TWO EMBEDDED GENOME CODES

If poultry is descended from dinosaurs -- and I have no trouble at all accepting that, esp. considering the Tyrannosaurus Rex roosters still strutting around -- then there are two things that are deep, deep in our genome.  Both recently showed up in little stories on the internet.  One was an account by Ellen Chase, reposted by Nick Kristof, about some adopted chickens, one of which went blind.  Most of the chickens kindly guided and even fed the unfortunate hen, but the chicken at the bottom of the pecking order saw it as an opportunity and often attacked the blind chicken.  Sometimes the rest of the flock intervened and sometimes they didn’t.  Bullying is not just for bulls.  And it is not the strong alpha creatures who are bullies -- rather losers trying to improve their status.

The other was a video clip that shows a turkey hatching, sprawling on the table top totally disorganized, hearing the biologist cheeping at it (which he had been doing all along while the chick was still in the egg), recognizing the voice, pulling itself together, staggering over to lean on the man’s cheek, and going to sleep.   http://video.pbs.org/video/2165688049/   The poult was imprinted and from then on would yearn for and rush to him, just as it would have to its turkey mother.  Babies need moms, but they needn’t be biological or even female or even the same species.

These two behaviors are so deep that they are described as “instincts,”  hard-wired into the brain, which means controlled by the genome by producing protein molecules.  The genes, so old, are still there, no doubt pre-mammal code that promoted survival. (Maiasaurus, the “good-mother” dino laid her eggs in nests near Valier.)  These two coded behaviors were deep enough and protective enough that the mammals preserved them in their own cells.  (No animal was coded for surviving asteroid hits -- that was just situational, literally once in a lifetime or even many lifetimes.)

We are in a time when we are just now looking at the excessive amount of “bullying” behavior in humans and wondering whether that’s really a survival tactic after all.  It certainly is for the immediate success of the individual, but what does it do for the whole community?  Is it a force for consolidation or does it undermine every possibility of human progress by sowing fear, distrust and forced compliance -- which is always an energy and resource burner.

Konrad Lorenz and his imprinted geese

Clearly the imprinting phenomenon is useful and charming.  Mostly.  My mother taught us as small children to hang onto her skirt because there were three of us and she only had two hands, even if she wasn’t carrying something.  On the other hand, when we were needy we followed her around bleating like bummer lambs, which got in her way and drove her nuts.  For an individual trying to get things done, having been imprinted upon is not always pleasant.  When one imprints on a therapist, that worthy will keep it under control with appointments and a closed door.  It might be called a form of transference.

Feral dogs and boys will attach to each other -- dogs with dogs and boys with boys or even dogs with boys -- sometimes in communities (packs, gangs).  But if the pecking order within that community is unstable, then bullying will thin the group.  What is the proper balance between attaching to each other and dominating each other?  What is the best trade-off between the individual and the group?  Can we replace bullying with nurturing in some constructive way?

The news this morning is that scientists have learned how to insert DNA code into the genome -- not at random by infecting with a virus, but deliberately in a specific place as though with tweezers.  So now all we need is to build the right gene (we’ve made simple ones) and put it in the right place (a little trickier).  That neglects issues like the epigenome and methylation, but at least we know the latter exist.  They might be easier ways to affect behavior than inserting or deleting genes.  The genome operates like a symphony orchestra, so one flat note or timing lag can throw the whole composition into trouble.  Genes are interactive and there is no sheet music to hand out.

In the meantime, what are the changes to our health care, our government, our classrooms, our marriages/families that would support nurturing instead of bullying?  In some families, children not capable of forcing their way will be destroyed, if only by exclusion.  This past week a young teen boy, wearing only trunks, was thrown out of the house in sub-zero weather because he was aggravating his parents.  People talk of “survival of the fittest” and define fitness as dominance.  But were these adults "fit" to be parents?

Some mammal mothers, if frightened or disturbed, will eat their babies.  (Mink are notorious for doing this, which is why mink ranchers get nervous around noise and disorder.)  Is this the interaction of the protein molecule that controls T.Rex behavior with the protein molecule that controls Maiasaurus behavior?  (“I love you to death!”)  Is cannibalism a form of over-nurturing? (“I wanted to make him part of me.”)  If humans have both genes, is modern “civilization” somehow making them interact dissonantly?  

