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Genetic Accidents

I got thinking about this whole seemingly new epidemic of allergies in kids of Indian origin that grow up in the vast praries to mile high cities to frigid latitudes of the North American continent.

Could it be that after millenia of having biological hierarchies spending time in tropical climates the genetic adaptation of the next generation is tuned or aligned with the world they would be expected to wander in?

There are not enough data points for example of Norwegians settling en masse in Chennai for years and then finding what symptomatic behavior their children exhibit. It has not yet happened - the flat world could change that.

My kid has nut allergies - he is lactose intolerant - he breaks into hives in the presence of cooked meat are chemistry and biology's newest finds. As the medics on this continent try to figure out the antidote I believe they are again only scratching the skin (figuratively of course).

On the same thought vein - I also got to thinking of all the great wise men and women that came before us and wonder if there were pure genetic accidents that made one a Shakespeare or an Einstein or a Carlin. Parallely all the evil that the planet also harbored in the form of Hitler or Saddam or numerous power hungry people that have no regard for the sanctity of human life.

What drives human spirit, the aggressiveness or compassion; its cunning or ingenuity; its tolerance or its extremism is beyond fascinating to me.

It is very much like the weatherman or woman - who tries his or her best to predict - what can truly be considered an art form more than science - what with scores still surrendering to the wrath of this planet - in the form of Icelandic eruptions to massive flooding in the American heartlands to larger tectonic events - its beyond human understanding.

Humans, far as we know (which may not be saying much) seem to be a fairly evolved organism on a small corner of the universe that is still trying to figure out the basic parameters of all the transaction activity that we go about in our daily grind. It may be time to step back and consider what the MASTER DATA may look like that is driving all the transactions.

DNA and RNA research and genetic cloning is probably the right toolkit but then again it is just that - an Experiment. We really need to know that we don't know what we don't know.

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