The Ff Gene
It’s been five years since the Human Genome
Project successfully sequenced the over 3 billion chemical
base pairs that make up our DNA, an achievement so ennobled
and applauded by the press that scientific laboratories
around the world subsequently enjoyed a population explosion.
The event marked another milestone in man’s long
and arduous quest to strip away the mysteries of Nature.
Making
available a blueprint of the naked ape’s genome
proved to be an irresistible lure for Classicists. These
partisans of the universe-is-a-pocket-watch theory of
life suddenly saw genetics the way a seven year old
engineer sees an Erector Set, as a reticulated bridge
of interconnecting struts and trusses. Thus the discipline
passed from the flamboyant stewardship of phrenologists
and social anthropologists into the laptops of anonymous
mathematicians. Genetics, like so many isms
and ologies, was ferried away from the island
of observational intuition to the linear flatland of
numerology and formulae.
But before the pennant on the top gallant of the good
ship Genome completely disappears from sight, I would
like to make one last parting observation. I suggest
the number crunchers of the Human Genome Project may
have overlooked something.
It’s well known that the HGP did not fully study
the entire DNA structure of a human cell. Certain heterochromatic
areas (about 8% of the total) remains unsequenced. Centromeres,
the mid-regions of each chromosome, contain millions
of base-pairs and have been inaccessible by modern sequencing
methods. The telomers, the ends of the chromosomes,
are similarly unexplored for the same reason. Both of
these sources of base-pairs are presumed to contain
no genes because of the nature of their redundancies.
There are also several loci in each individual’s
genome that contain members of multigene families difficult
to disentangle with shotgun-sequencing methods. These
multigene families often encode proteins important for
our immune functions.
So it’s conceivable the Project may have overlooked
something, a codon with chameleon-like properties, changing
its amino acid profile to echo receptor sockets of nearby
mRNA strands, for example. Or a reiterating fragment
of ‘junk DNA’ coding, eternally picked up
by mRNA template action, perhaps to ultimately mature
into a despotic protein when conditions were right.
Anything might manifest from that unseen, unresolved
eight per cent. So why not a regulating gene?
The gene I am proposing is very old and patient and
would be difficult to find. It’s utterly dormant
yet in its long history has managed to guarantee its
perpetuity through replicase enzyme action. With a robust
latency, it has sat like a mantra on a rug for over
two million years and only recently was quickened by,
ironically enough, technology’s ability to globalize
communication.
How does communication vivify this occult substance?
Through the lure of anonymity inherent in an IP signature,
an email address or the veil of a cellular phone which,
unlike a regular telephone, doesn’t trail a telltale
umbilicus to its whispering owner.
The stirring to action of this gene (which I propose
to call the Ff gene) invokes a uniquely human
hankering for identity cloaking. This hunger for anonymity
betrays its long lineage of incipiency in mankind’s
experiments with totemism, shamanism,
tattoos, makeup, camouflage, ventriloquism, masked balls,
Halloween, minstrel shows and mirrored sun glasses.
We want to act from a vantage of safety, dispose without
being deposed. And it’s the reason some primitive
tribes will not utter a name while others will not suffer
a photograph. When an actor is unrevealed, the action
cannot be made accountable. Obscurity is a fortification
against regress, a wall that protects the nucleus it
surrounds.
Walls are important to us. As metaphoric sheaths, they
bequeath levels of psychological security, as tendered
by our various lexicons. For example, the word paradise
means “around” and “wall”. Town,
which has a lattice of walls to hide behind, comes from
the German word zaun, meaning fence. The original
Chinese word for city, ch’eng, also meant
wall. And it’s no coincidence the effects of an
active Ff gene compels its host to use a
cellular phone which, like its namesake, protects
and hides the nucleus of his or her identity.
A behavioral norm is a fictitious concept, easily
debunked by the global reportage of the various news
medias. The relentless visual and printed barrage of
our inexhaustible strangeness makes it quite clear we
all possess a ‘behavioral phenotype’. A
phenotype is an outward trait or collection of traits
that arise from one’s genetic constitution. Certain
dispositions and actions are now believed to be genetic
in origin. An infant boy born with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome,
for example, appears normal at first but within three
months becomes what is known as a ‘floppy baby’
and can’t sit or hold his head upright. When he
cuts his first teeth he starts using them to bite himself.
