| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
For instance, an individual may have a fear of heights. Racial memory would suggest that perhaps this individual's genetic ancestors met a dastardly fate due to a fall; ergo, this "racial memory" of the danger of heights causes the individual to fear them.
Studies of the differences between the DNA of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells suggests that the diversity in prokaryotic proteins can be largely accounted for by natural selection from among all possible patterns of random DNA. Eukaryotic DNA, on the other hand generally contains much longer sequences of base pairs, which are often punctuated by so called introns and extrons , which are sequences of nonsense information. It would be as if the ribosome of a Eukaryotic cells expects to see normal genentic information filled in with occasional nonesense, followed by more information from the same gene and so one. Somehow, the eukaryotic ribosome "knows" how to ignore the nonsense information which is embedded in almost every large eukaryotic gene. The role of so called introns and extrons ...
With the mapping of the human genome, some research may be determining in which some cases whether the nonsense information in eukaryotic DNA is removed from the messenger RNA strand prior to translation, or whether the nonsense information is deleted during translation, or whether nonsense information is deleted from the resulting polypeptides.
The role of nonsense information in eukaryotic DNA however, might play an important role in the transmission of so called racial or ancestral memories. This is because the presence of such nonsense information may have an imoportant role in regulating the rate of transcription. Many bacterium can reproduce as often as every twenty minutes, whereas a more complex cell which has more baggage, so to speak will take longer to reproduce, or at least to transcribe proteins. Now if particular eukaryotic protein is includes a greater or lesser amount of nonsense information in the DNA master sequence, then it will take longer for a eukaryotic cell to transcribe, and translate that protein from its DNA representation. Hence, nonsense information included in eukaryotic DNA might serve as a regulatory function.
The question must be put therefore as to what extent racial or ancestral memories can be encoded adventagiously thereby. Several possibilities should come to mind, these would include: bird song memories, fingerprints, or utltamately "how the brain is wired" with respect to certain behaviours, which ought to in turn include the possibility ....
Recent evidence, as of September 2004, suggest that a different part of the brain may be involved in cases of Chinese descent who suffer from dyslexia, as compared to studies of persons of western descent who have the condition. Accordingly, one might suggest that it will eventually be shown that the aptitude for specific languages may be an inheritable trait, so that while in principle anyone can learn any language, it may be that the languages themselves are in some ways like mathematics and music, in that it is possible to inherit the ability to learn or even compose music or to perform well at math.
The more bold step then is to infer that certain ancestral memories will emerge sponteneously in any society or culture, as as to say that certain memes may appear in different cultures. For example, the Cinderella story exists in dozens of forms in different variants, quite possibly having been independently authored in different societies and cultures. In a sense then, ancestral memories are more likely to be soft-coded information phenotypes than they are to be explictly hard coded in specific genes.
By analogy one might consider the existence of certain patterns in the game of Pac-Man. These patterns are obviously not hard-coded in the original games ROM , rather many remarkably similar patterns are inevitiably discovered by Pac-Man players in the course of the discovering successful play strategies. Does this mean that these patterns are latent in the game design, in the same sense that certain species of birds might under the influence of unrelated environmental factors, in effect - produce the same "song memories?" Again, this is would be an example of hard-coded vs. soft-coded information.