CENTER VERSUS EDGE

I remarked earlier that we need to think about defining groups by their outliers, where things fuzz out into the next group or no group, versus defining a category by its nucleus.  Or what about variegated categories where components mix to make a kind of striped group?  Then what holds them together.  What is their axis mundi?

We’ve broken down the sharp lines between male and female, between the many kinds of desire, between various races -- esp. the ones defined by appearance whether skin color or epicanthal fold.  DNA smashes so many of our cultural and governmental categories.  One of the reasons I watch CSI is that it is an easy way to consider what the show writers have already debated over a coffee-stained table and defined for reflection.  What technical tools have reframed the same questions over and over?

Should we each get a genomic printout attached to our birth certificates?  Or should one be made in the womb so that “faulty” or stigmatized elements can allow an abortion of the fetus before it makes trouble?  Or, since CRISPR allows genes to be replaced rather accurately, should we just do that ?  If we can closely control who we are, what will we do?

What does that imply in terms of demographics -- not who prevails so much as how it will confuse the bean-counters.  Now it appears that everyone is “metis,” mixed.  There’s no such thing as a purebred human -- what a scandal to discover Neanderthal genes -- but, in fact, there’s no such thing as “purebred” anywhere anything, not even in a lab where an impure mix of e-coli strains can abort your doctoral thesis.  Even sitting there isolated in a petri dish, the little bugs mutate.

But history has insisted on sorting everyone by appearance and location.  And using location means drawing boundaries, which means the possibility of gating, controlling who can enter or leave.  Of course, a cell and a body MUST do that -- there MUST be a way to keep out poisons and eject debris.  

Recently the most paradoxical use of face-scanning recognition technology is using it to filter who may attend church services.  Troublemakers?  Heretics?  The disobedient?  Someone with a gun?   In the early days of Christianity there was a phenomenon called "fencing the Communion."  That little rail where you kneel and rest your elbows?  It's meant to prevent you from just walking up and helping yourself.  

Or it could exclude some people from the inner chambers where decisions are made and study becomes more intense.  It took me a while to realize the Board of Trustees of the seminary was mostly for show, to identify people with a lot of money, so as to keep them in mind of the next pledge drive.   The real decisions were made by a sub-group.  In the old days, they were men who retired for whiskey and cigars; naturally, rich widows did not attend.

Who's in, who's out.

Maybe you’ve never participated in a pledge drive in a big church.  The committee -- carefully chosen -- sits down with a set of cards or a list of members and guesses the income of each formal member and then informal Sunday attendees.  (There’s always a banker on the committee.) An estimate is made of the capacity of that person to pledge.  (Kid in college?  House burned down?)  Canvassers are each assigned a certain number of people to visit.  The idea is to remind them what good things generous pledgers had made possible in the previous years and then to hint a bit about “norms.”  One of the men I visited -- wives often weren’t present -- was an important doctor.  He knew I was not making a lot of money.  All I had to do was mention the amount I was pledging to cause him to blush and raise his pledge.  

So a lot of norming -- doing what others are doing -- is based on guessing secrets, which money matters normally are.  DNA suggests belonging to a population whose norm is attendance at a good school and many connections among themselves that will help to attract job offers and provide support after getting the job.  DNA counts more than IQ.

Schisms and eccentricities are bad for business, bad for research, bad for strategies -- IF your goal is to perpetuate an institution.  What kind of institution could be defined by it’s core?  Medicins sans Frontiers seems obvious.  No doubt there are differences among them, but the axis of it all is to heal as many as possible.  They have preserved the original pledge of doctors.

Of course, there are always many forces that are uncontrollable.  Even DNA is constantly being changed by the environment -- providing new opportunities or damages and, more subtly, turning various genes on and off.  Genes don’t necessarily control something like coloring but rather things like the timing of maturation or the interaction of sets of linked genes.  If some CRISPR enthusiast knocks out the gene for something linked to, for instance, metabolism, the person may fail due to its own attempt to succeed.

There are many subtle, internal, unseen dynamics of the code that is each of us.  But ethnic populations of many people also operate as codes, esp. when governments are trying to keep track, politicians are trying to persuade, and advertisements are trying to re-norm us so that we just MUST have some gizmo.

After I read about a lot of this teeny stuff, I love to read the macro research.  Like this quote:

“Until about 9,000 years ago, Europe was home to a genetically distinct population of hunter-gatherers, the researchers found. Then, 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, the genetic profiles of the inhabitants in some parts of Europe abruptly changed, acquiring DNA from Near Eastern populations.

“Archaeologists have long known that farming practices spread into Europe at the time from Turkey. But the new evidence shows that it wasn’t just the ideas that spread — the farmers did, too.

“The hunter-gatherers didn’t disappear, however. They managed to survive in pockets across Europe between the farming communities.

“ ‘ It’s an amazing cultural process,’ said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who led the university’s team. ‘You have groups which are as genetically distinct as Europeans and East Asians. And they’re living side by side for thousands of years.’

“From 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, however, hunter-gatherer DNA began turning up in the genes of European farmers. “There’s a breakdown of these cultural barriers, and they mix,” Dr. Reich said.

“About 4,500 years ago, the final piece of Europe’s genetic puzzle fell into place. A new infusion of DNA arrived — one that is still very common in living Europeans, especially in central and northern Europe.”

Dr. David Reich

So this population, possibly sheep herders on horseback, came in from the high north and their clue DNA is present in North American Indians!  Is this an example of NA’s infiltrating Eurasia through Russia?  

“The Ancient North Eurasian line was not present in either the 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers or the 7,000-year-old farmer, so researchers believe it represents a migration into Europe sometime after those individuals lived but before recorded history in the region.

“These Ancient North Eurasians must have spread into Europe at a later time, and so encountered early farmer- or hunter-gatherer-type populations and mixed with them,” Lazaridis said. “It’s definitely, chronologically, the last thing that arrived in most of Europe.”

“Lazaridis said the period of approximately 4,500 years ago appears likely for the influx, because that is when new types of mitochondrial DNA appear in the genetic record. Reich added that there are hints from other disciplines, including linguistics, that point to migrations during that time span.”

A far more controversial and politically incorrect study suggests:

“A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

“The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England.

“He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.

“In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.”

Tweets between @DavidQuammen and @Dr. Neil Bodie:

 "Why has there never been an outbreak of #Ebola in Pygmies? Very low rate of serious malaria? Genetic protection?"

Now consider what HIV and addiction are doing to the DNA of America.  Which is the center?  Maybe it is NOT entitled white men.  Maybe this winnowing will create a concentration of something new.  The name of the game is survival.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365516010/     First peoples.  So far, so good.  Maybe.