So many manufactured molecules are out there in the ground water, and no one knows how to remove them.  Some are coming from meds in the pee of humans who will die without them -- should we be filtering and recycling urine?  Filtering them from the water supply would be formidably expensive, but nowhere near the cost of inserting manmade genes into human cells.  (The cost of getting a readout is now advertised at a little less than a hundred dollars, without specifying the quality, extent or usefulness of the document.)

Above is a still from a horror movie called “Splice” that addresses the mixing of genes from different species by scientific means, one -- naturally -- being human.  Here's the link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pIeSYhipUs  In discussing the film, the director, Vincenzo Natale, astutely says that horror films are one way of thinking about the scientific edges of human life and suggests that this specific film has an undertow of incest.  How can one address genes without sex?  And who can love us more than we can love ourselves -- if we ever get around to it.  Once a person is in forbidden territory it all turns up at once, even our longing for our missing prehensile tails.  (Wings are a different issue --  see Nicholas Cage in “Michael.”  Tails belong to “Alien.”  Then there’s feathers vs. leathers.)

Luckily, we can explore the culturome and the memes of individuals much more easily and quickly, though perhaps not more safely considering how some people survive.  I mean, it upsets them to be investigated, much less interfered with.  Still, it is a counseling truism that if one changes oneself, everything around one will also change.  To understand such atrocities as battering and trafficking, it’s necessary to look at both sides PLUS the larger context.  Is the survival value of being beaten up worth the survival value of belonging to someone powerful?  Is the survival value of beating up one’s partner somehow a kind of self-nurturing, sucking power out of women and children like a Skeksi extracting life from the Pod People peasants?  Some people seem to think so.  I think we need to risk interfering or else lose all our best evolved culturomes.  We are neither dinosaurs nor poultry, but we’re not proving it.

Skeksi from "The Dark Crystal"

CHEAP DOMINANCE: A Reflection

Every living creature in its life of consuming and discarding is seeking survival, which can often become a need to dominate.  Not finding some way to co-exist means being eliminated from the ongoing stream of lifeways.  The alternative of surrender can mean a diminishment, but cooperation might also feel like a loss of control.  Domination can mean being stronger, more resourceful, maybe even more brilliant or educated, or it can mean looking for others to dominate -- put pejoratively, to victimize.   Weaker, female, displaced, undefended, younger, stigmatized, ignorant, poor, emotionally needy people make the biological potency of domination much more accessible, sometimes even to the point of running amuck, out of control, a kind of cannibalism.  Sometimes connected to testosterone secretion.

Today’s capitalist-tending-toward-oligarchy cultures who struggle to keep order by force, are not essentially different from kindergartners.  One summer when our six-year-old grandson lived with us, he came home from his explorations with a black eye, crying.  We told him not to stand for it, to fight back.  Soon the parents of the other kids that age were at the door, complaining that our boy was beating up on others.  We had created a monster.  He had discovered dominance.

When my mother, an elementary school librarian, caught one boy bullying another, she would lean in on him in his seat and intone:  “For every bug there is a bigger bug, and I am the big bug you’ve been dreading.”  True enough, and quite effective, but not very transformative.  The bullying shifted to the boys’ bathroom.  (They didn’t know my mother.  She went in after them.)

Persons who are charged with keeping order are hard-pressed not to at least present a dominating front, and hopefully they are backed up by a society that values their work.  It’s a symbiosis, since vulnerable sub-cultures that are not protected by authorities will no long respect law and order, and enforcement personnel who can’t get dominance (which they see as control) any other way will use force.  When I watch my favorite mystery and cop shows, this is the thread I’m watching for because that’s often what the good writers follow.  

Every television series that has tried to deal with the problems of dominance/submission in the context of the church (except in England, where they are always comedies) has been pushed off the air by dominating religious institutions.  I don’t know why they seem no longer able to suppress news stories.  But I guarantee that even now what gets to the newspapers is a filtered account or else packed with tabloid sensationalism and sentimentality. 

