What’s in your DNA? #27

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted March 30, 2008 in In Your DNA

Scott Adams of The Dilbert Blog on pain leveling when the less happy person transfers some of his/her pain to the more happy one:

…I overheard a kid bragging about something that was going well for him. The other kid reflexively called him a bragger and did a few other tricks to level the pain. I think this instinct is built into our DNA.

From Barack Obama’s speech on race:

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.

Kristina Chew at Autism Vox on her son Charlie’s autism:

I think that autism is genetic. When I consider some of the conditions or disorders (or whatever you might want to call them) in Jim’s and my own family history—-ADHD, OCD, anxiety, depression, various other things—-I have to say, Jim and I always figured that we’d have a child with “something,” though not necessarily with as severe of a condition as Charlie has.

Charlie and Kristina were also included in a recent Newsweek feature on autism - Mysteries and Complications.

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