EBOLA, IRAQ, AND LYNCH MOBS

We could learn from the events of the past few weeks with such diverse events as Ebola and ISIS, but it will take a long, long time. Something innate, deep within us, seems to keep us from realizing our errors; thus, condemns us to repeat our mistakes repeatedly, which is precisely why I think our behavior is genetic. The evidence suggests we will be able to modify that behavior; perhaps it will take many generations. I should be obvious that it cannot happen within one generation.

I look at the way we as a society respond to crisis, no matter what the crisis, as mob behavior. The classics mob scene is modeled after a lynch mob with a rope chasing down the street in the old South; a white girl clams she was raped by a black man; there is no proof the event ever happened and there is no proof the person they eventually hung in a tree had anything to do with it. In other words, at certain times and given certain stimuli, we tend to throw all reason aside as proved again and again by our “emotional”  responses to recent crisis; we turn away a cruse ship from both Belize and Mexico, we started a war in Iraq killing thousands,  and there is a repeated call to ban burkas in the United States—ridiculous. With these acts of stupidity in mind, I feel quite comfortable grouping things like Ebola, the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, and the beheadings by ISIS in Syria with the classic lynch mob. People responded in the same way.

In one sense, author Naomi Klein put her finger on the response in her book, Shock Doctrine; however, she went one-step beyond this basic innate response of society as a group. She emphasizes the dark side by formatting the idea in the context of economics; cleaver people, often have the nefarious motive of greed, tend to step up and use cultural shock to their own personal advantage. This is unequivocally true; however, people use emotional crisis to do both good and bad things for society depending on the motive. People can respond in a way intended to save our society from a bad outcome but others respond to advance their own agenda even at the expense of society; of course mistakes can be made in either case.

As a student of evolution, I like to think we evolved under the premise of Darwinian “natural selection”; that is, what is good for an individual’s survival is ultimately good for the survival of a society of individuals and after a number of generations, what is done persists. The classic geneticists will tell you that the sequence of DNA groups in our genes does not change; therefore, the change in behavior is not genetic and therefore concludes behavior is not genetic or innate. This is only true to a point. I turn to Stephen Pinker to advance my point. In his well-referenced book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and others similar books by other authors, it is clearly document that violence is slowly diminishing in society. We are moving from a primitive bestial beginning to loving caring human beings; even though it is sometimes hard to believe, we are learning to be better people. I call this transition “our humanization”. Dogs act like dogs, rabbits act like rabbits, and people act like “humans” because of our genes; behavior is genetic, it is innate; some conserved other traits not so much and we tend to conserve our humanization.

My conclusion is behavior is the result of a slow two-part multiple gene selection process that takes an estimated 600 years (30 generations) per change. The first part is the classical Darwinian systematic selection of favorable mutations, which are very, very rare and which is why the process proceeds at a snails pace. The second part is that human intelligence affords us with the ability to select mates based on what we learn to like from observing others. This second part, what I call learned selection, is rapid and can happen in a matter of minutes but is curtailed by part one. We can not select something that isn’t there to be selected. In addition, part two can be divided into two parts; genetic and epigenetic, which are what is in the genes and the way those genes are read. Again, classic geneticists seem to overlook that epigenetics is a result of modification to genetic expression by either RNA or protein accelerators or decelerators, which may have originated spontaneously but persist because at some level they are transcripts of DNA. For example, the addition of chemical groups, methyl groups for example, to specific places in DNA and RNA thus change the way genes act but the cell can only add such groups by site-specific enzymes, which are proteins that resulted from natural selction, which in turn can only exist in “genetic” memory because they are transcripts of DNA.

All this science or, I am sure some will call pseudo science without being able to refute it, can explain why we are becoming more human, why we, as the very special species we are, will learn how to respond logically to emotional crises. It is not right to hang some black man living in that town for allegedly raping some white girl, or start a war for the heinous act of a small group of people, or turn away a cruse ship with 4,000 vacationing people away from visiting a county against the advice of all medical experts because someone on that ship happened to work in a hospital where a person died of Ebola virus.

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