Over time, he chews away the ends of his fingers and
gnaws off his own lips. Drastic precautions have to
be exercised to ensure protection against himself. As
the boy grows older his self-destructive behavior becomes
more subtle and devious. He devises new ways to injure
himself. Often, in a kind of Tourette’s ferocity,
he spits, curses and strikes out at the very people
he likes the most. He eats food he detests and vomits
on himself. He says yes when he means no. He’s
horrified by his own behavior but is powerless to alter
it. Yet when he’s not being visited by such dysfunctional
impulses, he enjoys the company of other people, likes
being the center of attention and makes friends easily.
In Lesch-Nyhan syndrome a protein called hypoxanthine-guanine
phosphoribosyl transferase (HPRT), which is present
in all normal cells, seems to malfunction, or rather,
does not function at all. The job of this particular
enzyme is to help recycle DNA.
In the early 1980’s researchers decoded the sequence
of letters (A,T,C,G - adenine, thymine, cytosine and
guanine) in the human gene that contains the instructions
for making HPRT. It includes 657 letters that code for
the protein. Researchers also began sequencing this
gene in people who had Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. Each had
a mutation in the gene, nearly all unique. There was
apparently no common single mutation that caused Lesch-Nyhan.
In the majority of cases the defect consisted of a solitary
misspelling in the code. For example, one victim had
a G replaced by an A --a lone character misplaced out
of the 6 billion letters of code in the human genome.
Other genetic mutations have been associated with
behavioral changes beyond the ‘norm’, such
as Rett Syndrom (classically signalled by obsessive
hand-wringing) or Williams Syndrome (often called the
cocktail-party syndrome because of the afflicted
person's exaggerated social skills).
There are about 25,000 active genes in the human genome,
each having 1000-1500 letters of code. The smallest
change in this chemical symphony is enough to provoke
chronically bizarre behavior. Who’s to say a culturally
accepted modern ‘norm’ doesn’t have
its roots in one of these behavioral phenotypes? An
Ff gene, perhaps unique to X chromosomes
and recessively linked to them, may have traveled across
the ages within female carriers, sentencing half their
male offspring to its effects and half their female
progeny to the status of a carrier.
The influence of this covert gene might today be so
consummately established in our society that entire
races have adopted a correlative genome of conduct,
comprised of immensely complex permutations of A, T,
C and G –acquisition, totalitarianism, cupidity
and gratification. It’s possible the Ff
gene, whose signal trademark is pure greed, has managed
to overpower the tremendous impetus of countless ages
of ceremonial mitosis.
The plausibility of this accomplishment, whose fulcrum
is a whimper, not a bang, is demonstrated by the behavioral
distemper of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome victims, now explained
by geneticists as a dropped consonant in the endless
filibuster of life.
So what excessive deportment do the strings of the
Ff gene coax from the population puppetry
of our modern society? A mildly mitigating description
of our affliction would be to call it Nature’s
gift of perjury. The Ff gene is literally
a genetic mutation of fact. It uses the lash of greed
to whip words and actions into contradictory absurdness.
Actually, that is how one knows a person’s Ff
gene has been activated --they profess one thing while
following a lifestyle that openly negates their words.
Mrs. D declares her overheated fondness for animals
as she sits down to a dinner of lamb, duck, roast or
fish. Mr. P denigrates the worlds’ deadbeats as
he negotiates the tricky union paths toward a 100% disability
pension.
The anonymity worn by such people is metaphored by
a drop of water hidden in a wave. The contradiction
has become the ‘norm’. The behavioral phenotype
is universalized, shared to a state of sameness.
As shocking as such behavior is to someone whose Ff
gene remains archived and dormant, it goes completely
unnoticed by the pervasive majority, who inherit and
disseminate the gene’s influence. Like a throng
of penguins, their inscrutability lives in a hall of
mirrors.
