The Fall of Oxytocin the so-called 'love hormone'

After reading stuff that eulogises oxytocin as the creator of empathy and interpersonal love and so the chemical equivalent of 'all you need is love'. The simplistic equation of something that chemically promotes good feelings towards others with moral behaviour was always due to hit the buffers of human realities. And so ... ta da ...

Oxytocin, 'love hormone,' promotes group lying, according to researchers -- ScienceDaily: oxytocin caused participants to lie more to benefit their groups, and to do so more quickly and without expectation of reciprocal dishonesty from their group.

Now, I have to admit I was disposed to see this coming and had even thought it would probably be at this level: something that promotes group solidarity does not necessarily promote inter-group solidarity and could even help solidify a group in rivalry or enmity to another. In other words the 'dark' side is to create the possibility of an out-group which could be an enemy. And so, it would seem, it is.


The disposition to see this coming comes from an appreciation of one way to think about 'total depravity' which can be understood to be saying that there is no dimension of human being that is untouchable by sin -or that there is no human faculty that is automatically free from sin: if there's a way to do wrong; someone somewhere will find it. This is not, of course, the same as saying that everyone is fully 'evil'.



So even the 'love hormone' is capable of being corrupted and become a tool for wrongdoing. Human solidarity is good, but vulnerable to misdirection. A clear understanding of corporisations, the 'Powers', reminds us of that.

Origins of life: origins of the Powers

I got quite excited when I read this article: The secret of life won't be cooked up in a chemistry lab | Paul Davies | Comment is free | The Guardian. One of the things that I have said in my recent presentations on corporisations, when I'm connecting up the theological/scriptural notions of the Powers with the emergent properties of much of the natural world and then applying the latter to the former, is that I am, in effect, proposing that there is a "creational trajectory" of emergence which doesn't culminate in humans so much as reaches beyond us and includes us. -We are held together in corporisations by mimetic instincts, shared projects, language and semiosis and these bonds along with the feedback provided by among other things, self-awareness and reflection by human beings provide the conditions for further living entities to emerge: the Powers; corporisations. The trajectory is of each 'layer' of emergent things to form a 'substrate' for the emergence of yet another layer of entities.

Anyway, in the article I'm pointing to, Paul Davis writes that he and Sara Walker are proposing:

... that the significant property of biological information is not its complexity, great though that may be, but the way it is organised hierarchically. In all physical systems there is a flow of information from the bottom upwards, in the sense that the components of a system serve to determine how the system as a whole behaves. ... In living organisms, this pattern of bottom-up information flow mingles with the inverse – top-down information flow – so that what happens at the local level can depend on the global environment, as well as vice versa ... Walker and I propose that the key transition on the road to life occurred when top-down information flow first predominated. Based on simple mathematical models, we think it may have happened suddenly, analogously to a heated gas abruptly bursting into flame.

Applying this in my 'creational trajectory' would suggest that where trans-human entities formed of human agglomerations emerge, then they do so because the 'top-down information flow' reaches a critical point. Given that the 'top-down' thing is about exercising control and is composed, at least in part, of human mentalities interacting, then we have the makings of corporisations: the Powers that Be.

Two faced by the sun

I've been avoiding the sun for about 15 years now: fair skin and a tendency to burn easily plus celtic ancestry make me a prime candidate for some kind of -noma. So it's with a sense of 'Boy I'm glad I'm doing this' that I view this picture

Check out the backstory -but that's not a made-up face; it's a real person. One face, but two sides of a story | Society | The Guardian:

The left-hand side of the 66-year-old's face is deeply lined, pitted and sagging after 28 years of sun exposure through the side window of his lorry. The right-hand side, shaded by the cab as McElligott delivered milk around Chicago, is the taut, unblemished face of an apparently much younger man.

And apparently people who drive with their hands in the sun should also be wary ...

Why the monastic hours were less punitive than I imagined

WhenI first discovered that the seven monsatic hours of prayer included a prayer time that interrupted sleep, I used to feel that this was surely part of a punishing ascetic schedule. Now I'm not so sure. Evidence has been accumulating that we humans may, in fact not only be wired to have two roughly 4-hour sleep periods separated by an hour or so but that reading historical evidences shows that until the industrial revolution, most people seemed to do just that.
 "For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."
One of the things that some texts mention is that some people used this time for spiritual practice. So it seems to me likely that the monastic offices were merely a monkly or nunly version of this.
BBC News - The myth of the eight-hour sleep:

Life co-op

It's important to note this kind of thing; not all evolution is about competition: some is about co-operation. See here.

Life began with a planetary mega-organism - life - 25 November 2011 - New Scientist:

LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism

.

