onegoodmove

Personally, I'd love to see an MRI of the brain of george w. bush.

Many important scientific questions arise from this work: when lambs lie down with lions, is the parasite to blame? And are England fans and jihadis more likely to be cat owners than those of us bored by football or faith?

Well, I don't know about this. About 60% of the French never attend church, 55% of those in Britain never attench church, and only 16% of Americans never attend church.

43 to 54 % of the French are either atheists or agnostics. 31 to 44 % of Brits are either atheists or agnostics. 3 to 9 % of Americans are either atheists or agnostics.

Therefore, one might conclude that the Toxoplasma gondii is responsible for the more secular society in France. Or perhaps atheists are worse drivers. But no, this is debunked too, because the United States has the highest road fatalities of the top 10 Highly Motorized countries.

Deaths per 100,000 USA 15.8 France 13.8 UK 6.1

But the above numbers have to take into account the percentage of people who own vehicles.

Motor vehicles per 1000 USA 787 France 524 UK 408

The United States has a low incidence of Toxoplasma gondii, and yet has the highest fatality rate, although if the percentage of people who own vehicles is taken into account, then the fatality rates are closer in the comparison of these three countries.

Quick, someone get the president a cat, and maybe his attitudes towards governing our country will become more secular in nature.

To be honest, I don't understand your comparison.

Can you explain it in more detail?

Carl Zimmer has more to say on Toxoplasma gondii in his blog and in the New York Times.

Religious speculation aside, I followed this link and several other links in the comments to read about this virus. What a marvelous and incredibly specific example of the adaptability of life - a virus that makes mice unafraid of the smell of cats so that the virus may ultimately end up in the cat's intestines, the only place where it can reproduce? Incredible. Of course, creationists would say that this type of complexity could only be created by God, rather than evolution. Sigh.

Anyway, thanks for this very interesting link.

What a strange segue at the end of the article... It is a fascinating and disturbing parasite indeed, though it strikes me as very odd that they concluded the article with a bit about religion -- and I'm not quite sure how football fits in...

I can see the analogy between the parasite and religion, in terms of methods of propagation, but there is no basis for the suggestion in the last paragraph that there could be an actual, literal connection between religion and the Toxoplasma parasite itself. (Unless the argument were first made that religious fanaticism is correlated with schizophrenia; not implausible, but not, to my knowledge, known -- and certainly not mentioned in the article)

An odd, tangent-taking piece of writing.

"Quick, someone get the president a cat, and maybe his attitudes towards governing our country will become more secular in nature."

It's amazing how people who hate their own country can turn any discussion into a diatribe on how much the place they live sucks.

Quick, somebody mention the effect of magnesium on healthy bones so Jo Ann can whip out some more statistics about how the US doesn't sufficiently measure up to the rest of the world in bone length or density or something. All, of course, from the comfort of her US house, with her US utilities, US job, US freedoms, and US pay.

Hypocrisy is the greatest luxury. Raise the double standard.

Well, football bores me, not as much as religion though, and i'm a cat lover (and i never met a cat hater i liked), so Doctor, has my Toxoplasma Gondii mutated?! Gee, i'm worried.

I spent last year researching a candidate schizophrenia susceptibility gene. For anyone interested in the association between toxoplasma gondii and schizophrenia : Here Or here

I'm an atheist. I own cats, and have for most of my life. I find sports boring. I don't drive, mainly because I'm really not good at it. I'm schizophrenic (and, no, I'm not making that up to make a point).

This has to be the creepiest damn stuff I've read in my life. I've never been so thoroughly and accurately described, and all it is is conjecture about a parasite in people's brains.

Ahhh! Getitoutgetitoutgetitout!!!!

"All, of course, from the comfort of her US house, with her US utilities, US job, US freedoms, and US pay."

Ah, Below-Average-Joe. You poor provincial little man. The U.S. has nothing over Europeans in terms of the comfort of having utilities, jobs, freedoms and pay. I have no health insurance coverage because i had the audacity to get breast cancer and because of that, I was no longer able to keep up with the contigencies of being an accountant and I was fired, with no recourse because I had signed an at-will contract. Consequently, I have no insurance because I could not afford the $500/month insurance which is the fee under the COBRA plan. How to afford to pay the full fee of insurance if one has no job? If I lived in Canada or France or Norway or many other countries which have a more enlightened concept of how to treat people, i would still be covered.

Good pay, eh? $5.15 is great pay. Yeah, right.

"Quick, someone get the president a cat, and maybe his attitudes towards governing our country will become more secular in nature." - Jo Ann

It's amazing how people who hate their own country can turn any discussion into a diatribe on how much the place they live sucks. - Average Joe

What's even more amazing is how a moron like you, Average Joe, can take what someone else says so out of context and turn it into another drooling, invective-spewing, knee-jerk contrarian screed that bears ZERO resemblence to the original text you cite.

I understand you're an idiot, merely from the thousands of words you've written in the comments on Norm's blog. What I don't understand is what purpose you serve by all this laughable misrepresentation and specious argumentation you employ here.

Like, why not write your own blog, link it, and spare us all your idiotic ranting that adds not a molecule of substance to Norm's blog or his comments?

Arguing with you is pointless. It's like trying to tell someone he has a huge booger hanging out of his nose but he refuses to look in a mirror and check, and also, illogically, calls you names for trying to inform him of that huge renegade booger.

Blow your nose, Average Joe.

It's amazing how people who hate their own country can turn any discussion into a diatribe on how much the place they live sucks.

Sa-ay... Your vehement rhetoric against your fellow Americans would seem to count as "hatred towards your country". And come of to think of it, you always complain about these... these... cit-izens. You must really think the place (country) you live in sucks.

Maybe you weren't consciously aware of it, but you're really just railing against yourself.

Might want to see a psychologist about all that self-hatred.

Jo, how much coverage do you get for US$500 per month.

As an example, for one of my life insurance policies comparison, I pay about US$70 per year for a term insurance of US$80,000

Cripes. There are only 3% of us athiests out there? That's depressing.

"a perfect and objective instance of Richard Dawkins' metaphor of religion"

AAAARRRRRGGGGHH!!! 90% of the article was so informative and useful, then the author goes off the deep end. Dawkins' religion meme bit is NOT conjectured to be a physical thing, just an instance of memetics (which is in itself a conjectural concept, even if sometimes useful)

"like holy warriors, they lay down their lives for an irrational belief caused by a brain infection" - Depending on how you read this, it implies or states that holy warriors hold irrational beliefs "caused by a brain infection".

I wish he would write either science or opinion, but mixing them together like this, he really pulled an O'Reilly IMHO

The reason that the french have a higher per capita accident rate (and french colonies), is quite simple and should not be blown out of proportion. "Priorite a driote" - the guy on the right has the right of way. This means that you can come in from a side street and have right of way over the folks in the thoroughfare. Particularly nasty at traffic circles, where the fellow coming INTO the circle has right of way over the people in the circle - cause for quite a few gridlocks. If you do your research properly, you will find that France and french colonies are (or were) at the top three in terms of per capita mortalities. Don't try to blow this into something else.