Disgust

[Azathoth]

I always thought disgust was a learned response. Today, however, after making a baby cry with a particularly pungent fart it has come to my attention that certain aspects of disgust must be hardwired into us. I can see the evolutionary advantage of instinctively not liking smells associated with shit but am curious as to the mechanism behind it. Any ideas?

[Animavore]

I'm just reading this right now this minute
"some things automatically trigger disgust and don't have to be learned. Hydrogen sulphide, methane, cadaverine and putrescene..." Supersense p.174.

[Animavore]

p.175 "they can be found in various bodily excretions but are most concentrated in decomposing corpses."

[Rum]

This is a fucking brilliant thread!

[owtth]

That's some funny shit right there.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Sugar-rich foods taste sweet because ancestors that liked them gained a huge energy bonus and went on to do more living and shagging. This living and shagging led to them producing little ancestors which inherited their tastes and, due to them doing a lot more living and shagging than those that didn't like sweeties, outnumbering and eventually deleting those that preferred sand, felt, aluminium and other less immediately calorific foodstuffs.

In a similar manner, ancestors that liked eating shit did a lot of dying, vomiting and being afflicted with 'the evil scourge'. Even those that eventually recovered found that they were way behind in the living and shagging stakes and so they didn't get to do a lot of passing on of that particular predilection (except, for some unknown reason, to German pornstars. ) In fact, the downside of being desperate enough to try just 'a teeny weeny taste of poo' when famished was so severe that those that resisted this urge, even in extreme starvation, went on to do a lot more of that living and shagging that we all know and love - hence passing on their hatred of poo and all its derivatives to the rest of us.

Evilution - gotta love it - you'd almost think it was designed!

[Azathoth]

I am more curious as to the neurological mechanism that governs disgust. Have found this paper. It is very interesting, linking biological disgust to morality

Abstract

Disgust, an emotion related to avoiding harmful substances, has been linked to moral judgments in many behavioral studies. However, the fact that participants report feelings of disgust when thinking about feces and a heinous crime does not necessarily indicate that the same mechanisms mediate these reactions. Humans might instead have separate neural and physiological systems guiding aversive behaviors and judgments across different domains. The present interdisciplinary study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (n = 50) and behavioral assessment to investigate the biological homology of pathogen-related and moral disgust. We provide evidence that pathogen-related and sociomoral acts entrain many common as well as unique brain networks. We also investigated whether morality itself is composed of distinct neural and behavioral subdomains. We provide evidence that, despite their tendency to elicit similar ratings of moral wrongness, incestuous and nonsexual immoral acts entrain dramatically separate, while still overlapping, brain networks. These results (i) provide support for the view that the biological response of disgust is intimately tied to immorality, (ii) demonstrate that there are at least three separate domains of disgust, and (iii) suggest strongly that morality, like disgust, is not a unified psychological or neurological phenomenon.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf ... 2008.20109

[Animavore]

Look up Johnathon Haidt. He' the person referenced in the section about disgust in the book I'm reading, seems to have done a lot on it.

[FBM]

I... ...oh, sorry.

[devogue]

I always thought disgust was a learned response. Today, however, after making a baby cry with a particularly pungent fart it has come to my attention that certain aspects of disgust must be hardwired into us. I can see the evolutionary advantage of instinctively not liking smells associated with shit but am curious as to the mechanism behind it. Any ideas?

I think this is less a case of disgust and more an issue of genuine distress. Babies have got tiny wee lungs, so a well aimed fart could well cause poisioning or respiratory damage.

It could also be that the baby thought the noise of the fart was a scary monster or something.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

This thread is disgusting!

[Berthold]

On the other hand, one culture's delicacy frequently is other people's organoleptic horror (lutefisk being just one example ).

[Feck]

On the other hand, one culture's delicacy frequently is other people's organoleptic horror (lutefisk being just one example ).

Or that shark !! it bet that could make babies cry from many metres away.

[The Dawktor]

Sugar-rich foods taste sweet because ancestors that liked them gained a huge energy bonus and went on to do more living and shagging. This living and shagging led to them producing little ancestors which inherited their tastes and, due to them doing a lot more living and shagging than those that didn't like sweeties, outnumbering and eventually deleting those that preferred sand, felt, aluminium and other less immediately calorific foodstuffs.

In a similar manner, ancestors that liked eating shit did a lot of dying, vomiting and being afflicted with 'the evil scourge'. Even those that eventually recovered found that they were way behind in the living and shagging stakes and so they didn't get to do a lot of passing on of that particular predilection (except, for some unknown reason, to German pornstars. ) In fact, the downside of being desperate enough to try just 'a teeny weeny taste of poo' when famished was so severe that those that resisted this urge, even in extreme starvation, went on to do a lot more of that living and shagging that we all know and love - hence passing on their hatred of poo and all its derivatives to the rest of us.

Evilution - gotta love it - you'd almost think it was designed!

XC Although I'm not sure whether you should be on a lecture tour OR in the Village Stocks???

[Svartalf]

On the other hand, one culture's delicacy frequently is other people's organoleptic horror (lutefisk being just one example ).

Or that shark !! it bet that could make babies cry from many metres away.

What? lutefisk is a culinary delight compared to stuff likie hakarl or chicken feet...