[Paleopsych] It pays to lick the rich
Steve
shovland at mindspring.com
Thu Jul 29 00:50:24 UTC 2004
Remittance Men and Trust Babies are probably
the instruments of this exploration. Lacking
any duties, they go where they will, sometimes
to destruction, sometimes to better places.
Steve Hovland
www.stevehovland.net
-----Original Message-----
From: Val Geist [SMTP:kendulf at shaw.ca]
Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2004 5:15 PM
To: The new improved paleopsych list
Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] It pays to lick the rich
This is a quick one, Howard. Here you are on the same trail I was when I
first saw that the rich in human society are the usually the biological
dispersal phenotype. Indeed, the rich are notoriously our pioneers! And
they are BIOLOGICALLY! structured to be that way thanks to luxurious
nutrition beginning with conception. See my old Life Strategies...(1978)
book on this issue, chapter 6 entitled "How genes communicate with the
environment - the biology of inequity" . Yes, yes and yes again to your
musings. You are on track. Cheers, Val Geist
----- Original Message -----
From: HowlBloom at aol.com
To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org
Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2004 6:51 AM
Subject: [Paleopsych] It pays to lick the rich
Can the balance of nerve growth factor and of glucorticoids be one
of the stress balancers in the brain, the ones Ia?Tve been hunting down,
the one that can cave in in chronic fatigue syndrome?
Different strokes produce different folksa?"provided those folks
are rats.
A loving mother, a mother who pets and licks you, makes you
confident. A skittish mother who hesitates to touch you preordains you to
be easily spooked. Hugsa?"or the lack of thema?"change the way genes
function. Those genes boost or block nerve growth factor and the way your
brain handles stress hormones. This reset of genes resets something
grandera?"personality.
Pulling out to look at the slightly larger picture, if your mother
was under lots of threat and was too nervous to cuddle you, you may well be
born into the high-risk world that made her so distraught. In a world
filled with danger, it may make sense to be fearful and hide. On the other
hand, if your mom felt rosy, confident, and on top of her world, she may
have been cruising along in an atmosphere of privilege, abundance, and
safety. If youa?Tre born into her sphere of rank and guaranteed plenty,
confident exploration may be a luxury you can well afford.
Earlier research once convinced me that the rich do much to explore
the strange on our behalf. They play status games by competing to own
things that are rare and strange. As a consequence, they act as antennae,
feeding novelty and fresh possibilities into our brains. The status
symbols of the rich are often goods from exotic cultures or from mine
shafts half way round the world, shafts in diamond or titanium tunnels it
takes a huge investment to excavate. Or the rich go for ancient
masterpieces and archaelogical treasures from digs in obscure places and
from layers left by the people of even more obscure periods of time. The
rich, with their smug self-confidence bring riches like the rarities at the
Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, the Louvre, the Getty, and the
Tate into the mainstream.
Ita?Ts a drag to praise the rich for anything. They have so much
more money than you and me that envya?Ts more the order of the day. But
apparently if their momsa?"or nanniesa?"lick them regularly, they can
boldly buy where no man has bought before, and in the process add to our
middle-class lives. Howard
Retrieved July 28, 2004, from the World Wide Web
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040717/fob3.asp
Science News Online Week of July 17, 2004; Vol. 166, No. 3
Groomed DNA Handles Threats: Mothering styles alter rats' stress responses
Bruce Bower A rodent mother can't scold or praise her offspring, but her
approach to mothering lays a genetic foundation for her pups' life-long
response to threats, neuroscientists have found. Rats raised by moms who
frequently lick and groom them undergo permanent changes in patterns of
gene activity, leading to a penchant for exploratory behavior in stressful
situations, say Michael J. Meaney and his colleagues at McGill University
in Montreal. In contrast, rats raised with little maternal contact end up
with gene activity that fosters fearfulness in the face of stress, the
researchers report in the August Nature Neuroscience. From an evolutionary
perspective, having both behaviors in a population is beneficial. "Early
experience can have lifelong consequences on behavior, and [this new
report] reveals the genetic scaffolding of this phenomenon to an
unprecedented extent," remarks neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford
University. Meaney's group previously showed that female rats express
either a high- or a low-contact mothering style. Animals raised with lots
of physical contact later react to stress by secreting small amounts of
glucocorticoids, a class of stress hormones. These rats also possess large
numbers of glucocorticoid receptors in an inner-brain structure called the
hippocampus. Rats raised with little physical contact secrete large amounts
of glucocorticoids when stressed and possess relatively few receptors for
these hormones. In another study, Meaney's group found that pups raised by
doting mothers had high concentrations of a substance called nerve growth
factora?"inducible protein A (NGFI-A) in their hippocampi. It attaches to
genes for glucocorticoid receptors, boosting those genes' capacity to
regulate the hormone's secretion. The researchers' new report shows how
NGFI-A offers stress-fighting aid only to pampered rats. On the first day
after birth, in all the rat pups, regulatory proteins inactivate NGFI-A's
binding location on glucocorticoid-receptor genes. Over the next week, in
rats raised with high-contact mothering, the concentration of these
regulatory proteins decreases sufficiently to enable NGFI-A to do its job
of boosting production of hormone receptors. These rats retain this genetic
trait for life, the investigators say. In contrast, the regulatory
proteins in unpampered rats stay high, and the abundance of hormone
receptors remains low. Moreover, only high-contact animals displayed
another biochemical change, according to Meaney's team. The change
decreased the binding of histones to DNA, thereby letting NGFI-A attach and
boost the activity of glucocorticoid-receptor genes. The researchers also
tested a drug that blocks the binding of histones to DNA. When they
injected it into adult rats that had been raised by low-contact mothers,
the scientists found that the animals responded to stress much as pampered
animals do. These behaviors were reflected on the molecular level, in
patterns of expression of stress hormones and receptors. Whether differing
styles by human mothers induce similar molecular changes in their offspring
remains an open question. If you have a comment on this article that you
would like considered for publication in Science News, send it to
editors at sciencenews.org. Please include your name and location. To
subscribe to Science News (print), go to https://www.kable.com/pub/scnw/
subServices.asp. To sign up for the free weekly e-LETTER from Science
News, go to http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/subscribe_form.asp.
References: Weaver, I.C.G. . . . and M.J. Meaney. In press. Epigenetic
programming by maternal behavior. Nature Neuroscience. Abstract available
at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn1276. Sources: Michael J. Meaney McGill
Program for the Study of Behaviour, Genes and Environment McGill University
3655 Sir William Osler Promenade MontrA?al, QC H3G 1Y6 Canada Robert
Sapolsky Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences Stanford
University School of Medicine Gilbert Laboratory, MC 5020 Stanford, CA
94305-5020 http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040717/fob3.asp From
Science News, Vol. 166, No. 3, July 17, 2004, p. 36. Copyright (c) 2004
Science Service. All rights reserved.
----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces
of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang
to the 21st Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University;
Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member:
Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project;
founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of
Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American
Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and
Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board
member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see:
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of
History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big
Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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