Late morning. You had a roofer from Mid-Miami
come up to check on the roof and to give estimates for repairing or putting on
a new roof. You’ll find out late next week. Either way it will be done this
Fall. Jill K. arrived for housecleaning. Her husband Rod K. a recently retired
Mason teacher is going to mow your yard rather than neighbor Tim King, Rod’s
brother, because Tim had his appendix out last Sunday. You have been running
errands and are presently at Kroger’s on Mason-Montgomery Road waiting for
Carol. After dropping the groceries off you will head out for lunch. – Amorella
1159
hours. Tim was lucky he survived the appendectomy as he has been having trouble
for a year, that is, he is lucky it did not burst some time along the way. I
have the final copy of our personal channel guide to run off and we are set to
go. When I was dropping in today’s
blog date I noticed you said, “let it remain among us” in reference to my
response to your most excellent question. Sometimes I make mistakes in
translation when I type so I assume I should have written ‘between’ rather than
‘among’. Am I correct?
No. ‘Among’ will do. – Amorella
1207
hours. That’s fine. Thank you for the clarification.
Later, orndorff. Enjoy the pleasant summer
day. – Amorella
You
had an excellent salad, renegade steak and potato lunch at Longhorn’s. Jess was
your server as usual. Now, for something quite different, you are reading in
the shade of the hill and trees at the north end of Pine Hill Lakes Park. Carol
is two/thirds of the way through Lee Child’s ‘Jack Reacher novel’ Personal
(p. 402). – Amorella
1431
hours. We are feeling full. Overall, for us, the steaks taste better at
Longhorn’s. How do I return to the setting of Dead 10?
Let’s go to it. - Amorella
1525
hours. I have 383 words I could use 250 more, mostly of poetry, but I need the
humor too. Merlyn drops his anxieties in those last two lines, but open soul
sees none of this – totally unaware, and in this flash perhaps it is Merlyn’s
own soul who is observing.
This is a line of thought but you have used
this sort of devise before. Let’s have Merlyn get a new soul here – an exchange
of souls but in this case it is his own. – Amorella
1531
hours. I did not know the Dead might exchange their souls. How is one thing but
why is another. Where would Merling’s old soul go? Where would his new one come
from? Why is this important to the story?
1650
hours. I am to: “I search to ingest sustenance.” What does the soul assume the
human heartanmind to be?
‘Passion’ popped into your mind first,
before you asked the question. Let’s go from open soul’s perspective not yours.
An analogy here would be – you are afloat searching for a naked sense of
consciousness that needs protected as much as you need to protect something.
You both gain something from the other. – Amorella
1657
hours. I cannot think of the word*, but what comes to mind is the mitochondrial
DNA. [I asked Carol and she told me right off – a *symbiotic relationship, that’s
the word I could not think of. Three cheers for Carol.]
** **
Mitochondrial DNA: The Eve Gene
by
Stephen Oppenheimer
To
say that we get exactly half of our DNA from our father and half from our
mother is not quite true. One tiny piece of our DNA is inherited only down the
female line. It is called mitochondrial DNA because it is held as a unique
circular strand in small tubular packets known as mitochondria that function
rather like batteries within the cell cytoplasm. Some molecular biologists
say that, aeons ago, the mitochondrion was a free-living organism with its own
DNA, and possessed the secret of generating lots of energy. It invaded single
celled nucleated organisms and has stayed on ever since, dividing, like yeast, by
binary fission. Males, although they receive and use their mother’s
mitochondrial DNA, cannot pass it on to their children. The sperm has its
own mitochondria to power the long journey from the vagina to the ovum but, on
entry into the ovum, the male mitochondria wither and die. It is as if the man
had to leave his guns at the door.
So each of us inherits our mtDNA
from our own mother, who inherited her mtDNA intact from her mother, and so on
back through the generations – hence mtDNA’s popular name, ‘the Eve gene’.
Ultimately, every person alive today has inherited their mitochondrial DNA from
one single great-great-great- . . .-grandmother, nearly 200,000 years ago. This
mtDNA provides us with a rare point of stability among the shifting sands of
DNA inheritance. However, if all the Eve chromosomes in the world today were an
exact copy of that original Eve mtDNA, then clearly they would all be
identical. This would be miraculous,
but
it would mean that mtDNA is incapable of telling us much about our prehistory.
Just knowing that all women can be traced back to one common ancestral Eve is
exciting, but does not get us very far in tracing the different lives of her
daughters. We need something with a bit of variety.
This is where DNA point mutations
come in. When mtDNA is inherited from our mother, occasionally there is a
change or mutation in one or more of the ‘letters’ of the mtDNA code – about
one mutation every thousand generations. The new letter, called a point
mutation, will then be transmitted through all subsequent daughters. Although a
new mutation is a rare event within a single family line, the overall
probability of mutations is clearly increased by the number of mothers having
daughters. So, within one generation, a million mothers could have more than a
thousand daughters with a new mutation, each different from the rest. This is
why, unless we share a recent maternal ancestor over the past 10,000 years or
so, we each have a slightly different code from everyone else around us.
