Where do you stay?

I’ve already mentioned in a previous posting the complexities around the links between genes and Jewishness. Sharing an ethnicity does not mean sharing an exclusive genepool. There can be more variation within shared ethnicities than between them. And the link between genes and nationalities is even more complex, although perhaps less so in a small country like Scotland which has had relatively little immigration. Perhaps nationalities are (becoming) more memetic than genetic – one can learn to be a different nationality through subconsciously, or consciously, adopting the mores of the people around you.

For example, when I was a child we drank coffee. We hardly ever drank tea. Although my parents were both born in England, one grew up in America and the other was the child of German and Austrian immigrants, and neither had a history of drinking tea. Even as a child I drank coffee for breakfast. Now (perhaps as a result of living in Yorkshire for several years and having a partner from there) I drink tea all the time, and so does my father. Has he learnt it from me?

But sometimes you can get stuck in the middle – for example, I never know what to reply when someone asks me where I ‘stay’. Scottish people use the word as a synonym for ‘live’ or ‘reside’. If I reply ‘I stay at…’ it feels artificial, as if I’m appropriating someone else’s language. But if I reply ‘I live at…’ it implies I’ve thought about using the word ‘stay’, have rejected it as being too Scottish for me, and have retreated to ‘standard’ English. Either alternative makes me feel self-conscious.

Perhaps I should make up my own word.

I’ve learnt that genes are influenced by their envronment, too. They get turned on, or ‘expressed’, by influences surrounding them. This environment stretches all the way from the neighbouring genes, through the rest of the cell, the host organism, and the wider environment. So, genes are not little bullet entities that whistle unperturbed through their host organisms, only randomly mutating. (This concept of ‘random mutations’ sounded so dangerous when I first read about it and I couldn’t figure out why until I realised that it’s a reminder of radioactivity.)

This adaptation to your surroundings can be reflected in laws on nationality. Different countries have different attitudes and laws on the conferring of nationality is conferred. Some use ‘blood’ (e.g. Germany before 2000) through which you can confer your nationality to your offspring even when they’re born outwith the country, others use ‘territory’(e.g. USA) through which your offspring automatically achieve that nationality by virtue of being born there. Those that use territory – do they place more emphasis on learning behaviours and attitudes, such as the desire to aspire to ‘American’ ideals? Because there are no genetic links to rely on to hold society together?

Notice that I used the Scots word ‘outwith’ in the previous paragraph. Perhaps I’m adapting my language after all.

Naming things...

Why do we love words so much? Is there a gene responsible for the love of language?

There’s a lot of commentary on genes which seems to conflate the four bases with the alphabetic symbols used to describe them; A, C, G, and T. For example, I’ve read that ‘genes are made up of sequences of these four letters’. But at the risk of stating the obvious, bases are not letters, they’re acids. So are we confusing the thing with its symbol?

The statement ‘DNA behaves like a written instruction’ is a powerful analogy. But not everything is language. DNA is not a written instruction, and to say it is muddles the distinction between a thing and its name. Perhaps this is a hangover from the belief in magic, the power of the spell and the perception that to know a thing’s true or secret name was to have some power over that thing.

I think there is a related confusion over the reporting of a new gene being discovered and its role. Often we are presented with information on the name of a new gene with the implication that there is now an understanding of what that gene does. The naming of chemical elements, living organisms and genes allows us to structure and order our external world. But it does not necessarily explain it.

And I love the fact that there appears to be no order or structure in the way that genes are named. It seems that anarchy rules, and there are no naming conventions. By contrast, in astronomy only solar system objects get names, and now everything else just gets a rather prosaic mixture of letters and numbers, usually based on their coordinates and the catalogue in which they are listed. This wasn’t always so. Stars which are visible to the naked eye, and which therefore were identified and named before the invention of the telescope kickstarted astronomy in the West, tend to show the influence of medieval Arabic civilisations. There is a sort of palimpsest on the night sky, we look through a web of names and their associated civilisations when we look up at the stars.

So in the future, people will look at genes’ names and get a sense of the civilisation that produced them. They may ask themselves what on earth was meant by ‘radical fringe’, ‘mindbomb’, or ‘zinc finger’. They may try and infer something about the processes which produced these names. They may suggest that geneticists in the 21^st century were using these names to convey secret messages to one another, to rebel against the authoritarian times in which they lived, or to provide an amusing counterpoint to the way that science was normally described at that time. I wonder what they’ll think…