Mean Genes

Continually throughout this book, the link between the problems our ancestors faced and the way we react to our relatively new and modern issues. We tend to approach our problems with the same methodology that our ancestors did, but are usually unsuccessful due to the extremely different nature of our problems and modern society.

The genes we possess are inherited from generation to generation, and there is little change in the genes and how they are expressed. In Mean Genes, the concept of gambling, risk and adrenaline rushes are examined and expanded to show how they connect to the archaic problems of the past.

" Lottery officials have discovered the equivalent of wild cards and have created games that entice our gambler within while fooling our more calculating side. In fact, most of us have no idea what odds we face. As noted, winning the big drawing in California requires matching six numbers between 1 and 51. Why these rules? Precisely to hide the terrible odds. On mathematical problems of exactly this sort, people overestimate the odds of winning by more than one thousand percent. That's why lotteries use them.

Let's face it, if a friend said, 'I'm thinking of a number one and eighteen million. See if you can guess it,' you probably wouldn't have much hope of winning nor would you wager the family's grocery money.

Businesses take advantage of our instincts in other ways. In one experiment, researchers ran a lottery ticket with a twist. Half of the people were allowed to pick their entires. The others were assigned entries at random. Just before the drawing, the researchers offered to buy the tickets back from the subjects. What did they find? People who had been assigned tickets were willing to sell the,pm for an average of just under two bucks, while those who picked their entry demanded more than eight dollars. This enormous difference seems silly. The lottery was run purely by chance, so every ticket, chosen or assigned, had the same value.

A related study had people play a game of chance against an opponent. The game was simply to have each person draw a playing card, with the highest card winning. Half the bettors played against a well dressed opponent who acted in a confident manner. The other half's opponents were instructed to act in a bumbling manner and wear clothes that did not fit.

What is the chance of winning this game against the cool, powerful opponent? Exactly half, and exactly the same as the odds of winning against the bumbling fool. Remember, this is a game of total chance. In this experiment, however, bettors wagered 47% more when they faced the meek, poorly dressed opponents."

Our genes and our behaviors are extremely predictable. Lotteries, businesses and crooks use that information and the data shown in the above studies to play into our genes and ancestral habits and nature, to succeed. But, with a knowledge of how our genes work and how we react to situations, based on history and biology, we can overcome and suppress those habits. We must know how our brain is going to want to respond to things, like feeling more confident against an individual that seems weaker and submissive, even when no preference exists in a game of total chance. Mean Genes focuses on informing people of our habitual nature, that has existed for centuries, but little has been addressed on how to prevent our shortcomings when it comes to adapting to modern problems.

I think this is something that needs to be focused on and and addressed in biology classes, maybe not regents biology because it requires a level of comprehension fresh,an may not have, but definitely at some point in high school. The knowledge of how our bodies and brains naturally react to situations due to our genes can directly combat issues like obesity, gambling, addictions, deficits, and other crucial issues our society faces today.

HeLa Again

In the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author Rebecca Skloot gets the inside information from Henrietta's family to see what their opinions are. Bobette, Lawrence's wife, had his own comments on the doctors. Here is one of his statements.

       "You know what is a myth?" Bobette snapped from the recliner. "Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didnt donate nothing. They took them and didnt ask." She inhaled a deep breath to calm herself. "What really would upset Henrietta is the fact that Dr. Gey never told the family anything - we didnt know nothing about those cells and he didnt care. That just rubbed us the wrong way. I just kept asking everybody, 'why didnt they say anything to the family?' They knew how to contact us! If Dr. Gey wasnt dead, l think I have killed him myself."'

        I agree with Bobette to an extent. I agree that the doctor operating on Henrietta should not have just taken her cells without her consent. There may have been a bias when Bobette said that Dr. Gey does not care about any of them because of the fact that their anger is pretty obvious. There should have been some sort of communication between the doctor and Henrietta's family. What kind of society do we live in where we do know what is happening to us? But then again this is reality. We are living in a time period where not everyone is telling us exactly what is happening in the world. Social media twists views and officials in the government avert their eyes so that us Americans will not get hurt. But truth be told, we are getting hurt. We are being lied to about information we should be told about in the first place and it is all on our decision. After all America is the land of the free. Even though I agree with Bobette, I do not agree with him in that he wanted to kill the doctor for doing such a thing. Yes, it was pretty irrational for the doctors to do so, but then again this has helped so many people in the world. We may find it extreme to think about just the outcomes and not the true story, but sometimes the results overcome what actually happened.

Deep Ancestry

   "The Indian and southeast Asian distributions clearly show that the descendants of these early coastal migrants are a minority today." Spencer Wells is able to trace the lineages of pretty much every human being on the planet just by finding the routes that people moved around the continents so many years ago. Because of him we can know where we originated from and what our ancesters did long before we existed.
   William Calvin, a neurobiologist, has written on the effects of climate change on early human evolution. He says that the Sahara drew animals from other regions during wetter phases and expelling them when the weather turned drier. "During one of these outward-pumping phases a small group of hominids left Africa and entered the Middle East." According to Calvin the climate changes that humans have experienced throughout their time on this planet, have had a great impact on where humans relocated and settled.
   Without these climate changes, where would we be today? With global warming happening today, how does it affect the human race for the future? I mean we have learned that not all climate change is good, but the human race seems to be partly a cause of that.

Ebola virus

"Are you worried about a species- threatening event?"
He stared at me, " what do you mean by that?"
"I mean a virus that wipes us out"
"Well it could happen. Certainly it hasn't happened yet. Im not worried. More likely it would be a virus that reduces us by some percentage. By thirty percent. By ninety percent."
"Nine out of ten humans killed and you aren't bothered?"
         To think that one cant be frightened by the thought of a virus being capable of wiping out over 50 percent of the human population is mind blowing. His response was that a virus like that can do us good, that  it could thin us out. Karl Johnson, a virus hunter who lived in the rain forest of Central and South  America, helped discover the at the time new virus, and named it Ebola. He and Patricia Webb who helped discover the virus said they were "worms". They saw snakes , pigtails, branchy, forked, things that looked like the letter Y, and they noticed a squiggle like the letter g. A classic shape, the Shepard's crook, is something else they noticed within the virus. The first ever photographed picture of Ebola was on October 13th, 1976 by Fredrick A. Murphy. it was magnified 112,000 times and the lumpy rope-like features in the particle are the mysterious structural proteins that surround a single strand of RNA, which is the virus's genetic code. Johnson questioned whether or not the virus could be spread by droplets in the air, almost like influenza. "If Ebola had spread easily through the air, the world would be a very different place today."
       I cant imagine, what it would be like if a virus had wiped us out. Or going through each day knowing that humans are dying and there might not be a way to control or even stop it. There would be complete chaos.