Happy Ausra Darling

Mani (pronounced like 'money') is the Sanskrit word for 'gem' and is the true origin of the word 'money', not from the temple of Moneta in Rome.

Before our ancestors began their love affair with fruit and shiny stones, 'mani' meant one of two things:

The Female Jewel or the Virgin Bride.

Back then it was 'No food? No Mani (hunny)!'

Now it is reversed: 'No money, no food.'

Rats, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution

What would happen if an artificial community of rats was manipulated to give a changing pattern of 'role distribution' over time such that it mimicked the human race's changing patterns?

For the sake of simplicity, let us say that one human generation = 100 rat generations.

Initially, at T-10,000 years (~500 human generations, about 50 years in rat timescales) we have 100% wild type rats.

As the generations pass, some rats will begin to take the role of 'farmers' and the rest will remain wild. The farmer rats will have an electronic tag fitted which will allow their environment to be controlled in respect of that particular rat.

All rats will be able to 'forage' for a slightly inadequate amount of food, but the bulk of their food will only appear when the 'farmer' rats have done enough 'work'.
Farmer rats will release food upon having delivered a certain amount of work. These rats will be able to eat only the food released by their own work, in addition to the small amount available for foraging. Wild type rats will still be able to forage, they will also have access to food released by all the 'farmers'!

The proportion of 'farmers' will increase from 0 to 90% until we get to T-200 years when we will introduce a third role, the 'worker rat'. The worker rat will not be able to work for food or forage for food. Worker rats will enjoy a life of leisure but will be dependent on  'farmer' rats for food. Wild rats will still be able to forage and take food from both other kinds of rat.

Throughout the experiment, rat populations will be allowed to follow the same rate of increase as human populations did over the relative timescales. Whenever populations get 5% bigger than they should be, food supplies are constricted for one generation and excess rats are removed at random, sacrificed, and examined at the molecular level.

That's the basic outline anyway. The purpose of the experiment is to look for neurological changes that might give us clues as to whether or not the changing role structure of the human race could be responsible for the development of psychiatric disorders such as autism, adhd, sociopathy and related.

Hyper-nutrition as a driver for ASD

When you were an egg in your mummy's tummy when your grandmother was pregnant with your mother, your great-great grandmother, your great-grandmother, and your grandmother all sang a song to your mother, and that song was taught to your great-great grandmother by your great-great-great-great grandmother, you heard it, and it's encoding onto your 'junk dna' was reinforced. That song spanned six generations of women, sometimes it can span as many as ten generations.

Nothing new here, just a slightly more politically correct hypothesis for a possible 'cause' of autism than the one presented in the previous post.

Looking at this, this and now this, along with the baffling set of demographic correlates for ASD, one finds it hard to ignore the possibility that these correlates are all compatible with a streamlining of the diet, maybe over a small number of generations, giving rise to exploratory evolutionary changes in the human race.

The only thing that autistic people have in common is the triad of social impairments, which could be a fundamental requirement for exploratory evolution. As for the rest of the differences we find from one autistic individual to the next, there seems to be no end to the variation. As if mother nature is telling the human race to let it's hair down and find a new trend!

Not fussy, we swing 21 ways, 22 if you count 'none' as a kind of sex ;)

Many have asked why we always reduce the directions of sex into eating directions? Sure the whole male / female / parent / child shebang has 12 (or 18) dimensions compared the the 2 (or 3) dimensions of eating, but is that it? Really?

Oh dear? Centre of the universe again are we? Tut.

It's when you come to do the breeding directions for guys like these that you really need to look to the reductionist approach.

The eating directions of migration? Food moves. Whenever you move you are eating yourself ;)