Understanding our evolution through the lens of diet and nutrition

The Community Nutrition Forum (CNF) in my home state of Kerala in India organized a “Webinarathon” in celebration of National Nutrition Month in September. 15 days of 1 hour sessions conducted by expert dieticians and nutritionists about a range of topics such as basics of good nutrition, diet for different diseases and diet for different age groups. I missed the first few sessions but since then have been listening to topics such as diet and nutrition for Alzheimer’s disease, women suffering from PCOS, lactating mothers and adolescent kids. One common factor has stood out in all the sessions. From children to elder people, every category of people has one basic requirement the lack of which is creating a host of health issues in them.

Vitamin D.

Where do we get Vitamin D from? Simply go stand in the sun. But there is a catch. Our body creates maximum Vitamin D when exposed to early morning sun, between 7-9 am. This is why most Indian temples are open till 9:30 am. What happens after 9:30? Sun’s radiation becomes stronger as it gets hotter and we get exposed to more UV rays which in the long run can cause cancer. But simply standing in the sun is not enough. With brisk walking we inhale more oxygen and the increased pumping of the heart sends oxygenated blood to all parts of the body triggering cell regeneration. More oxygenated blood flow rejuvenates the brain which in turn helps improve focus and concentration. Many schools are adopting 10-15 minutes of workouts or yoga before beginning of classes every morning. Circumambulation of banyan trees is common in Indian temples because banyan trees produce the best oxygen in the morning. Most traditions are rooted in science but people would ignore if they are asked to walk for the sake of health but would walk readily in the name of Gods, so Gods have been used to build healthy communities for thousands of years.

The dominant genes in all of us contain genetic information from our ancestors who were active and predominantly outdoor people. Our present lifestyles are in direct contradiction with the information contained in our genetic makeup. Moreover, fats, proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, sodium, potassium, magnesium, iron, etc all exist in a certain balance in our body. Imbalance in one of them can have ripple effect on the others. Such imbalances result in the release of hormones that can do the exact opposite of the so called happy hormones, making people moody and pushing them into spirals of negative thoughts. This in turn reduces our body energy known as prana and when that battery dies we die.

Vitamin D manages a host of body functions and is even said to protect us from cancer. But we are too busy for morning walks. Many people take Vitamin D capsules, unknown to the fact that absorption of Vitamin D through the gut is very less compared to creation of Vitamin D from sunlight through our skin. Then there are people deriding others for walking in the sun because it will make their complexion dark. Pitting staying healthy against looking white and (supposedly) good is not smart and it is born out of ignorance of our own anatomy.

I have observed dietitians advising people to shun junk food completely and eat only healthy food. We resist just like animals when we are forced to change something we like or adopt something we don’t want to. People who like eating junk food, especially the ones in the adolescent age group are going to laugh off such advices. The question here is how did we reach the point of addiction to junk food?

Animals eat food for nutrition and not based on taste. When we see a pride of lions hunting and devouring a wild buffalo, there are two aspects to note. Herbivores extract proteins from the vegetation they eat but protein content is low in vegetation which is why they need to eat a lot to satisfy their protein needs and consequently developed large appetite and large physique. Carnivores eat herbivores to get the proteins from them. Also, lions hunting a large animal means every member of the pride can eat to their full and they don’t need to eat again for some days. Hunting is an exhaustive and risky affair, zebra’s hind leg kicks have broken jaw bones of lions and starved them to death.

Our taste buds are far more in numbers and far more evolved than that of animals. Our preference for taste grew with time and this is how we started using spices. There were times when food was made with the balance of nutrition and taste, like the biryani. What changed those dynamics was the industrial revolution, concept of money and office jobs. Working for long hours became the norm and there was no time for sumptuous meals. This heralded the emergence of a new food industry, the fast food industry. Food items that can be prepared quickly, are tasty and can be eaten fast or on the go became the need and the fast food industry catered perfectly to the new dietary requirements. A large proportion of fast food items are fried and deep fried, have milk products such as cheese and butter and adding a sedentary lifestyle with little to no exercise has become the recipe for health disasters.

Dietitians have to understand the short and long term adverse impact of eating junk food and prepare totally new diet charts with healthy food items that can reduce the adverse effects of junk food. Fast food has become an integral part of the global food industry and junk food an integral part of our diet. Restaurants in India heat oil for deep frying a variety of vegetarian and non vegetarian food items in the same oil, reuse the same oil the next day and add fresh oil to it. Every food item fried in such oil is junk food for me. Dietitians have to accept this reality and evolve with their diet plans accordingly.

