Can Microbes Encourage Altruism? | Hacker News Reader

Can Microbes Encourage Altruism?

quantamagazine.org

41 pointstdurden10 comments

If humans had parasites that would encourage them to be altruists against their interest and for the sole benefit of their parasites—which is of course implausible and hypothetical and absolutely not even possible—would they make us downvote and flag comments on HN discussing the possibility of parasites manipulating humans to be altruists against their interest?

Anybody who down votes you is probably infected.

The popularity of cats on the internet is at odds with your premise. They've clearly infected many humans with thought changing microbes and yet ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H...what were we talking about?

Uhm, just saying, you guys ever heard of toxoplasmosis?

Now I'm thinking of an old short story titled "The Giving Plague", by David Brin.

http://www.davidbrin.com/fiction/givingplague.html

>The researchers then pitted two types of virtual microbes against each other in the simulation. One microbe promoted altruism in its hosts, while the second did not.

Replace microbes with anything that's heritable and the effect still plays out in the simulation. With respect to the study's model, is there any difference at all between bug heredity and DNA?

I don't understand this either. Perhaps one has to look further into the details of the model. (My general fear with these models is that they are so abstracted from reality, that by tweaking parameters or assumptions you can find anything.)

> She also speculates that interspecies transmission of microbes — from dogs to humans, say, or the other way around — could affect interspecies altruism, another prediction that could be tested using animal models.

This reminds me of the speculation that index funds hurt competition between firms. (In brief: Nowadays, every investor owns both United and Delta; so why would the investors want them to compete with each other?) The microbial species is the investor.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-22/index-fun...

Yes, if its a bug, you can use that to imply its a disease- and that not being altruistic is the normal behavior. But wait a second, is the everyone against everyone idea, not basically altruism with yourself? Clearly, just working for yourself, is then a disease too- and we should eradicate that disease - to work and fight ourselves to death.

I demand consistency in my daily propaganda dose.

If teamwork was the optimum, and leaching of teamwork was a parasite, would there be a article on that?

The study is here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5241693/

Their model has altruistic α and non-altruistic β microbes, that determine the behavior of their hosts. In each generation, hosts are paired up randomly to interact. Altruistic hosts reduce their fitness by a certain cost c and increase their partner's fitness by a benefit b. Additionally, each kind of microbe has the opportunity to infect the other host with transmission probability Tα|Tβ.

The proportion of α microbes increases when Tα b > c (1 - Tβ) + (Tβ - Tα)

Importantly, when there is no horizontal spreading between hosts (Tα = 0), this is never true, so simple heritable genes are not enough for altruism to dominate.

The quantity Tα b essentially corresponds to the benefit accrued by spreading to a host you have helped before, c (1 - Tβ) is the cost you have to bear if your host is not taken over by β anyway, and (Tβ - Tα) is the natural advantage of β over α.

There's this, there's the post the other day about encouraging 'openness' with MDMA, there was the article proposing 'fairer' jerrymandering reform that just so happens to shift all the votes in a single direction, plus all the hagiographies of our tireless selfless social media censors, I'm beginning to think there's a burgeoning industry working on novel side-channel attack against the electoral system.

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