The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Genetic Family Values (NY Times Sunday Magazine, 12/12/2004, pg. 73, Year in Ideas Article) (link retired)
The glue between mother and infant, according to work done at the National Research Council Institute of Neuroscience in Rome, acts like an opiate. Baby mice genetically altered to be unresponsive to opiates did not cry out when separated from their mothers, as normal mice do. According to Dr. Francesca D'Amato and her team, this supports the notion that a mother's affection works like a pain-relieving opiate in her baby's body. Maternal caresses are not just psychologically soothing, the work suggests, but physically so.
Right off the bat let me mention that all experiences that are psychological are physical in the brain. They don't have to rediscover this in every micro study.
This study does not show that a mother's affection is unlike any pleasure. What they don't realize here is that these various genetic changes that they experiment with that have an effect on behavior need only be changes in one thing over and over: the increase or decrease of general levels of stress in those nervous systems (with some exceptions here and there). Over and over these studies that show small behavior changes can also be explained by greater or lesser amounts of stress (and therefore greater or lesser amounts of autism ranging from ADD kinds of changes to the extremes).
By transferring the gene into the meadow vole, however, Dr. Larry Young of Emory University found that the wanton creature instantly stopped roving and turned into a veritable prairie home companion. “It indicates that, in terms of evolution, a mutation in a single gene could have altered behavior,” Young says. “And it means this mutation could disrupt the ability to form bonds, both in extreme cases, such as autism, and in behavior that we wouldn't call a disease, such as promiscuity.”
Let me posit that the mutation in the single gene did nothing more than increase the stress in that system so the animal studied was behaving more autistic. Males have more stress in their systems than females (relative to the same age). So males are more likely to be autistic. Autism is an inhibition of empathy (leading to lack of concern for partners) and autism is a collection of greater stress in the switchboards of the brain so that the different portions of thinking are not considered together but separately. Empathy is the putting together the concerns of the self with the perceived concerns of another and is not as possible if the parts remain separate. The same goes for sexual focus over love or commitment focus. If the parts don't get together then the partner remains separate in the mind from the sensation. Lack of concern for the future is another form of the same issue.
Males are more autistic than females statistically. So they are more self-focused and less other-focused. This makes them more sexually focused rather than love-focused. All animals have a setting that comes from genetics that is somewhere in the spectrum from low stress to high stress and with behaviors that are more akin to either health or the various disorders that develop at higher and higher levels of stress. Whatever behavior they start with will only change to the behaviors at the higher levels of stress with aging and development. Males are more autistic than females so they will have less social or partner awareness than the females and will exhibit many of the tendencies that are more autistic (to some small or great degree). This explains many things including the earlier peaking of sexual development (and earlier decline) and earlier death, on down the line.
This same study was used earlier in the year to announce the identification of a gene that might be the cause of autism. They make big claims about how a single gene could cause such a big change in behavior but it need only be one basic change to the system: the increase or reduction of stress, a mathematical event, that will collect in that system as it develops. The autism can be given without a gene by severely stressing the animal or person (and it will be identified as autism if the stress occurs early in development or as some other disorder such as schizophrenia later in life as schizophrenia is just another manifestation of an autism that looks different at a later stage of development).
There are many, many ways to stress a nervous system and gene manipulation is just one of them. Many different changes in behavior and health can be observed by changing the amount of the stress and changing the scope and focus of the regions of the nervous system that are getting the brunt of that stress.
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