UNIQUENESS OF PERSONALITIES

I listened to Bill Gates on Morning Joe (MSNBC). He is not just a rich guy. The man has an interesting technical history. Buried in his technical history is the story of how people like him were able to transform a simple on-off switch to highly complicated programs that can do all kinds of wonderful things.  The on-off switches are formulated into a pattern or a certain series of “switch settings” that can be stored in a transistor in a certain location. A typist can summoned that pattern when needed by knowing that location. For example, in a word processing program that series of on and offs stored in the chip may cause a printer to print and “A”.  This in overview is a mathematical nightmare. What a programmer does is to create a way to read, or interpret what people like Gates call computer machine language. There is more than one way to do this; there are many disc operating systems.  Nonetheless, like most complicated things, through analysis people could reduce them to simple steps, in other words do the reverse of programming—a daunting task at best.

What perked up my interest this morning was the thought that geneticists have the unenviable job of trying to figure out the significance of a mathematical nightmare of codes written by millions of years of evolution—reading the code of life and do it by reduction. They, with biochemists and myriad of other scientists, are doing a wonderful job; however, the job is not yet complete especially in one area. A wide gulf exists between classic geneticist and the relatively new group of scientist collectively referred to as “evolutionary psychologists”. Everyone knows, or think they know that behaviors, hence culture, are influenced by genes, yet cannot divorce them from the fear that they are no more than genetic robots, which is obviously implied by saying our behavior depends on our genes. We fight that thought; our ego does not allow us to think that way.  People who follow my firetreepub.blogspot.com know I believe our genes influence our behavior. Because of my interest in politics, I most often broach the subject in blog posts in terms of voting patterns or political party affiliations. Of course, it will be difficult to decipher the “machine language” of our DNA/RNA and of course, I have jumped ahead of the empirical science. It will take an army of scientist many more years to decipher the genome if not forever—at my age, I cannot wait that long.  

Chickens act like chicken, dogs act like dogs, and people act like people. How can people have freewill that is how can each individual person act independently if he or she is a robot? TV crimes scene dramas have taught the American people that each individual has a unique DNA. Please note there are 7 billions individual on the earth; that is a lot of uniqueness! However, if our behavior (or our personalities) is dependent on DNA/RNA and our DNA/RNA’s are unique, why shouldn’t our personalities be unique? I believe they are—all 7 billion of them. We tend to group or cluster people based on behavior. For example, he/she thinks and votes like a Republican verses like a Democrat and all manner of behavior in between. This is no different from saying she acts like a woman and he acts like a man with all grades in between. Of course, culture clusters behaviors. This does not mean that each man or woman or each Democrat or Republican in their clusters is the same. The point is if there are 7 billion different personalities may give the impression that people act the way they do because they are independent, and not robots but the truth is their genes are exactly why they act the way they do; it is not due to freewill, it is due to their uniqueness.

For those few who do not believe there are enough nucleic base pairs in our DNA/RNA to code for all of this, will have to study the wonderful advances made by epigenetic scientists in the area of gene splicing and annealing. The various permutations and combinations resulting from simple transcriptions are virtually endless.