system, like people with AIDS. Pregnant women should avoid getting it too. People get it the same way rats or other animals does, contact with cat litter.

Studies of humans infected with Toxoplasma have shown some subtle changes in personality. Quoting from this article:

Those infected, he found, show a small, but statistically significant, tendency to be more self-reproaching and insecure. Paradoxically, infected women, on average, tend to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, while infected men tend to be more jealous and suspicious.

There's not total consensus on this yet and it seems like only a few of all infected people have any notable issues with it. Toxoplasma infection has also been linked to schizophrenia, and medicine against schizophrenia made infected rats afraid of cats again. Why and how is not clear yet.

I would not be the slightest surprised if all of the truly cat-obsessed people are carrying Toxoplasma gondii.

Another classic example of a parasite controlling it's hosts is the Lancet Fluke. It has a complex three host cycle involving cattle, snails and ants. They live in sheep or cow livers where they mate and then leave their eggs out in the host’s feces. Snails eating that gets infected and to protect themselves they make slimy balls filled with parasites that they leave behind. Ants finding these slime balls eat them and get infected. Every night the fluke takes control over the and and makes it climb to the tip of a grass straw, hold onto it with it's mandibles and stay like that until the morning. Then it goes back to looking for food as normally, until the sun goes down. Finally, once some grazing animal accidentally eat the ant with the grass, the fluke is back in a host where it can reproduce.

There's more examples like this too. One fluke reproducing in wading birds makes infected fish shimmy and jump to make it easier for the birds to find and catch them. A certain hairworm who infect grasshoppers takes control of it's host when it is ready to leave it and makes the poor grasshopper suicide by jumping into some nearby water. The worm will be back in the water where it wants to be. (More hairworm here(pdf). Mind controlling parasites at LiveScience.)

I hope I'll never get a parasite infection. Especially not some slimy, crawling animal. Wikipedia has more information and links about this than you ever want to know...

Human evolution in another light

Yesterday Scott Adams linked to an interesting article from Newsweek about human evolution. The conclusion they get to in the article is that humans didn't evolve linearly, instead lots of branches and sub species existed at the same time.

I don't understand why people find this surprising. You see it with all species in nature, be it fishes in Lake Victoria or sparrows on the Galapagos Islands. Evolution is not linear. I find it obvious that a random process will give results that diverge and spread out.

The article also suggests that by tracking specific genes in the DNA, we can find the last common ancestor to all living humans. It seems like they lived about 89,000 years ago and left Africa as recently as 66,000 years ago.

One of the last sentences in the articles says "It therefore suggests that we are still evolving.". Of course we are, who would ever think otherwise? I believe it's happening quite fast too, but with a completely different set of rules compared to back then. The definition of fitness for survival and reproduction in this modern world is nothing at all like surviving on the plains of Africa.

Scott Adams says "Fossils are Bullshit" and what he means is that the old rigid theory of evolution just doesn't feel right. I agree that the theory is far from complete and I think it's a common mistake by many scientists that when they find a proof for a particular thing within their current theory, they feel like they have to increase the scope of the theory to include things that are way beyond what they actually did prove.

Of course everyone want to make their theory more and more general and less complicated, but I think it's been proven over and over again that everything in the universe is more complicated than it looks at first glance.

A lot of times it seems like getting enough detailed information is the biggest hurdle. Often it feels like scientists spend too much time staring at the data they already have instead of thinking about new ways to find data that would shine a light on the problem from a different angle.

To use DNA in addition to the information they have from fossils and bones, like they did in the article, is a great example of finding such an additional source of data forcing them to adjust the current theory.

We should look at things from another angle more often.

The evolution of religion

New York Times had a great article called Darwin’s God last Sunday. It's a lot to read, but absolutely well worth it.

I definitely think that religion and superstition is a byproduct of something that was actually useful for human survival. Stephen Jay Gould used the architectural term "spandrel" for it and I guess that's as good as any. Unfortunately I think religion has a more negative than positive impact in our society, mainly because it can so easily be misused to control followers.

Just read the article, the writing style is excellent and the topic is fascinating!

Tapeworms

Just read a great post over at The Loom about tapeworms. Parasites are nasty creatures and it's something that's both scary and interesting to learn more about. Something about living inside another living creature and crawl around makes me squirm. Here's a quote from that post about Monogeneans:

Some monogeneans give birth to offspring without releasing them from their bodies. Their offspring mature inside them and give birth as well. Like a hideous Russian doll, a monogenean may contain twenty generations of descendents inside its body!

How weird is that? How do they evolve when the offspring living inside itself like this? Carl Zimmer who writes on this blog is an author of some very interesting posts and books, for example Parasite Rex.