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Chapter 1: Do insects feel pain and what does it mean for animal rights?
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Time for another science show. I'm Robin Williams. And I'm Belinda Smith. And I know, Bel, that you've been dealing with that cruel bastard René Descartes. Yeah, he truly was a heinous human being. But I've only been dealing with him in the interests of caring for animals. Fair enough. And we're connected in all sorts of surprising ways, even painful ones.
MUSIC PLAYS Thank you.
And we shall ponder briefly the 50th birthday of the selfish gene a little later. But we begin with this quick trip into and around your brilliant brain with another book, just published with an unlikely title, You're Dangerously Well. It refers to cases of patients whose malady isn't obvious and whose treatment should include tender, loving care, not just industrial meds.
And the man behind the book is Professor Roger Rees of Adelaide, famous for treating drastic head knocks. And your title, Professor, Dangerously Well, what does that mean?
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Chapter 2: What insights does Professor Roger Rees provide about hidden illnesses?
And their own thinking is like a pondered up river. It's going nowhere. So the only way out of that for them is to be violent. And you see this all the time. What's the scientific ingredient?
Because this is a science show, of course, not a medical programme. You're not talking to Norman Swan.
I think the scientific ingredient is based on my first meeting with the head of mission at the Lifehouse, Chris Milross.
and he gave me a copy of the Lancet's compendium paper called The Science of Hope and there's 80 references in it and they look at the way in which behaving in a hopeful fashion enables the person not only to proceed in a positive fashion but that alters the response of their immune system.
So that concept of hope, which appears to be something which is social and interpersonal, has in fact a distinct effect on our immune system. And there's a chapter called A Look at Immunity, and the reviewer of it was Peter Doherty, who won the Nobel Prize for his Improving Our Understanding of the Immune System. And he's kindly endorsed this book.
So we are affecting with hope, but we are affecting the immune system with every piece of behaviour. Cathy Ellis's book about the new health. She's the professor of biodiversity at Oxford, and she contrasts with Ian McEwan in his statement in his new novel. But she tells a positive view of life based on a much better understanding of our environment and how we nurture the environment.
And if we do that, then we're building our own immune system. or rebuilding us, because the immune systems are shot to pieces in societies where the air is so poisonous.
And I think there Professor Rees is referring to social turmoil rather than toxins, where little seems secure, and our anxieties then cause our health to suffer. The book is Dangerously Well, Life Affirming Care at the O'Brien Life House, and all sales of the book go to that hospital in Sydney.
Now we leap across to UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, but still with ideas about your brain and well-being. And here I must mention my late cat, a delightful Burmese, who always chose to sleep with us in our own bed, which must frankly have been almost guaranteed an infection with a germ called Toxo, a germ I share, it turns out, with a third of the world's population.
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Chapter 3: How does the concept of 'Dangerously Well' relate to patient care?
So how could that be applied in the health project?
Chapter 4: What evidence is there for insects experiencing pain?
Presumably you're looking at human beings and their toxos.
Down the line, the hope would be that we can rewire our metabolism by making our mitochondria healthier, by making them take up more fatty acids, for example, which when athletes are doing a certain exercise, they burn more fatty acids, that by finding ways to engineer our mitochondrial metabolism, we can also find ways to restrict the growth of not only toxoplasma, but any other pathogen that needs fatty acids or that needs folates when it infects the host cell.
Do many people actually get toxo in a way that affects their health?
I've never quite met one. I think this raises a very interesting question. So one third of the world's population is estimated to have toxoplasma. However, it's in a form that's thought to be asymptomatic. And what's always been remarkable to me is that this form lives potentially in our brains and is quiet.
And so for a long time, the dogma was that chronic toxoplasmosis, so when you've had the infection for more than a year, is silent and asymptomatic and doesn't affect you. But there's more and more studies emerging that indicate that there is a modulation of immune system function in individuals that have chronic toxoplasmosis.
So even if you don't have overt symptoms, there are changes in your immune system going on that you are not even aware of. So I think it does affect the immune system component. And then there's been very interesting work from predominantly driven by a Czech scientist, Dr. Jaroslav Fleger, that has investigated how toxoplasma impacts human behavior.
And I think he won an Ig Nobel Prize, so these are the prizes that make you laugh and then make you think, for showing that they make men who are infected with chronic toxoplasmosis are more likely to be, I think, indolent and scruffy and take less care of themselves, whereas women are more likely to be intelligent and sexier and risk-taking.
That doesn't rule out terribly many people.
Most men I know are a bit like that. Well, I don't know what the rate is in Australia, but... It's usually not a problem for immunocompetent individuals. So for healthy folks, toxo will stay in its chronic stage and it won't cause any overt symptoms. It becomes a problem in two scenarios. One is when an individual becomes immunocompromised.
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Chapter 5: How do crickets and fruit flies demonstrate pain-like responses?
He works at Oxford, where one of his colleagues is Desmond Morris, who wrote The Naked Ape. That's a sort of ethological number 96. Actually, Desmond Morris designed the way-out cover for the selfish gene. Now, like The Naked Ape, Richard Dawkins' book gives itself rather a large scope.
He tries to explain how altruism could have been produced – that's loving-kindness, if you like – by an evolutionary process that seems designed to produce nothing but self-interest. He attacks the way some biologists have talked of populations being the basis for natural selection.
And then he jumps right up to human society to say that our culture, our music, our customs and religions could be subject to the same evolutionary forces, selfish ones. And now let's hear what Richard Dawkins himself has to say. After all the popular books we've had in recent years on what's now called sociobiology, why do we need yet another one?