I have had problems digesting meat from my childhood so I never liked eating meat. My great grandfather was a Brahmin so I used to think my dislike to meat was genetic till my mom told me that she ate very less meat during her pregnancy. This is when I realized being not used to meat from my mother’s womb could be the primary reason. My friends keep telling me the need to eat meat for meeting my protein requirements but I believe everybody’s nutrient requirements are different based on many factors and my body may not have similar protein requirements like others.

Precision nutrition is an evolving and exciting area of study where one’s DNA, microbiome, and metabolic response to specific foods or dietary patterns are analyzed and evaluated to determine the most effective eating plan to prevent or treat disease. According to many religions, each human being is made up of genes from 7 generations. Considering 7 generations of genes on both father’s and mother’s side of each one of us, we are all made up of genetic soup and our genetic structure must be as unique as our fingerprints.

They say the way to someone’s heart is through their stomach. Healthy hearts are the key to our overall health and dieticians are best positioned to ensure this. The need for healthy diets are on the rise in every aspect of our lives so dietetics is an emerging field with immense potential. Looks like dietitians have a major role to play we move towards our next stage of evolution.

Humanity’s fantasy world has been shattered by a virus

I had a very interesting conversation with a friend (who is going to read this) about whether COVID-19 virus is a zoonotic virus or a man made virus. There are many articles and videos that have been circulating on social media proposing to provide evidence that the virus was created in the virology lab at Wuhan, China. What my friend is worried about is, if these allegations turn out to be true, it means we have interfered in nature and tampered with the natural evolution of a microorganism. He wants strict regulations on biological testing similar to the ones imposed on nuclear and chemicals testing so that we do not end up engaging in a biological war with one another like the atom bombs in Japan and chemical warfare in Vietnam. My answer to him was in 2 parts. 1) Human interference in nature We started interfering in nature when we started cutting down trees to build our houses. We did not pause to wonder why animals are not doing the same. Rather, in our arrogance of having superior intelligence we looked down upon the supposed lower intelligence of animals. We never wondered from where did we get this ability which no other living being on the planet has. Nature will never give the intelligence and ability to any living being to destroy nature’s ecosystem. Nature is a closed ecosystem which means everything that is born or created within it will or has to return to it. Animals build nests using items available in nature which gets recycled by nature after use. When we die our bodies are recycled by nature. Fully knowing this, we created tar, concrete, plastic and a zillion other things nature cannot recycle and knowing that nature cannot recycle our waste, we keep forcing it on nature which nature has duly started returning to us during natural calamities. So we have come a long way to worry about human interference in nature now. 2) Tampering with the natural evolution of a microorganism My friend believes biological testing in labs is essential to understand about microorganisms so that we can build medicines and vaccines to protect us from them. First of all, every organism in nature is in continuous evolution. So there is no end to biological testing. Why are animals not doing the same? This is not about higher or lower levels of intelligence. Nature has a sophisticated and effective way of handling this situation. Immune system. Diseases are simply conflicts between organisms of higher and lower orders. All living beings when exposed to nature will constantly be under the attack of microorganisms. Immune system keeps learning about more microorganisms and becomes more robust in protecting us. So we do not need to test microorganisms in labs for our protection from them. The bigger problem with this is, not everyone will have good intentions. These genetically modified microorganisms could be stolen and released into nature. We will have no control over them once they are in nature and consequences could be catastrophic. We have found ways to splice genes in lab and now we are working towards repairing genes in human genetic structure that cause diseases. I am all for it because it can cure genetic diseases like diabetes permanently. But any lab experiments that can potentially involve nature has to be strictly forbidden. Even if COVID-19 is a man made virus and we let it out into nature, did it affect nature? No animal died because of it. 3 million humans and counting have died. Every time we go against nature, the consequences will come back to bite only us. Most importantly, it is inconsequential whether the virus is natural or man made because in either case it has broken the glass houses we have been living in for so long. This goes back to the conversation I had with another friend (who is also going to read this). Every aspect of human life has become untenable in nature. Our food habits have become extremely inorganic and unhealthy, our sleep cycle has vanished and our entire lifestyle is in disarray. We are no longer in communication with nature because of which our immune system gets to learn nothing and has literally become idle. One virus of moderate virulence has raised a question mark over the survival of our species itself. Diseases are one of the ways in which nature controls population of every living being. So death is inevitable. Greater the size of population higher the mortality rate and more number of reasons to die. If diseases don’t kills