Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?

Correlation between Hofstede and a brain parasite.

Abstract; “The latent prevalence of a long-lived and common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, explains a statistically significant portion of the variance in aggregate neuroticism among populations, as well as in the ‘neurotic’ cultural dimensions of sex roles and uncertainty avoidance. Spurious or non-causal correlations between aggregate personality and aspects of climate and culture that influence T. gondii transmission could also drive these patterns. A link between culture and T. gondii hypothetically results from a behavioural manipulation that the parasite uses to increase its transmission to the next host in the life cycle: a cat. While latent toxoplasmosis is usually benign, the parasite’s subtle effect on individual personality appears to alter the aggregate personality at the population level. Drivers of the geographical variation in the prevalence of this parasite include the effects of climate on the persistence of infectious stages in soil, the cultural practices of food preparation and cats as pets. Some variation in culture, therefore, may ultimately be related to how climate affects the distribution of T. gondii, though the results only explain a fraction of the variation in two of the four cultural dimensions, suggesting that if T. gondii does influence human culture, it is only one among many factors.Keywords: personality, nations, masculinity, neuroticism, uncertainty avoidance”

via Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?.

A case study on Identity and IP numbers.

From 7 February 2011 to 22 August 2011 a discussion on the tool ‘RedZone’ took place. This tool mapped IP numbers to Second Life avatars (exploiting a media stream feature). The discussion demonstrates a wide number of views and perspective on the perception and ethics on ‘Identity’ of avatars.

[#ARVD-38] RedZone Security violates TOS, exposes private information and is being misused – Second Life Bug Tracker.

Below is a word cloud of the user comments: