This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

by Kathleen McAuliffe

When I pressed Thornhill to point to a country that exemplifies his philosophy, he shot back, “The whole of the Western world, because gradually there’s been a reduction in infectious disease. In the 1920s, you get chlorinated water. By the 1930s you have food-handling and sanitation laws. These spread very rapidly specifically in the West, but not outside the West. Around the same time you got antibiotics. By 1945, you got fluorinated water and it spread very rapidly. That knocked out all the mouth infections. In 1945, you also got DDT, which knocked out all the insect vectors of disease. Malaria went down the drain and [so did] other human diseases [spread by insects]. “In the 1960s, we got the cultural revolution: civil rights, women’s rights, the sexual revolution. All that stuff came out of the cleanup of infectious diseases specifically in the West. Liberal parts of the world. Outside of the West none of these things have occurred.”