us, accidents, murders and so many other reasons are lurking. We do not even know if we will wake up from our sleep the next day. Common reasons for death during sleep – silent cardiac arrest, brain hemorrhage. But we are “existing” in a blissful fantasy world. We take housing loans and agree to pay EMIs every month for the next 20-30 years. In interviews, candidates are asked ” where do you find yourself in the next 5 years or what are your professional goals for the next 5 years”. Education is linked to profession which is linked to money which is linked to social status. Health has become irrelevant. We take insurance policies and swagger around in arrogance that when we fall sick, the policies will take care of us. Health is wealth has become wealth is health. We rush to hospitals where we get treated when we fall sick. Note : Hospitals are not places that ensure we do not fall sick. Doctors do not take us off tablets and tell us how to become healthy naturally. We no longer seem to remember that prevention is better than cure. Moreover what diseases are doctors and hospitals curing us from anyways? We are given medication that suppress diseases. There is still no cure available for even common cold. Google and see the classifications of headache. There is a type of headache called stress headache the cause of which medical community has no clue about. This is how little the medical community and doctors who treat us know about human anatomy. Medication for pain simply interrupt the signal to the brain that indicates pain so we stop feeling pain. This is called workaround in other professional jobs and cannot even be considered as treatment. Suppressing a disease and keeping it inside the body long enough can result in the genetic information of the disease getting encoded into our genetic structure. This is how genetic diseases are created and passed on to future generations, thereby making the entire species unhealthy. This is what has happened to us which animals with their lower intelligence avoids by identifying and abandoning/killing unhealthy offspring. Even more ironical are the facts about medication and vaccination. Diabetes is a genetic disease and medicines only help to keep it under control. Can pharmaceutical companies manufacture medicines and vaccines to repair our genetic structure? Human body is tuned to absorb vitamins from nature and food on its own. I have read about people in western countries who live on diet of vitamin tablets completely ignorant of the fact that human body is incapable of absorbing vitamins from tablets properly. I have heard of people suffering from Vitamin D deficiency in India which is literally unbelievable. I can understand this in the colder western countries where there is less sunlight but in a tropical country all it takes is soaking our body in sunlight for a while. We are all made to believe that medication will cure us and vaccines will protect us from diseases. In reality, medication and vaccines are top ups for our immune system, a miniscule external intervention which provides more information for the immune system to fight diseases and protect us. If our immune system is already weak, medicines and vaccines can never protect us on their own. These are the reasons why keeping ourselves healthy is so important for the survival of our species. We have no control over diseases and death. The healthcare system we have does nothing to protect us from diseases. All we can do is to stay healthy, maintain a good immune system and hope that it will protect us from diseases. We cannot run away from nature, live inside concrete buildings and hope to have a good immune system. People are being kept under lockdown now and are being told that staying at home will keep them safe from COVID-19 virus when the reality is governments are completely unprepared to handle a health crisis. Staying at home without enough physical activity and away from nature can drastically affect our immune system and make us vulnerable to other diseases. It is mind boggling that almost the entire human race has become so ignorant about themselves, about nature and have become so gullible to live in such an artificial world. There is a business evaluation model called PESTEL which evaluates uncertainties in the business environment such as political situations, economic conditions, etc to find the associated risks that can impact business prospects. The 2nd E in the model is for evaluating environmental factors which includes natural disasters and diseases. Very less importance is given to this as I came to understand from the experience of a local businessman. Even though some corporate companies do give importance to natural disasters, diseases are largely ignored. We saw how much companies have struggled after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and it has taken a year for employees to get used to working from home. Just like fever is our immune system’s indicator that a foreign organism has entered our body, nature sends out signals when there are changes in its environment. Animals understand signs of natural disasters in advance and are able to protect themselves. We have lost that ability somewhere along our evolution. I do not know how useful is our higher intelligence if it does not even help us to survive in nature. I do not know if we are too late to break out of the glass houses we are living in and return to nature, but it is never too late to try.

The disastrous impact of meat consumption on human behavior and climate change

The awareness of adverse human impact on nature has only started to grow in earnest in recent times. Many of us were even in denial about human imprints on climate changes till not so long ago. What we are still not completely aware is that our activities are adversely affecting nature in a multitude of ways, each activity is adding to the cumulative effect on nature and the blow back on us will be unimaginable in magnitude.

