Some years ago I watched a nature documentary which dumbfounded me to the point that I forgot to identify which channel it was on. There was a troop of monkeys perched on a branch; on a lower branch was a python. Neither animal interacted with the other, as though an agreement on territory was obvious. There was one monkey however that found its way from the troop, down to the serpent’s branch. The monkey then proceeded to provoke the python, pawing its head and jumping around it. Motionless, the troop of monkeys just looked on and before I knew it, after continued interference, the python was devouring the monkey. It made me wonder: what happened with this monkey’s genetic warning system that the troop had conformed to?
The parental social burden that is both right and wrong lies in the cultural creed that children are what their parents deliver and that their errors are moulded by the shortcomings of parents. If we pay slight observation to such precedents about us, it would be clear that there are parents who encourage and push children into crime and badness, and then there are children who drag parents into poverty and an early grave.
I worked with a man in the media who was a Librarian. His son was a street hustler from the early-mid seventies; this man used every cent from his pension to invest in his son’s freedom. This was a good man with an active intellect, but after he retired he had no pension. The media house employed him on a month to month basis. As for the son who had ruined him, he ended up walking the street as an addict who had lost his active consciousness to marijuana abuse. He died on the street in the oblivion of addiction, his father I am told, is still alive.
Neither genes, nor bad or proper upbringing will be the final force that determines choice. Choices seem to come from a more complicated element that includes all things mentioned. Another good example is the intense drug impact on Guyana. Between the mid-1980s to the present, ordinary semi-literate drug dealers were able to own, lock-stock and barrel some of the lawyers from the high families of Guyana. The people who stood in defiance of that social onslaught were in many cases poor, working class people. Involvement by interaction was optional and in many cases citizens of simple means, were driven by principles, rather than the overwhelming force of its financial lure. With the former group, can this be a genetic surge for wealth cultivated in defiance of all else generations before, or the cultural choices of a time-space where status has to be sustained at all costs?
The science of Genetics is recorded to have begun in its infancy around 1868 with a German pioneer named Miescher. But after a long line of pioneers, in 1966 Marshall Nirenberg and Gobind Khorana constructed the Genetic Code, also known as DNA. Genes are who we are physically; our physical looks and inherited traits and can indicate our physical health possibilities- good and bad. The construct of one’s genetic heritage is grouped into the developed traits of human variations (ethnicity) or ancestral traits.
It can be argued that inherited genes span an endless record of passed on traits. Genetics is still a new breakthrough in understanding physical life. But as a concept, it existed in our ancient past, very much confusing our ancestors when the son or daughter of an outstanding father or mother of merit turned out to be disappointing. Then the questions were raised about possible maternal infidelity or of spiritual sabotage by envious bodies. In fact the Genetic pool over the past 100 years might have consisted of an exact ancestral manifestation, from a veritable Akashic record, of which the family decided against preserving as a memory because of the doings of that shameful aunt or uncle. That is why we inherit a grandchild that is nothing like the stress inflicting mother or father. The grand child may have acquired genetic traits from a great grandparent as against that manifest in its parents.
There is another force that I referred to that is cultural and related to the influencing of Genes, and is pure science to its result. Homo Sapiens (modern man) emerged from a common African prototype, that migrated across new environments with different and specific foods and geography that produced over countless millennia of human variations that evolved diverse physiognomies, norms of cultural survival and supporting philosophical and mystical creeds. To conclude this column I’ll adjust the philosopher’s prose (Kahlil Gibran) “Our children do live in the future, but they stand on the foundations of a past, too myriad and elusive for they or us to grasp in this phase of our evolution, so is the future and the past so far apart? ”