Over a period of nearly
200,000 years, a number of tiny random mutations have thus steadily accumulated
on different human mtDNA molecules being passed down to daughters of Eve all
around the world. For each of us this represents between seven and fifteen
mutations on our own personal Eve record. Mutations are thus a cumulative
dossier of our own maternal prehistory. The main task of DNA is to copy itself
to each new generation. We can use these mutations to reconstruct a genetic
tree of mtDNA, because each new mtDNA mutation in a prospective mother’s ovum
will be transferred in perpetuity to all her descendants down the female line.
Each new female line is thus defined by the old mutations as well as the new
ones. As a result, by knowing all the different combinations of mutations in
living females around the world, we can logically reconstruct a family tree
right back to our first mother.
Although it is simple to draw on
the back of an envelope a recent mtDNA tree with only a couple of mutations to
play with, the problem becomes much more complex when dealing with the whole
human race, with thousands of combinations of mutations. So computers are used
for the reconstruction. By looking at the DNA code in a sample of people alive
today, and piecing together the changes in the code that have arisen down the
generations, biologists can trace the line of descent back in time to a distant
shared ancestor. Because we inherit mtDNA only from our mother, this line of
descent is a picture of the female genealogy of the human species. Not only can
we retrace the tree, but by taking into account where the sampled people came
from, we can see where certain mutations occurred – for example, whether in
Europe, or Asia, or Africa. What’s more, because the changes happen at a
statistically consistent (though random) rate, we can approximate the time when
they happened. This has made it possible, during the late 1990s and in the new
century, for us to do something that anthropologists of the past could only
have dreamt of: we can now trace the migrations of modern humans around our
planet. It turns out that the oldest changes in our mtDNA took place in Africa
150,000 - 190,000 years ago. Then new mutations start to appear in Asia, about
60,000 – 80,000 years ago. This tells us that modern humans evolved in Africa,
and that some of us migrated out of Africa into Asia after 80,000 years ago.
It
is important to realize that because of the random nature of individual
mutations, the dating is only approximate. There are various mathematical ways
of dating population migrations, which were tried with varying degrees of
success during the 1990s, but one method established in 1996, which dates each
branch of the gene tree by averaging the number of new mutations in daughter
types of that branch, has stood the test of time.
A final point on the methods of
genetic tracking of migrations: it is important to distinguish this new
approach to tracing the history of molecules on a DNA tree, known as
phylogeography (literally ‘tree-geography’), from the mathematical study of the
history of whole human populations, which has been used for decades and is
known as classical population genetics. The two disciplines are based on the
same Mendelian biological principles, but have quite different aims and
assumptions, and the difference is the source of much misunderstanding and
controversy. The simplest way of explaining it is that phylogeography studies
the prehistory of individual DNA molecules, while population genetics studies
the prehistory of populations. Put another way, each human population contains
multiple versions of any particular DNA molecule, each with its own history and
different origin. Although these two approaches to human prehistory cannot
represent exactly the same thing, their shared aim is to trace human
migrations. Tracing the individual molecules we carry is just much easier than
trying to follow whole groups.
[I underlined for emphasis.] - rho
Selected and edited
from --www.bradshawfoundationDOTcom/journey/eve.html
** **
2205
hours. We had our late supper sandwiches while watching television. Carol is
upstairs reading. I now have 421 words on Dead 10. Though open soul has a mouth
it is a place to receive a simple complex of ‘human-like’ heartanmind. I am not
sure how to introduce this open soul to Merlyn’s heartanmind which are already
held intact by an old soul.
This open soul is far older than the one
Merlyn has; as old as Adam, one might say. – Amorella
2211
hours. Words from Melville’s Moby Dick rise up – Ahab speaks to Starbuck
– “Forty years” and I hit on the words as a harpoon would hit on the White
Whale – I quickly engulfed the last chapters of the book. I understood. I
understand a truth once setting within the mind of Melville. Whale and Ahab are
tied together in Eternity, as are the soul and heartanmind. Which (daresay I) is
the soul or the heartanmind? Which is soul and which is heartanmind – Moby Dick
or Captain Ahab? (2242)
You have spent time searching for more words
from Moby Dick to satisfy your own anger and passion as to why it is
that soul and heartanmind form a pact that drives your species into a near
madness. What is the soul’s necessity to the heartanmind?
I
can see why the heartanmind, vulnerable to the elements beyond the physics
would seek a soul for some semblance of protection, but not the other way
round. What gains the soul? Even in a fiction such as this, what gains the soul
by ingesting a heartanmind? (2300)
Your anger is misguided, boy. Enough for
tonight. Post. – Amorella
2302
hours. I am pulled down by the majesty of Melville’s grand concluding chapters
to Moby Dick.
If this be the case, it is you who stand in
heartanmind as Captain Ahab; but I know this is nothing but your own dark
imagination that is angry at your birth into this world. It is as though you
were cast out of a better place than Earth, not Heaven, and know of no just
reason why this is so.
2308
hours. Your words paste much childlike behavior within my heartanmind. You are
correct. I need to mature where it counts most. Moby Dick, more than any other
book, raises my passions to rebellion, not against G---D, but against my very
soul. – rho
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