When we talk about climate changes and how the food we eat is affecting it, most of the general population would still laugh it off. What can cultivation and raising livestock do to climate? We have been doing both for thousands of years. Why has it become a problem now?

This is where our education system is so superficial and our knowledge of this planet and its history is so poor. There is ample proof to show that the Earth has gone through 5 mass extinction events till now. The last one was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs got wiped out. Wasn’t that caused by a comet or asteroid? Well, yes, but earth’s atmosphere and climate had changed considerably by then. Giant herbivores had devoured tons of vegetation and tore through the forests while letting out huge amounts of methane gas from their bellies causing high levels of green house effects. Because of the huge population of herbivores, carnivore numbers had also exploded. Nature, atmosphere and climatic conditions had deteriorated to the tipping point and the asteroid impact was just the shove that triggered the extinction event.

So what has all of that got to do with us? The extinction event wiped out the most dominant species in nature, the dinosaurs that were the primary culprit for the imbalance. When nature cleanses itself, it wipes out what made it dirty. This time its us who is creating instability in nature. When it comes to our food habits and especially with livestock and their meat, we need to first understand how nature’s food chain works. The animals that reproduce in large numbers have high mortality rates and greater number of predators. The ones that do not have predators, known as apex predators reproduce in comparatively low numbers. Predators prey mostly on the ones that are injured or have diseases which in turn ensures that no genetic diseases exist in nature. This predator-prey relationship ensures that no animal’s population grows beyond control or spreads diseases and creates imbalance in nature. We, supposedly the most intelligent beings started protecting our livestock from wild animals effectively disabling nature from controlling their population. This has reached the tipping point where it is no longer possible to discern whether demand or supply of meat is driving the economics of livestock. Now cattle livestock consumes large amounts of vegetation and release methane gas which has contributed significantly to the green house effects we are experiencing.

I have always looked at our alarming increase in meat consumption with the fear of repercussions from nature. I was always a very reluctant meat eater from childhood and I finally quit 20 years back. Digesting meat was always a problem for my stomach and it was too difficult to accept that I could eat animal meat and still be an animal lover. Friends tried to dissuade me by giving me many reasons such as where else will my body get enough proteins other than from meat? My logic has been simple. If herbivores exist in nature, they are getting all the proteins, vitamins and carbohydrates they need from nature. I do not have to walk the long road of first ingesting their meat and then putting my body through the arduous task of digesting the meat and extracting proteins from it when I can get it directly from vegetables, pulses and grains.

Many years back, when I was staying at my ancestral home, a duck flew out of a nowhere and landed inside my house compound wall. We decided to keep her and find a male duck (drake) for her. My dad and I went to the town slaughter house and saw a group of ducks and drakes in an enclosure. The enclosure was right outside where the ducks were taken to be killed. We pointed to a drake and the people at the slaughter house thought we wanted its meat and took it to the slaughter stone. Before any of us could react the drake put its neck on the stone by itself. I was shell shocked for a split second before I screamed no. It was clearly able to see the fate of other ducks in the enclosure but the fact that it knew what its fate was going to be and was even prepared for it was too much for me handle. And we claim only we have a mind and intelligence.

Animals live in very different ranges of wavelengths and frequencies when it comes to light, sound and electromagnetic waves. Many of them have also adapted to understand the ranges we exist in. Only we haven’t been able to tune in to their ranges. Cats are known to see spirits which is why ancient Egyptians considered them as guardians of the netherworld and Bastet was worshiped as the cat Goddess. So it is no surprise that animals know about death and probably better than us. This is where it gets interesting. Whenever we get into a stressful situation, be it an accident or a fight, energy due to trauma accumulates in the muscles that bears the maximum impact. I have heard about pigs getting bludgeoned to death with hammers in slaughter houses. Even if an animal was butchered in an instant, traumatic energy would still accumulate in its body muscles. When we consume meat from butchered animals, we ingest their trauma as well which in turn does two things. It affects the energy chakras in our body and our genetic structure.

Genes are essentially of two types, the encoded ones we receive from our parents, relatives and ancestors and the ones that get encoded with the information from our own experiences. So how do we know that ingesting meat is affecting us genetically? If we look at human history, our evolution into the societal life has surprisingly made us more aggressive and violent beings, not just towards other beings but to our own kind. All over the world we have been raising more livestock, devouring more of their meat and fighting more with each another. Even after creating the mushroom cloud with the atom bombs during the second World War, we are not done with our squabbling and killing spree. We have aggressively pursued industrialization and building a money based society along with finding innovative ways to weaponize every new technology to harm each other and we have done everything without even having scant respect for nature. We created plastic but never cared to check whether it is degradable in nature before commercializing it.

