I really have begun to marvel at how much the Central Dogma of molecular biology has worked itself, willy-nilly, into modern popular culture, modern popular psychology. Modern popular entertainment.
The Central Dogma, in its simplified form, can be expressed as follows: DNA => RNA => protein. It is, by and large, still applicable. It is also unilateral, and it promises that we can understand any organism’s biology by following a simple one-two translation of its genetic code.
But as we’ve learned more and more about molecular biology, the promised clarity of the Central Dogma has become increasingly defined by what it leaves out, which renders it more and more obscure.
For example . . . there are feedback loops. The proteins in our cells that already are present affect exactly which genes, encoded in our DNA, get expressed later. There is epigenetics, which encompasses ways in which genetic material can be made to express or not express itself, and which can be passed on hereditarily even though the genes themselves do not change between populations.
But the central idea of the Central Dogma remains intact across the half century or so since its exposition: DNA determines RNA, RNA determines cellular proteins, cellular proteins determine phenotype and (maybe) species behavior.
Because this is considered natural – this genetically determined existence – it seems to me it also is increasingly unthinkingly seen as proper. I’ve begun to think we may need to change that attitude.
This occurred to me again whilst watching the latest episode of Orphan Black on BBC America. Now in its third season, this is a British-SyFyesq show about a woman who discovers she is actually the product of an illegal human cloning project. The thing is anchored by the incredible Tatiana Maslany, who is such a superhumanly good actress that I frequently forget, when I am watching scenes shift from clone to clone, that I am watching the same woman perform all these different roles. Maslany really nails the different characters, an incredible performance(s).
But the heart of the show is about a corporation’s (?) government’s (?) shadowy outfit’s (!) attempt to own – that is, to possess legal rights to – human reproductive ability. The first two seasons did not shy away from creating a truly creepy sub-(barely)-text about women being viewed as little more than incubators for a next generation. And, although the organization supposedly in charge of this process did have a few female personnel, most of the on-screen creepiness factor was supplied by old, white males crooning over their “imminent success,” and cradling young women who were expected to bear progeny – without any agency of their own.
Really, really creepy and disturbing imagery.
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Recently, I’ve begun reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari has some interesting ideas about what he calls the “revolutions” of human behavior that allowed our species to get to where it is now. I’m going to focus on one: Harari’s take on the agricultural revolution – what it meant for humans individually, and what it meant for the human species.
Harari points out that most of the evidence indicates that the agricultural revolution – that is, when human went from nomadic forager/scavenger/hunters to sedentary settlements of crop-growers – seems to indicate that this was a really bad deal for humans on an individual basis. Judging from the remains left behind, humans afterward had a worse diet (both nutritionally and calorically), our growth was stunted, we suffered more disease, and we may have even had a shorter average (measured from childbirth) life expectancy.
(This is not new, by the way. Jared Diamond made pretty much the same claim in his book The Third Chimpanzee.)
Harari argues, however, that while settling into an agricultural mode might have been bad for individual humans, it was great for humans’ genes. Biologically speaking, the only measure for success from a genetic view is whether your genes (or the genes of someone closely related to you) make it into the next generation, with the possibility of then getting into the generation beyond that.
Biologically speaking, the only thing that is important is propagating genotype across time. All else is superfluous.
So, from a biological perspective, there have been no greater winners than all the crops and livestock humans have manage to cultivate. It is very unlikely, for example, that wheat could have outcompeted all other grasses without human assistance . . . but wheat now covers a huge expanse of this planet’s landmass.
Cattle probably could not have done very well against, I dunno . . . . the tribes of wilding European lions that used to exist, but now cattle are a hugely widespread, large mammal – in fact, the most widespread large mammal on the planet. Of course their individual lives suck complete ass – most are killed early, very few are allowed ever to roam in a herd, their individual lives are terrible. And yet, biologically speaking, they are a huge success story.
Harari seems to argue that much the same can be said of humans. Our ability to grow sufficient food to sustain ourselves permanently might have meant that we were encouraged to reproduce as much as possible (“go forth and multiply”). This would not have been ideal when we were still hunting, foraging, and scavenging, but when we could replace mother’s milk with cereal gruel, the idea of getting another body to help with the harvest might have been irresistible. We absolutely would have had a bunch more kids.
Of course, the more we grew as a species, the more we needed the efficiencies of monoculture. The more those efficiencies helped us grow as a species, the more dependent on that way of life we became.
In the end, Harari posits, agricultural humans outcompeted their remaining nomadic/foraging brothers, not because their individual quality of life was better, but simply because they had better numbers. Quantity vs. quality, and quantity won out.
If genetics is strictly about getting the greatest copies of our genotype into the next generation, than the genes won out. The fact that the carriers of those genes – the individual humans, cattle, even wheat – might have a shittier life . . . .well, that’s just how biology works.
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I am a big fan of the Devil, as a fictional construct. I like to see the different ways this character has been imagined over the centuries, and to wonder what those different representations mean about the people doing the imagining.
As near as I can tell, back in the beginning Satan (the “adversary”) was just a member of God’s court – God was the judge, Satan the prosecutor. Of course, the Defendant was Humankind. Satan may have been adversarial to us, but he wasn’t adversarial to God . . . no more than is an Assistant U.S. Attorney to the federal U.S. judge before whom he tries a defendant. In the stories, Satan was just trying us (remember Job? Satan tried the crap out of that guy!), and God was passing judgment.
Of course, this changed when the New Testament came out. God Our Father was no longer somebody with whom we had simply contracted – now He was definitely on the side of humans. If Satan was the Adversary of humans, then Satan necessarily was the Adversary of God. This elevated Satan, making him almost an equal, but also cast Him out of Heaven.
And so it went for around 2 millenia.
But in the past 50 years, popular culture seems to have gotten a little more forgiving of the guy. Personally, my favorite characterization has been Neil Gaimon’s construction in his Sandman series, and also in his magnificent short story, Murder Mysteries.
In Gaiman’s imagining, Satan is the expression of Free Will, the desire to Know, and the insistence on plotting one’s own course. Mike Carey did wonderful work expounding on this characterization, later, in DC’s Vertigo imprint Lucifer.
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Of course, the tension between Fate and Free Will has almost certainly been with us, always. “God’s Will” has been conscripted, universally through the ages, as justification for whatever the established order has been – the divine Right of Kings, the Papal Infallibility, the “One Man, One Woman” rule of marriage. And against all that, has always been the one question that is the way of Reason: WHY?
Of course, if you can point to science: BECAUSE BIOLOGY, you get to shut down that revolution against authority. Because it’s biology that women bear children, because it’s biology that we “go forth and multiply,” because it’s biology that we obey our grossest instincts. And that might mean that we embrace xenophobia and racism, or that women become second-class breeding systems, or that unlimited growth, without constraint, until our biosphere kills us with our own poisons, is unavoidable.
I dunno.
Ultimately, I like to think that one of the reasons we have been blessed with conscious, rational thought, is that we can rebel against any kind of mindless authoritarianism, whether that mindlessness comes from a divine (but, apparently, perverse) God, or from our own biological mandates . . . . If there is a point of having a human existence, it must be that we get to choose to be better than we ought to be.
We reach beyond our pure programming, we transcend our mere matter, because that is the only point of being us.