Chapter 6: What implications does insect pain have for animal welfare laws?
I was stimulated by some of the works that you're probably referring to. For example, Robert Ardrey's Social Contract, which I thought a very interesting book with a very interesting thesis. The only trouble with it being that it was wrong. And I felt it was important that a book so persuasively argued as Ardrey's shouldn't be allowed to go unchallenged.
Basically, it's a matter of whether natural selection favors group welfare rather than individual or gene welfare. I wanted to make the point very strongly that it's gene welfare that counts and that conclusions parallel to those of Ardrey's but ending up different could be arrived at if we treat the gene as the unit of selection rather than the group as he did.
I also felt that there are profound questions such as what is the meaning of life, rather pretentious sounding things like that, what is the meaning of life, why are we here, what is man, which could be given a really quite simple and straightforward answer that anybody could understand
And I was intrigued and fascinated by the sorts of answers that modern biology is able to give, and I wanted to share some of that fascination. You talked about this discrepancy between group and individual. What did Darwin have to say about these things at the time that he actually wrote about them?
Darwin, of course, knew nothing of genes, but that apart, he had it all right, if I can put it like that. Darwin all the time talked about individual welfare and I think that the only thing one would want to add to what Darwin said is to do with genes.
Darwin didn't have the benefit of what we now know about genes, even though, oddly enough, he could have had if he'd read a certain obscure horticultural journal in which Gregor Mendel published his findings on genetics. Yes, which were not read for, oh, several decades.
If we can go back further than Darwin, much, much further to the time when there were not plants and animals on the world, when there was, if you like, the famous primeval soup with complex molecules floating around in it, could you tell us how these complex molecules, the basis of life, came to be involved in a process that actually evolved?
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Chapter 7: How do we define sentience in animals, especially insects?
The key step in that process was the arising, in that primeval soup, of molecules which had the power of self-replication. We don't know how that happened, there are lots of theories, lots of speculations about it, but all these speculations seem to agree on one thing, that the key to the process was this matter of replication.
It just means that a molecule arose by chance in the primeval soup which happened to have the property that it served as a kind of mold or template on which copies of itself could be made, and smaller molecules which were in plentiful supply in the soup were arranged by this mold or template so that they created an exact copy of the original replicator molecule.
Nowadays, the equivalent of that replicator molecule would be called DNA, and it's possible that the original one 4,000 million years ago in the primeval soup was DNA, but it's much more likely that it was some other kind of replicator molecule, and DNA is a kind of later usurper. So, we have the process beginning. How did it become such that many different forms of life evolved?
Why make the whole thing so difficult by producing many, many, many different forms of life? Well, I think first I should say perhaps that the process of replication first of all gave rise to what I've called survival machines, which are larger entities not made of replicating molecules but created by replicating molecules.
By that I just mean bodies, you and me, but originally they'd have been much simpler, single cells, perhaps single jackets of protein. These were machines created by the replicators for their own survival, and at the end of 4,000 million years that gave rise to us. Now your question is, why were there so many different sorts of them?
Why wasn't there just one form of life that discovered how to do it, so to speak, in the best possible way and then stuck with it? Yes. And that is, of course, a very interesting and difficult question. I think I can answer it very roughly.
If you start out imagining one single way of life, it might be a simple microscopic plant which floats around in the sea and absorbs sunlight and uses the energy of sunlight to make the chemicals that it needs.
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Chapter 8: What changes in perception of insects should we consider for humane treatment?
There are plenty of those still left. Why did anything else evolve? Well, the answer is that when you've got a simple form of plant like that, there is the possibility for other organisms to exploit it by eating it. And once you've got the possibility for other organisms to exploit it, then there's the possibility for yet other ones to exploit them.
So you have herbivores being exploited by carnivores. Then you have parasites exploiting both herbivores and carnivores. And as each... ecological niche is filled, it creates the possibility for yet other ones to be filled in more bizarre and outlandish ways. Until now, we have thousands and millions of different species all making a living by exploiting each other.
Professor Richard Dawkins in Oxford, and yes, if you suspected that was from a science show nearly 50 years ago, it was. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Selfish Gene, the book... And Professor Dawkins will be here in Australia in November, I hear. And to carry on with more evidence on how we are so very much connected is Bell Smith.
Bell, it's not so much a matter of pain, but also how we also share even feelings with other creatures. Yeah, that's right, Robyn. So a few weeks ago, you might remember we featured an interview with an entomologist who found crickets seemingly feel pain. It's an example of a study into animal sentience.
So that's where the various species can feel things like pain, happiness, pleasure, joy, that kind of thing. So you might think, well, why bother with any of this kind of research? Short of getting an idea of how flies and cockroaches experience the world, these studies might also change their legal status and maybe one day even give them animal welfare protection.
Even from very early philosophy, like Descartes arguing that animals were just machines that mimic the appearance of experience, but they don't have any inner life.
Dr Eliza Middleton, an entomologist at the University of Sydney, and yeah, Rene Descartes being the I think, therefore I am guy, he thought animals did not feel pain and were incapable of experiencing suffering. Any noises an animal might make in response to something that we'd consider painful were, to him, simply the squeaks of a poorly oiled machine.
That concept from the 1600s really shaped Western science and philosophy because they were very intertwined back then. But even that machine metaphor, you know, that's been retreating in the face of evidence for 300 years. We no longer look at a dog and think that a dog is a soulless, thoughtless being. We might think it's only thinking about smelling butts and stuff, but it thinks.
And thinking is also relevant to whether an animal feels pain because pain is more than just that reflex of jerking your hand away from the hot plate when you accidentally touch it. It also involves some level of cognition.
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