I am aware that though I may not be able to prove the correlation between meat consumption and human behavior what I do know is about the impact of non-consumption of meat on us. The Brahmin community in India were originally the collectors and recorders of knowledge. Interestingly, they decided to relinquish eating meat some time during their evolution. I am not sure what triggered this change. Maybe at the onset of Kali Yuga, idol worship started, temples started getting built and Brahmins expanded their dominance in society from being advisers to Kings to temple priests by taking ownership of ancient Indian texts. But it still doesn’t explain why relinquishing meat was necessary to imbibe the knowledge of the texts but what we do know is that a vegetarian diet has made them benign humans. The hymns, chants and bells in the temples are all intended to synchronize our souls with the highest cosmic energy and thereby find harmony with nature. Now that Brahmins have also expanded into other professions, I know and have heard of many of them who changed to meat diet and started showing clear signs of aggressive behavior. This could be one important reason why the Brahmin community chose to seek knowledge and serve in temples and not take up other professions. Maybe there are undiscovered secrets that could explain how consumption of meat interferes with the assimilation of knowledge and anatomical explanations for how consumption of meat creates aggressive behavior and has made us destructive towards our own kind and towards nature.

From our cave dwelling times when meat was an essential source of food, even though we learnt to cultivate food, our propensity towards meat consumption has only increased with time. Here is another interesting example. Christianity and Islam were both born in the desert lands of the Middle East where cultivation is impossible and meat is essential for survival. The Christian and Muslim communities in India are not migrants from the Middle East. Christians are descendants of the first Hindu converts and Muslims are both descendants of converts and descendants of Muslims who came from outside and bred with the women in India. There is no dearth of cultivated food in India then why do both communities still follow the food habits of their brethren in the Middle East of consuming large quantities of meat? Meat consumption has become part of the culture of all communities and it is reflecting on how the communities are at loggerheads with one another.

There needs to be more research done and more awareness created about how meat consumption has become one of the many self destruction buttons we have created. I believe aligning ourselves with nature is the only way to save our species from total annihilation. Every single step of ours is creating an adverse impact on nature and climate change is just one of them.

The World Should Be Worried About Gun Related Massacres Spreading As A Culture

The tranquility of two peaceful countries has been shattered by gunfire in the last few days. Life in New Zealand and Netherlands has been jolted by bullets and the ensuing blood and gore. As the perpetrators are caught and assessed to find out the objective of their barbarous acts, the answers lie somewhere else.

I have lived in Utrecht for 6 months between 2008 and 2009. Going from Bangalore to Utrecht felt like going to a sleepy village. The effect was more profound because I was there during the winter season. No birds, no leaves on trees, there used to be hustle and bustle on the streets between 8-9:30 in the morning and 4-5:30 in the evening. Rest of the time, it used to look like an urban desert. I saw police cars 4 times in 6 months and 3 times were outside departmental stores. I heard a vehicle honk once in 6 months. Honking is considered to be abusing there (God bless Indians). I heard about one road accident in 6 months. I couldn’t sleep for the first few days because of no sound. In India, sounds of human activity can be heard all through the night. Lack of any sound was so new and overpowering for me. A decade on from all of this, the city being in the news for random gun related killing is extremely disturbing.

But this is not without an irony. Bursting firecrackers is banned in Netherlands except for New Year celebrations. I do not understand banning firecrackers and allowing people to possess guns. Here is a typical case of this guy from New Zealand.

He used to own a gun for farming related reasons. I have seen farmers chasing away birds from their farmlands in my hometown by bursting firecrackers. In farmlands all kinds of animals exist. Small birds come to eat beetles and insects, those birds are eaten by larger birds of prey, snakes come to eat rats and snakes in turn get eaten by mongoose. This is nature’s way of maintaining its ecosystem. So what can guns do on a farm that fire crackers cannot?

An argument can be made that guns help people protect themselves. From what? Lets say armed robbery. If robbers know people have guns, they would also try to get a gun by stealing or by illegal means. What chances do people have in a shootout? It could go either way. In commando and special ops training, trainees are taught to use anything available as a weapon. Moreover any tools that we use like knives, screw drivers, etc can be used as weapons. But all of those have some utility value and serves multiple purposes in our daily life. What purpose do guns serve other than taking lives?

