



Genetically modified prairie voles may illuminate the human condition

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I'm way less tolerant of the BS insult at the end of this article. F-you whoever wrote it, and I hope the editor of the piece gets slammed for letting it appear in print. It's not a matter of PC — it's a huge insult to millions of men, including many single dads who found their mates more apt to seek fresher wood shavings then stay and face the ups and downs of monogamy. I thought this magazine had journalistic standards?

D. Sherman

In response to adidan clarke, who is to say that less cheating on spouses would be an improvement? I might just as easily argue that because humans are both biologically successful and only occasionally monogamous, promiscuity might account for some of our species' success. In simple genetic terms, it makes perfect sense for a woman to marry a man who is likely to be a good long-term provider, but get her children fathered by men who are genetically superior in ways that are important for survival (even just to have them fathered by a number of men so as to ensure that they don't all share the same genetic defect). The reproductive advantages of male promiscuity are so obvious that they hardly bear mentioning; it's strictly a numbers game in which (at least prior to the invention of DNA testing and lawyers) there was little cost to inseminating lots of women and obvious reproductive advantage to doing so.

On the other hand, humans are not as promiscuous as many other beasts, and we're roughly in the middle of the scale among primates. That means there's also some advantage to monogamy, which probably has to do with the difficulty of raising a human baby successfully to adulthood and the fact that biological parents, working together, are more likely to accomplish that. So, evolutionary pressure has given us a certain tension on the subject, to the point where we've subjected ourselves to first religious and now legal penalties in order to force us to do what we don't always naturally want to do.

We do not need threats of harsh judgment, either in court or in the hereafter, to compel us to eat food when we're hungry or put on clothing when the weather is cold. We don't even think that it might be handy if some scientist would develop a pill to make people do those things. The very fact that we contemplate compelling behavior of one sort of another means that the desired behavior is not completely natural.

aidan clarke

GEfree, why not improve the things that we can? The whole history of human progress is merely a history of humans improving the things we can. If someone wants to take a pill in order to be less tempted to cheat on his or her partner, then more power to them!

D. Sherman

That last line was clearly added as a gratuitous joke, but since the rest of the article was fairly scientific, it's worth noting that every heterosexual man who "cheats" on his partner is doing so with a woman. The accurate studies that have been done on human monogamy tend not to show men as being significantly more promiscuous than women. Perhaps the stereotype exists largely because men are more likely to brag about their exploits, at least to their buddies, even to the point of exaggerating how many women they've bedded, whereas women tend to be ashamed of being thought of as promiscuous. So, the notion that women ought to "hope" that a drug could make men be monogamous reflects a social bias rather than a biological reality.


If you have enough power, you can do that, but the consequences are equally unpredictable.

Love will tear us apart again.

Yes, it does.

c.f. Cold Mountain


Do Buy.


It seems like there's an obvious and soon to be indispensable application of this research just waiting to be invented: a gene you can inject into your spouse's brain that makes them glow in the dark if they're going to cheat on you.


Why, WHY do we have to change things? As much as I like science, the ego charges forward to alter and change every living thing. The system is not broke. Quit trying to fix things. You don't need a monogamous gene for men. You need a gene to allow men to accept what is on this beautiful planet, just as it is. Did any of you ever stop to think that the way we are IS the way it is meant to be? Really, as a female, I am intelligent enough to know the past men who cheated only led me to the fabulous man I have now. The struggles and tears along the way only made me the person I am today - that I would never trade for anything!


"It may be some time before such interventions are available for human males, but women can always live in hope."

I'm confused? Is the science gender specified? This seems to pop up out of nowhere, and heavily misrepresents animal mating patterns seemingly for no reason other than sexism. If there is another reason your reporter should have made that clearer.


Humans are more complex beings than rodent model systems. This is simply evident based on the complexity of our brain. Hence all this study provides is a plausible molecular insight into bonding behavior. The prime topic of analysis should in fact focus on the evolutionary benefit for this social trait in rodent history and then, we can start to relate the implications of this study to our life. Until then, this is just another cool genetics based approach to understanding behavior in a simple animal model. I have not even covered other variable facets such as vasopressin expression pattern in this model, implications of controlled lab environment on rodent behavior and lack of complex human brain regions in the prairie vole. However, this is novel science moving towards emotions on a microarray, so dream on.


There are 3 main drugs that humans take on a regular basis: Love, Money, and Power. People don't go after these things because they want them instinctively, they do it because they get a physical response from them as the article indicates. Just like any drug though the more you use it the more you need. Falling in love the first time is always better than any subsequent experimenting with that particular drug, and its effects fade with time. With money and power, those drugs can truly corrupt people. The true human condition is devoid of these artificial pleasures. A solitary monk would be a pure individual.


If such an intervention could be surreptitiously added to a cup of coffee, the whole world might be "A Midsummer's Night Dream", i.e. not much different than at present, particularly if a surreptitious antidote were available


I am tempted to be all politically-correct and say that women cheat too, but yes, as a bitter ex-girlfriend I feel that the sooner this is developed for humans, the better.


No it is Vasopressin.
PNAS January 29, 2008 vol. 105 no. 4 1249–1254

Variation in neural V1aR predicts sexual fidelity and space use among male prairie voles in semi-natural settings
Alexander G. Ophir*†, Jerry O. Wolff‡, and Steven M. Phelps*
*Department of Zoology, University of Florida, P.O. Box 118525, Gainesville, FL 32611; and ‡Department of Biological Sciences, St. Cloud State University,720 Fourth Avenue South, St. Cloud, MN 56301

all bask

it is OXYTOCIN, not so much vasopressin, involved in human bonding. though they both chemically very similar.


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