faithfulness and vasopressin receptors

[miriam_e]

Interesting. It is becoming clear that some issues of morality are not simple questions of good and bad.

Recent work on male voles (small, mouse-like rodents) has shown that faithfulness, at least in that species, is dependent upon the number of vasopressin receptors on the nerves in a part of the brain. Those voles with few receptors in that area will screw anything; those with a lot of vasopressin receptors there will mate with a single partner for life and never stray.

If that research is found to generalise to humans then those who are promiscuous can't be blamed anymore than a color blind person could be blamed for an inability to see colors. Conversely those who are proudly monogamous can have no moral high ground from which to cast aspersions on others; it would be like a person with synaesthesia blaming others for not seeing colors with sounds.

Read more in this short article in Nature magazine. And a more informative article in American Scientist magazine. Some pictures here.

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Here is a weird site devoted to the hormone oxytocin. The site promotes a chemically induced paradise where we are all loving and happy.

Such a future would be nice, except that I notice that when I'm happy and all my needs are satisfied I am not very productive. When I'm a little unbalanced I produce the things that I most admire -- things that frankly mystify me later when I puzzle over how I could ever create such things.

Comments

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting article...I read about it when I was in Salt Lake City, in their local paper - the same paper that held the article about the man with 30 or so wifes and hundreds of children that he was trying to wiggle his way out of taking responsibility for...(they took DNA tests to prove it..). We kept thinking that perhaps both articles should have been on the same page, to make it all a bit more thought provoking...

The discussion about morals is not easy, never was. It's well known facts that it's tougher for some people to stay away from drugs and not get addicted. Violence has a partly biological explanation to some more than others etc...but where does responsibility begin or end?.. I think that is going to be an on going discussion in the future, the more we know about these things...