Even more ironic and silly is the assessment of perpetrators of gun related crimes and profiling of candidates to be given license to have guns. Here is a news item from last year about the Netherlands government profiling candidates to be legal gun owners. Human emotions and behaviors are influenced by circumstances, genetics and hormones. Our genetic structure supposedly contains information from our 7 previous generations. So it is possible that our genes may have information about robbers, murderers and rapists. Those information could become dominant in an environment that nurtures them and influence our behavior. This could explain many crimes because with a sane mind, criminals don’t seem to be able to comprehend how they committed the crimes, something which society has been explaining away as the influence of Satan. So tendencies to commit crimes may arise anytime within us. What can the government do about someone who was given license to possess a gun 10 years back, the person had to face severe problems in life after 8 years and in despair took out the gun and killed his family and himself?

What is worrisome is the gun related killings spreading to all parts of the world. As people migrate to all parts of the world, their cultures hold them back from integrating themselves into the new society they are in. There have been many cases of men from Muslim countries migrating to western countries and finding it hard to contain their sexual desires when they see the attire of women in those countries which are in stark contrast to the burka tradition prevalent in their own countries. Crime rates have increased in Europe after the European countries opened their doors to asylum seekers from many strife torn countries in Africa and Middle East. Inability to adjust to new cultures, despair because of leaving their homeland and loved ones behind, frustration at having to start life from scratch in a new place all contribute to mental disturbances leading to violent behavior. While the perpetrators of the massacre in New Zealand have been attributed to white supremacy, the one in Netherlands has been identified as a Turkish man whose motive is yet to be found out.

Guns empower us to assume that we can provide quick justice and get rid of problems instantly. Politics, human and animal atrocities, there are so many issues and instances that make us feel helpless which in turn invokes the sense of vigilantism within us. We may be able to eliminate a corrupt politician with a gun but not corruption. It is possible to kill an individual but guns cannot destroy a system. If we look at it closely, no guns in society makes more sense that having them. Then why aren’t  governments all over the world taking a unilateral decision to ban guns?

World War II was termed as the “war to end all wars”. But there have been armed conflicts after the war all over the world and continues to this day. Research to develop more lethal and sophisticated weapons is a black box and consumes unimaginable amount of money. The weapons are not meant to protect humanity from alien invasions. We are developing those weapons to fight among ourselves and kill our own kind. Why do we still have borders between countries and armed forces? The answer is very simple. Weapons manufacturing is one of the biggest and most profitable industries in the world. The same companies provide funding to political leaders during elections which makes the leaders accountable to them than to the people. From shopping malls to hospitals it is people and their lives that create revenue for the corporate. The gun lobby in the US is extremely powerful and influential. This is why there are only talks of banning guns without a ban ever coming into existence.

How understanding genetics could shape future of humanity

Didn’t we all gape in awe when the first of the X-Men movie franchise hit upon us? Genetic mutation, extraordinary powers, special skills, straight from the world of fantasy, right? Maybe it’s not. Ever wondered how a brutal rape or murder or road rage crime happens? How is it possible to incite a group of normally thinking people into a mob? The answers could all be in our genes. How does knowing this help? Simply put, to create a better version of us in the future.

Genetics is one of the most complex aspects about humanity which our knowledge of science hasn’t been able to explain. Genes are made of DNA and modern science has been able to understand only 3% of our DNA in medical labs. More importantly, science is yet to answer the fundamental question that has perplexed everyone. How did we manage to take that leap suddenly from dumb Homo Erectus to intelligent Homo Sapiens? Normal evolution would have taken millions of years more. What is even more perplexing is, if our evolution was normal, why didn’t any other animal evolve like us in the same time span? I believe all the answers lie in our genes. It has been found out and is common knowledge now that genes contain encoded information. Now take the case of any animal. Each tiger may have stripes unique to it, but as a species, every generation of tigers do the same things and behaves and lives the same way. Hunt, procreate and die. This should mean all of them have similar genetic structure with almost the same encoded information. So what is different about us? The answers may be in our genetic structure.