This is important because there is a tendency for some to use the competitive view as justification for a eugenic ideology or cut-throat capitalism. This kind of discovery/hypothesis tends to undercut that piece of lazy political ethics.

Cockroachescould be good news!

A few weeks back we discovered that we could be about to run out of effective antibiotics (I think it was on the BBC news). Well, how about this? Cockroaches Have Super Antibiotics in Their Brains; We Must Steal Them | 80beats | Discover Magazine: From the inheritors of the world after the fall of civilisation, to the possible saviours of medical treatment.

"The brains of these insects carry some serious antibiotics—strong enough to slaughter bacteria that have evolved resistance to the hospital antibiotics we use."

However, the development time may be a good while. It could be a race between resistance in bacteria and development of new a-b's.

$99 DNA test

Admittedly, it was only a time-limited offer, but the fact that it could be offered seems to indicate that the costs are likely to continue to fall. Today only: $99 DNA test: "oday only, the usually $499 DNA test from 23andMe is only $99."
Of course, it's not yet Gattaca -the Gattaca scenario clearly required a very cheap DNA testing system. However, we should consider the social and ethical ramifications of ever cheaper DNA testing: for example, paternity testing becomes routine and even could be done covertly, without permission (and once that genie was out of the bottle ...), or insurance companies routinely require them, surveillance becomes easier in some respects ....

Post-Darwinism: The New Synthesis

Some readers may find this review article intriguing: Post-Darwinism: The New Synthesis :: William Grassie :: Global Spiral. This paragraph lays out briefly why I think it's important to those of us interested in the relationship between science and theology and taking interest especially in the recent selfish-gene wars: "It would be nice to have a simple theory of evolution, as Darwin has provided in his elegant algorithm, but the catechism of random drift, universal struggle, survival, reproduction, and differential selection just doesn’t hack it anymore.9 It is time to embrace complexity, symbiosis, multi-level selection, contextuality, and as we will see, even some aspects of Lamarckianism.10 Along the way we can banish the geneticist dogma of “selfish genes,” because genes do absolutely nothing by themselves. Indeed, it is equally valid and descriptively accurate to talk about “sharing genes."
The book it reviews sounds like it should be important to have a look at -especially the coda of the book (some of it, naturally, is quite technical).
The Book? Scott Gilbert and David Epel’s, Ecological Developmental Biology (2009)

Going From One Cell Type to Another

This Going From One Cell Type to Another Without Using Stem Cells | Wired Science from Wired.com may have important consequences for debates about embryos and stem cells etc: "Melton's team avoided stem cells, and their baggage, altogether by using a virus to tweak three developmental genes in pancreatic tissue cells in mice. Three days later, these became insulin-producing beta cells, and appear free from the complications that have frustrated stem cell researchers."

Insects inherit the earth ...

In an intriguing report about a soon-to-be-published hypothesis, Forget the meteorites - it was insects that did for the dinosaurs there seems to be credible evidence that longer term ecological factors could have had a lot to do with the demise of dinosaurs.
"Our research with amber shows that there were evolving, disease-carrying vectors in the Cretaceous [period], and that at least some of the pathogens they carried infected reptiles. This clearly fills in some gaps regarding dinosaur extinctions.'
In the gut of one biting insect preserved in amber - fossilised tree sap - from that era, the team has found the pathogen that causes the parasitic disease leishmaniasis, and in another they found a type of malaria parasite that infects birds and lizards. By inspecting fossilised dinosaur faeces, the team also found parasitic microbes that are carried by insects.
Apart from spreading disease, the insects were busy pollinating flowering plants.
These gradually took over from seed ferns, cycads and gingkoes. If herbivorous dinosaurs could not adapt to this new diet they would have gone hungry."
And from there, the effects would work up the food chain.

On doing what we don't want to do and vice versa: the biology of temptation

I've always reckoned that the real trick to resisting temptation is actually recognising it in the first place. Perhaps help is at hand.

The funny thing about being vulnerable to saying, eating, or doing the wrong thing is that humans are typically unaware that they are in a moment of weakness, unlike the strain and fatigue we feel in our muscles after a workout. Fortunately, new research conducted by University of Kentucky psychologists Suzanne Segerstrom and Lise Solberg Nes suggest that there may be a biological indicator to tell us when we are working hard at resisting temptation and consequently when we are vulnerable to doing things contrary to our intentions.

I suspect wearing a heart monitor isn't really going to help most of us. There'd be too many other issues and false positives. So I think we're just going to have to keep working on self-conscientisation. Still it's good to know that spotting temptation is really a difficult task.