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| Ancient Pattern Recognition Tool |
I. Background
The Cuckoo's egg phenomenon (The Cuckoo's Egg Hatched Again, 2, 3, 4) presents an opportunity to revisit the genetic constant ~32/35/25/6 phenomenon again.
The gist of The Cuckoo's Egg Hatched Again series was that a human parasite, a human being, could behave like the avian parasite, the Cuckoo Bird.
The human finds a location in networks where it can 'lay an egg' (e.g. a software program) that will extract 'benefits' from that system.
Likewise, The Cuckoo Bird finds a location (another bird's nest) where it can 'lay an egg' which the other bird will hatch and then feed the Cuckoo Bird's chick.
Avian scientists call the bird behavior Avian Brood Parasitism and computer scientists call the human behavior 'hacking', but both fit the description of 'parasitic behavior'.
II. Genetic Constant ~32/35/25/6
'Constants' are interesting to numerologists, mathematicians, etc. (Life as we know it would not exist without this highly unusual number).
But, as has been pointed out in Dredd Blog posts, it is also interesting to software engineers and geneticists (On The Origin Of A Genetic Constant, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; On The Origin Of Another Genetic Constant, 2, 3, 4).
III. The Genetic Constant ~32/35/25/6
In The Cuckoo Hacker
And The Cuckoo Bird
The appendices in the posts in Section II contain data on a variety of species, but today's appendix shows the ~32/35/25/6 constant as it appears only in the Cuckoo Bird (Cuculus canorus) chromosomes (Appendix Cuckoo Chromosomes).
There are links to official databases for each chromosome so that you can peruse the data in .gbff or .fasta formats if you choose to.
The tables in today's appendix are counts of the atoms in the bird's genome.
The variation in the ~32/35/25/6 is not excessive or unusual because there are problems with nucleotide accuracy in terms gathering the data as well as analyzing the data because a lot of the nucleotides are 'N' designations (meaning the researchers who gathered the DNA are not sure if an 'N' designation is actually an 'A' 'C' 'G' 'T' or 'U').
Thus, the uncanny ~32/35/25/6 pattern is like the 1/137 pattern "we have no idea where it comes from" (see first link in Section II above).
How can we relate parasitic behavior in one species to another species in terms of 'does the same behavior in two different species (human, bird) originate from a single source?'
This subject is not ignored in scientific research:
"An entire edition of one journal, for an example of primitive propaganda, concerns how some parasitic species can develop processes for the manipulation of the brains of their host species:
The ability of parasites to alter the behaviour of their hosts fascinates both scientists and non-scientists alike. One reason that this topic resonates with so many is that it touches on core philosophical issues such as the existence of free will. If the mind is merely a machine, then it can be controlled by any entity that understands the code and has access to the machinery. This special issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology highlights some of the best-understood examples of parasite-induced changes in host brain and behaviour, encompassing both invertebrate and vertebrate hosts and micro- and macro-parasites. The observation that parasitic infection can modify specific host behaviours is an old one (see Moore, 2002). The general consensus has been that these parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate host behaviour in order to advance their own reproductive success (Moore, 2002). Unfortunately, there has been a lack of information on two key points of this hypothesis. Firstly, it has proved difficult to unequivocally demonstrate that changes in host behaviour benefit the parasite (i.e. enhance parasitic fitness). Secondly, the mechanisms that parasites use to change host behaviour were completely unknown for many years, particularly in the case of vertebrate host systems.
(Neural Parasitology). Regular readers will remember that in other Ecocosmology Blog posts we have looked at how that pathogenic behavior can and has been changed whereby the pathogenic and/or parasitic behavior can become mutualistic once again to benefit both host and symbiont (Microbial Languages: Rehabilitation of the Unseen--2)."
(On The Origin of Propaganda - 2). Nevertheless, it is still difficult to imagine that the behavior of humans and birds who exhibit parasitic patterns is from the same source, and it is difficult to form a hypothesis for that eventuality:
"That parasitic microbe is the protozoa Toxoplasma gondii ("Toxo") which, as a world renowned scientist explains, has incredible abilities:
The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior... Toxo instead has developed this amazing capacity to alter innate behavior in rodents... If you take a lab rat who is 5,000 generations into being a lab rat, since the ancestor actually ran around in the real world, and you put some cat urine in one corner of their cage, they're going to move to the other side. Completely innate, hard-wired reaction to the smell of cats, the cat pheromones. But take a Toxo-infected rodent, and they're no longer afraid of the smell of cats. In fact they become attracted to it. The most damn amazing thing you can ever see, Toxo knows how to make cat urine smell attractive to rats. And rats go and check it out and that rat is now much more likely to wind up in the cat's stomach. Toxo's circle of life completed.
"Complex" Is An Understatement
... part of my lab has been trying to figure out the neurobiological aspects. The first thing is that it's for real. The rodents, rats, mice, really do become attracted to cat urine when they've been infected with Toxo. And you might say, okay, well, this is a rodent doing just all sorts of screwy stuff because it's got this parasite turning its brain into Swiss cheese or something. It's just non-specific behavioral chaos. But no, these are incredibly normal animals. Their olfaction is normal, their social behavior is normal, their learning and memory is normal. All of that. It's not just a generically screwy animal.