I believe there could be two types of genes, immutable and mutable genes. Mutable means editable. This is just like normal and rewritable CDs. Mutable genes can store new information and are possibly rewritable and immutable genes are the ones with information from our ancestral genes which cannot be rewritten. Now, if the majority of genes in animals are immutable and there are very few mutable genes, their behavior would be uniform through the generations and more importantly, new information would be added very slowly. Evolution happens because of genetic mutation, when new information causes changes to our genes. Maybe this is why animals are slow in evolution. What happened to us then? We have been created with a larger genetic structure and we probably have a larger pool of mutable genes. This must be the reason why we are able to learn, evolve and even create things. But how does gene mutation happen? This is what science has been able to find out now, about the rest of the 97% of our DNA. Genes can be altered with information and information could be in the form of light, sound and all energy forms around us, at the correct frequency and wavelength. But this is already happening in our lives. When I was shown the picture of an apple and was told that it is an apple, light from the image of the apple and the voice of my mother combined to create that knowledge in me. This could be the fundamental secret to our intelligence. A larger pool of mutable genes combined with the abilities of our 5 senses has helped us to learn and evolve faster.

An astrologer had told me once that members of every generation are connected to past 7 generations in their family. Maybe it is true, I have no clue how that works. But I saw a connection there. The immutable genes we have must be carrying information from 7 generations. Why 7? Maybe because older information may not be relevant and also, if no constraints were put on the amount of genetic information we are carrying, all of us would still be having genetic information from Adam and even from the Homo Erectus . That would be an insane amount of information to carry which would be impossible. When we are conceived in our mother’s womb, only our immutable genes are active and it could be because of information in these genes that we resemble our parents and relatives in looks and some basic personality. This could be the reason how we are able to identify our family members quickly when we are babies even though we have no sense of recognition at that time, because the information in the immutable genes could be helping us make the connections.

So when the astrologer told me that the karma of past 7 generations can affect us, it made sense to me. We are outraged every time we hear that a woman is raped. It is quite possible that one or more of the ancestors of the rapist may have been abusive to women, which was normally the case in olden times when women were trod upon and abused by men. This information could be lying dormant inside the rapist. When the rapist comes from a background where he has seen women being abused from his childhood, this information gets stored in his mutable genes. Then when he meets like minded people, the combined effects could be triggering that ancestral gene to becoming dominant. In a way, I can substantiate this because it has been found that changes in genetic information precedes the onset of cancer. There was huge public outrage in India over the brutal rape of a young woman in a moving bus by a group of young men back in 2012. Irony is, the youngest of them who was 16 or 17 years old at that time had been the most brutal with the woman. How would it be possible to explain his behavior? How many of us can rape a woman? It is not even a thought that crosses normal minds. Then what is different about the ones who indulge in it? How do we explain road rage? How do we suddenly lose our self control to the point where we end up killing random people we have never even seen before? Dormant information of our ancestors in our genes coupled with our experiences could be the possible reason. This is probably why many people who indulge in such crimes feel confused and lost afterwards because they are not able to explain their Mr. Hyde personality.

So how does all the information help us? To understand each other to begin with. We might be sharing genetic pools with other people, but common information could be very sparse, especially in a corporate environment where we could be working with people from all over the world, which in turn creates an incredibly diverse and complex genetic environment. One thing said to such a group of people could be interpreted in so many different ways, based on the choice of words, body language and facial expression of the speaker amidst a host of other factors. Let me cite an example. I used to work closely with an Australian lady who was an employee of the client I used to work for. One day, she told me that she received an email from an employee in the US and she escalated that mail as a complaint to the company VP. I asked her why and she said the email contents were typed in capital letters. So? For her, capital letters meant the US employee was ordering her. I was astounded. I would have probably focused on the matter in the email rather than on the letters themselves. We call this cultural differences and conditioning, but this is ultimately the information with which our mutable genes get encoded and gets passed on to the next generations.

All of this converges to a single point. Our karma. We have to be very careful with our behavior and how we manage life and people. I do not know what triggered diabetes the first time in human history but it has persisted long enough amidst us to become part of our genetic information. Someone may not have diabetes in his/her genetic pool but if he/she becomes diabetic because of unhealthy lifestyle, that information could get passed on to future generations through the genes. This applies to our behavior as well. It is true when they say that if we want men to not abuse women, raise them by showing how to respect women. That’s just one half of the story though. What is unsaid here is the story of the genes. The 7 generations concept could be key here. We have traveled through the Dark Ages, Renaissance, the greatest inventions and two World Wars of the 20th century and the internet to reach where we are today. With each new generation, we may be shedding information in our genes from older generations. An example would be cannibalism. From being a common nature among Homo Erectus it is almost extinct among us now. There is another stark example. Why is there so much passion among Europeans for rugby and football? Both are very physical sports which can cause extreme physical harm to players. If we look closely, the stadiums would seem like ancient Roman Colosseum during the matches.  They must still be carrying some genetic information from Romans, Huns, Goths, Vikings and of course Genghis Khan, whose genetic information has been found all over Europe. The same genetic information has migrated to the US, Australia and other places around the world. Probably this is why we still like to be in conflicts and fight each other, because we still carry traces of genetic information from our violent past. If we can live together in peace for 3 generations, we can easily become a vastly improved species.

