Tag: genes

  • Reflections on my OS – Part 1

    Alternately: Internal Pattern Recognition: IPR? 😉

    If there’s one thing that Stoicism has taught me, it is that the good fight is not with the world, but yourself. Many of the books I read and observations I try to make on family are to get a better understanding of the ‘why’ behind my thinking. Among the many things that “Behave” gave me insights on was this, and an explanation for how siblings can be very different in terms of mindset and behaviour, despite inheriting not just ‘nature’ but sharing ‘nurture’ too.

    ‘Another dogma was that brains are pretty much wired up early in childhood – after all, by age two, brains are already about 85% of adult volume, but the development trajectory is much slower than that. …the final brain region to fully mature (in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the mid twenties.‘

    “…the brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.” 

    (more…)

  • When Man was God…

    A few days back, I read this amazing article ‘Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong‘, thanks to Surekha. Though it begins by rubbishing ‘creation by God’, it thankfully moves soon enough into Darwin’s theory of evolution and the epigenome (the protective package of proteins around which DNA is wrapped), which plays a role in deciding which genes get to express themselves in a creature’s traits and how much. It talks further of how a change in the surrounding environment for even a relatively small time can affect the way genes express themselves in future generations. This raises a question mark on the ‘random mutation + environment filtering’ basis of Darwin’s theory, and suggests that the environment had a hand in creating those ‘random’ traits. Lifestyle alters heredity.

    (Kindly read the remainder of the post before confronting your grandparents)

    I don’t have a hard stance against anything to do with God/faith, because I find around me many things that are not really explained, many dimensions which we haven’t been able to crack. Maybe, we will, in the future, but that doesn’t mean I will be arrogant about science now. There are so many wonderful things around me that awes my mind because of the mix of complexity and simplicity, that I like to have faith in a system/being at a higher level.

    But the article made me think about the way we have reached where we are, and our concepts of God and evolution. And that’s how I wondered whether man was ‘God’ at some far off point, and had some fun. A half-ass thought. For this scenario I’m accommodating both versions – i.e. God created man in his image OR nature threw up enough random genes to create a version of man with super powers.

    So at some point a long way back, we have a set of humans on the planet, all of them with superpowers – lifespan, various controls over elements etc, and thanks to that, a complete disregard for everything around them. The system (God or evolution/epigenome) realises this is a bad thing and starts turning down the super powers slowly. Or maybe they fought amongst themselves and turned off each others’ powers, until only a few had them. Their lifestyle tampered with their heredity. In later generations, they appeared in patches, say in a few  who are now known as rishis/sadhus/saints. These generations however, knew that earlier beings had superpowers and begin to regard them as Gods. They also began to fear the power of nature as they experienced calamities and lost things and people that were dear to them. Man now thinks that he should be beyond the control of nature. Technology  makes its entry and is man’s weapon against everything that nature can throw at him.

    Where does it go from here? Maybe nature is working to a plan – pushing man to increasingly rely on technology until the point he can no longer think for himself. And then attack man with all it has got when he’s at his most vulnerable.

    until next time, a 20:20 vision we might never have 🙂