You say, okay well, it's not that, but Toxo seems to know how to destroy fear and anxiety circuits. But it's not that, either. Because these are rats who are still innately afraid of bright lights. They're nocturnal animals. They're afraid of big, open spaces. You can condition them to be afraid of novel things. The system works perfectly well there. Somehow Toxo can laser out this one fear pathway, this aversion to predator odors... Toxo preferentially knows how to home in on the part of the brain that is all about fear and anxiety, a brain region called the amygdala... Toxo knows how to get in there.
Next, we then saw that Toxo would take the dendrites, the branch and cables that neurons have to connect to each other, and shriveled them up in the amygdala. It was disconnecting circuits. You wind up with fewer cells there. This is a parasite that is unwiring this stuff in the critical part of the brain for fear and anxiety... It knows how to find that particular circuitry... Meanwhile, there is a well-characterized circuit that has to do with sexual attraction. And as it happens, part of this circuit courses through the amygdala, which is pretty interesting in and of itself, and then goes to different areas of the brain than the fear pathways... Toxo knows how to hijack the sexual reward pathway. And you get males infected with Toxo and expose them to a lot of the cat heromones, and their testes get bigger. Somehow, this damn parasite knows how to make cat urine smell sexually arousing to rodents, and they go and check it out. Totally amazing... So what about humans? A small literature is coming out now reporting neuropsychological testing on men who are Toxo-infected, showing that they get a little bit impulsive... And then the truly astonishing thing: two different groups independently have reported that people who are Toxo-infected have three to four times the likelihood of being killed in car accidents involving reckless speeding... Maybe you take a Toxo-infected human and they start having a proclivity towards doing dumb-ass things that we should be innately averse to, like having your body hurdle through space at high G-forces. Maybe this is the same neurobiology... On a certain level, this is a protozoan parasite that knows more about the neurobiology of anxiety and fear than 25,000 neuroscientists standing on each other's shoulders... But no doubt it's also a tip of the iceberg of God knows what other parasitic stuff is going on out there. Even in the larger sense, God knows what other unseen realms of biology make our behavior far less autonomous than lots of folks would like to think.
(A Talk With Dr. Sapolsky). Bingo, remember that this series is about a hypothesis that microbes may be the source of the toxins of power that corrupt the minds of officials who inhabit offices of power."
(Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power - 6). It is more difficult to apply any such hypothesis to atoms, which are not biological :
The better part of a decade ago Dredd Blog was complaining about a non-existent science called "Abiology" that should exist (Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 27, quoting Dredd Blog posts from 2012).
About a year after that post I complained, along with other scientific researchers, about the scientists of the biology persuasion having loose lips:
"Since at least the 17th century (and mostly because of Newton), natural scientists have stopped using formal or final causes to explain natural phenomena ... except in biology. This was first pointed out by Colin Pittendrigh (Pittendrigh, C. S. Behavior and Evolution) (ed. by A. Rose and G. G. Simpson), Yale University Press, 1958), who coined the term "teleonomy" to refer to the kind of teleological phenomena observed in biological processes."
(On The Origin of Genieology - 2). "Abiology" still doesn't exist, and the elite among them still go on and on about possibly not knowing the difference between bio-(live) and abio-(not live), i.e. biology and abiology (Are Viruses Alive?).
And I am still pointing out that viruses are discussed in the science commentariat (media) without knowing what microbial host the viruses are replicated by:
"Seriously, it behooves researchers to closely examine the microbes that replicate the SARS-CoV-2 viruses (they haven't yet specified exactly which microbes those are)." (The Doll As Metaphor - 3; cf. On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19)
A microbiologist wrote: "Easy to see though, plaque assays for counting phages [a type of virus] do not work if you have − or suspect you have − lots of phages in a sample but the host bacteria are difficult or impossible to culture on plates, or − even worse − not known." (Small Things Considered, emphasis added).
The virus commentariat's 'solution' all too often is to ignore "the host bacteria" of the virus ('home' of the virus), and to substitute that location/home with what is actually the "meta-host" or "epi-host".
That is, they substitute the host bacteria of that virus and tell us that the virus is "in a human host", "in an animal host", or in "a plant host".
(Quantum Biology). But let's give them a break because physicists who attempt to analyze behavior by attributing behavior to quantum sources are at times scorned by their peers:
"... Roger Penrose and I have developed a theory of consciousness ... It basically proposes quantum computation in brain neuron microtubules inside neurons. So rather than neuron-to-neuron communication, we're looking at a deeper level inside neurons to give a global sense of consciousness through quantum mechanics, which results in real-time causality and free will ... it gives consciousness real-time control and a potential connection to fundamental space-time geometry, quantum space-time geometry, through Roger's objective reduction. This is consistent with Eastern spiritual traditions. Although Roger doesn't like to talk about it, I've taken the liberty of observing the implications of what he said and what we've said for consciousness, for Eastern philosophy and other spiritual traditions ... if quantum consciousness is correct, for example, if Penrose's idea is correct, we are literally ripples in the fine structure of space-time geometry, which can resonate - levels of consciousness can resonate from the Planck scale, the bottom level of the Universe, multiple hierarchical levels to the brain. This is consistent with Eastern philosophy and also indicates that afterlife, reincarnation, and out-of-body experiences that we've heard about are plausible. The quantum soul."
(TED Talks). E.g. The Physics Detective ...
IV. Closing Comments
The issues of science are seen as so simple by some who envision it as all slam-dunk facts and all of them fully proven.
That is as naive as 'CHNOPS' as the video below (@ 8:05) points out.
Constants are interesting but like the honest scientists say when it is appropriate "we don't know" why they exist.
The previous post in this series is here.
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