Relevance in the new age society

This is something that has been going on for ages in India but has been in the limelight for the past few years because of the increasing reach of an emboldened media who are increasingly trying to capture the attention of the masses by highlighting murders and rapes. The Khap panchayats. Khap means clan and panchayat is similar to an administrative body of people. So this is a bunch of people selected from within the clan to manage the clan and make sure the clan’s policies and beliefs are enforced on everyone in the clan. The reason why they are in the news is because, they have been ordering the execution and rape of couples who marry from within the clans.

India’s societal structure is as diverse as everything else in the country. The caste system was introduced by the Aryans and divided the society into four broad categories based on people’s occupations. Then came the clan structure. Every clan traces it’s roots to the father’s side of the family except in a couple of states where polygamy was prevalent for a very long period of time, so mother’s lineage is considered. In the new millenium and modern age, people are no longer willing to be bound by what they consider as age old and decayed practices. The mutiny within the society is being met very harshly by the Khaps, but neither are Khaps caring to explain nor are people digging into the past to understand the relevance of these customs.

Marrying from the same clan is supposed to cause negative effects on the genes of the children. We know about the effect of the genes now but the effects have been understood and observed for thousands of years. So it essentially means intra clan marriages are prevented to stop wrong gene combinations. How did people come to know of the negative effects from so long ago? I will not believe on my life that the knowledge has been obtained just from sustained observation through the ages. Then how?

Science has answers, right before our eyes. All holy books say we were created from the essence of God. What if essence meant genetics? What if we were created and we are who we are today after going through many genetic experiments? It is accepted that there is a gap in Darwin’s timeline of evolution, when humans suddenly evolved into intelligent beings. Hinduism says people had all the knowledge of the Universe passed onto them by the Gods and it is right before us, but we have forgotten how to see it because of our own vices. We were not intelligent enough to understand genetics so we followed the rules when it was made part of our society. Is this something that Khaps do not know, do not want to know and do not think is essential to educate people with?

Which takes me to the keyword: Relevance. This word is hardly spoken but we keep hearing everyone preaching about staying up to date, moving with the time and the tried and tired one “when in Rome, be a Roman”. Do we stop to think how many things do we live with in the society that have become irrelevant and have gone past their expiry dates long back? We believe in God because we are disillusioned with their own lives and are scared of suffering and going to hell after death. We always have the need to believe in something and lean on it, like how animals follow one who takes the lead. Religion has always been the twin sibling of politics and both are used to manipulate and manage people. Times have changed, people are getting enlightened, yet did either religion or politics evolve with time? No.

Another prime example is marriage. There is this new age when women shudder to think of having one baby and there was a time when all women did was have babies through their lives. Those were the times when women were dependent on men for everything and procreation was essential for the race of mankind. In the new age, both the reasons no longer have relevance, but has the concept of marriage evolved? No. We are still following the rule of “alliance of conveniences”, be it in love or arranged marriage. Life changes with time but the concept of marriage in society has stagnated thats why there is so much marital discord now.

What is the learning? First, weed out what we longer need in our own lives and change what has to be changed at the individual level. It is the collective knowledge of everyone of us that becomes wisdom of the society. Enlightenment, first by knowing ourselves, digging into our past, knowing who we are, where we are coming from, accepting that there is so much we do not know and continuous learning is what defines life and finally, passing on our wisdom to others. A wise new Indian politician, when asked about banning Khap panchayats, merely said that panchayat means an assembly of people and no constitution can ban people from assembling together. If the word Khap is banned, people will congregate using another name. It is their actions, their brutality that needs to be banned. This is wisdom, this is enlightenment. People have to be enlightened scientifically why and how wrong genetic mutation is caused by combination of genes from the same clan. We are no longer the beings who used to worship thunder and rain as Gods. We need enlightenment and we need to stay relevant, thats the only way we can progress as a society.