There’s almost always a flip side of everything, so the flip side of cheap dominance is cheap submission, which is not quite like “cheap grace,” a theological term referring to unearned redemption.  Bonhoeffer coined the term “cheap grace” in WWII when people wanted to be seen as virtuous Christians though they didn’t want to act in a Christian way because the cost was so high.  He himself was hanged for plotting to kill Hitler, which -- if you are a faithful Christian -- was akin to crucifixion:  “earned redemption.”  “Unearned condemnation” is the same as “stigma” -- which to Hitler justified the Holocaust.

   

Decades ago when I was working with humane society people, one female colleague said her ideal relationship was that of the gazelle with its throat in the mouth of a leopard.  Her image.  A final deadly ecstasy.  It was the Seventies, so she was not thinking about Christian martyrdom but rather something more like a dangerous lover, a heroin overdose or one of those mega-orgasms.  Kind of SM.  She was a beautiful young woman and I suspect she didn’t have much trouble finding someone to grip her by the throat.  

Since then I have run across other women seeking submission and a few boys.  Sometimes it seems to be a matter of not wanting to have to grow up, and other times a guilt wanting punishment and even now and then a weird way of feeling superior, a martyrdom.  Once in a while it’s kind of being an “assistant person,” not necessarily sexual.  All those buddy movies usually are one-strong/one-weak, the sidekick syndrome.  When I preached about it, people objected to a sidekick being any kind of worthy role.  They wanted everyone to be in charge and no one to be weak, but in fact there were always marginal people trying to affiliate with the minister.  In practice, we used to say, “for every Lone Ranger there should be a Tonto” (not the kind exemplified by Johnny Depp), someone willing to help and thereby learn the job. We know about gender assignments based on dominance/submission, which is part of the reason sex gets into it, but why does Tonto have to be the submissive?  The mask, of course, is part of the paraphernalia of dominance, hiding identity being a privilege of the powerful.  (Was Jesus really the masked God’s sidekick, submitting to crucifixion as His surrogate?)

Dominance is often associated with wickedness, the power seized through social structure or force.  Submission is sometimes associated with transformation, a matter of learning through submission, maybe even by having been “inside” the dominator, seeing Darth Vader with his helmet off, all the scars signaling his secret vulnerability.  Dominance/submission can be distant -- as with predator drones -- or intimate as in sex or torture.  It can be mental or physical or a mix. One practical reason for buddies in films is that they are the writer’s source of dialogue over the issue, most sharply over the question of how to survive a predicament.  The Lone Ranger has silver bullets, but it is Tonto who knows the territory.

Cheap dominance has few rewards.  In fact, it destroys the dominator who becomes convinced of his power though he has none, like a mass murderer who shoots a roomful of little kids, which so diminishes him that he self-destructs.  “Expensive” dominance is the same as responsibility, accountability, and protection of the weaker, female, displaced, undefended, younger, stigmatized, ignorant, poor, emotionally needy people.  Of course, the church can be criticized for NOT doing this, for not emptying their pockets and discarding their fancy red shoes in order to walk in the dust with the refugees.  That’s the trouble with institutions in general -- they succumb to cheap dominance, become bullies, and justify it by their alignment with the Bigger Bug in the Sky. I wonder what the Catholic Scalia really thinks about Dominance -- he doesn’t seem to value the humility element very much.  And Thomas has already said that he considers the equal opportunity forces that put him through law school to be contemptible.  I think they have dominance/submission issues, not safe for Supreme Courts with much power.

Cheap dominance is also a matter of commodification, not just the fantasies of Conan the Barbarian in books and movies, but also access to medical care -- Big Pharma has you by the throat.  Appearance rules.  Sensationalism trumps achievement.  Too many crave the cheap dominance of a gun in the hand.  This is a nation built on dominance, hooked on world domination both economic and military.   Our Congress in its budgeting capacity sits in Washington DC with its thumb voting on budgets that rule our lives, like Nero in the Coliseum.  Thumbs up on banks, thumbs down on AIDS funding.  It’s not easy to evade even in daily life.  

The question is how to use strength without dominance.   I have a list:  awareness, justice, listening, cooperation, clarity. . .  The things a democracy must practice.  But, Grasshopper, we can always turn to the East where winning through submission has been developed to a high art.  The seeds of overthrow take root in the earth under the stamping feet of dominance.  Hispanic voters demonstrated this in the last election.  They tend to be religious.  Some try to exclude them, feeling their very survival threatened.