The lion's share of the world’s population is
non-technical. For them the Ff gene exercises
its mandate through this shared hypocrisy. But for the
few who embrace technology as an ally, the gene ramps
up its effects. These people see the nebulous community
of the worldwide web as a haven for obscurity. Masked
as a web site or spam letter, they become virtual particles
that momentarily condense out of a fog of electrons,
pitch their confidence deal, harvest the money and then
dissolve back into the ethernet.
Modern society abets these grifters by fostering a
culture that erodes our ability to detect deceit. Two
generations of radio, television and movies -all medias
that foster metaphorical masks -have eased us into a
state of careless credulity.
According to Hitler, the public will always believe
a Big Lie. And so big lies have been drafted
into the service of governments, corporations, advertising
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When
Hemingway was asked what a good writer needed most,
he replied, “A 100% shock-proof shit detector.”
Studies have been made to determine our ability to detect
lies. Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan of the University
of San Francisco says the average person knows when
they are being deceived only about half the time, which
is like saying half the population judges the veracity
of condominium and used car salesmen by regarding a
tossed a coin as a financial advisor. Yet within society
there is a small percentage of people who seem to have
an unerring ability to detect deceit. Of 13,000 subjects
tested, Dr. O’Sullivan found 31 wizards, as she
called them, who were usually able to tell if a person
was lying, whether the lie was about an opinion, how
someone felt or dealt with a theft.
According to Dr. O'Sullivan, "There are two categories
of clues to a lie: thinking clues and emotional ones."
Examples of emotional clues are facial expressions,
body language and spoken words. Does the person react
normally? Is their facial expression consistent with
what they are saying? Does their body language accord
with their words? Do their words match their emotions?
Thinking clues are what betray liars when they are
making up the ‘truth’ or trying to narrate
details they formulate in their head. Examples of thinking
clues are hesitations in speech, stuttering, groping
for words, strange word order, or speaking incoherently
by choosing inappropriate words or not completing sentences.
In the 1960s William Condon pioneered a study of interactions
at the fraction-of-a-second level. In his research project,
he examined a four-and-a-half-second film segment frame
by frame, where each frame represented 1/45th second.
After studying this recording for a year and a half,
he noted interactional “micro-movements”,
such as when a wife moves her shoulder exactly as her
husband's hands came up, which when taken together yielded
what he called “microrhythms”.
American psychologist John Gottman began video-taping
living relationships to determine how couples interact.
By studying these micro-movements, Gottman became adept
at predicting which relationship would hold together
and which would break up.
Most people do not perceive these microexpressions
in themselves or others. In the Diogenes Project,
researcher Paul Ekman found that these tiny movements
can often expose lying. Like Maureen O’Sullivan,
he found that a very small percentage of those he studied
had a preternatural knack for detecting them.
We seem to be duped easily by a smile. In fact, we
tend to implicitly trust a smiling face. In one experiment
Dr. George Rotter, professor of psychology at Montclair
University in New Jersey, cut out yearbook photos of
college students and asked people to rate the pictured
individuals for trustworthiness. In almost every instance
people chose the students with smiling faces as the
most honest. Women with the biggest grins scored the
best. Men needed only a slight curve of the lips to
be considered truthful.
"Smiles are an enormous controller of how people
perceive you," explained Rotter. "It's an
extremely powerful communicator, much more so than the
eyes."
Early
in the mid-19th century a French scientist named Guillaume
Duchenne de Boulogne set out to discover which muscles
are involved in different facial expressions. After
taking hundreds of photographs of a subject whose facial
muscles were electrically excited, Duchenne uncovered
the secret of the fake smile. When mild shocks were
applied to the cheeks of the face, the large muscles
on either side of the mouth - known as the zygomatic
major - pulled the corners of the lip upwards to create
a grin. Duchenne then compared this smile with one produced
when he told the subject a joke. The genuine smile involved
not only the zygomatic major, but also the orbicularis
oculi muscles around each eye. In a genuine smile these
muscles tighten, pull the eyebrows down and the cheeks
up, producing tiny crinkles around the corners of the
eyes. Duchenne discovered that the tensing of these
eye muscles was beyond voluntary control. When the muscles
were not employed, the smile was artificial.
There are so many ways liars betray themselves that
it seems incredible half the population can be duped
at any time. A short list of telltale clues will illustrate
just a few of their potential pitfalls: