Topic 58: On Being Eye-Minded

Carol:

 The Eyes Have It

 What I remember from my high school science classes is not much, especially since back then I got my science mostly from fiction. Now I get it mostly from the “Science” Section of the New York Times, and it often sounds like fiction.  Let’s take genetics, for example, and eye color.

Here’s what I remember from high school without looking anything up after 44 years. Genetics has to do with genes, chromosomes and  DNA. A guy named Mendal (a monk or priest?) experimented with plants (or seeds, or both) and tracked traits from parent plant to child plant.  In Biology class, we had to fill in a chart showing eye color based on inheritance of dominant  Brown  or recessive   Blue traits. We get ½ our genetic material from Mom and ½ from Dad. I have blue eyes, so I am Blue/Blue. My husband has brown eyes, but our kids have blue eyes so Marc must be a Brown/Blue. What were the chances that Brown Bully Eyes hubby and Baby Blue Eyes wifey would have blue-eyed children? Fifty-fifty, toss of a coin.

Blue/Blue Kid #1

Now for the facts.The guy’s name was Mendel, he was a Moravian monk, and he experimented with pea plants.  According to a NY Times book review  it took the scientific community a while to catch up to the 19th century monk scientist: : “Mendel's findings were completely neglected for 35 years before being rediscovered in 1900. It took scientists another 50 years to deduce the structure of DNA. Since then genetic research has proceeded at breathtaking speed” (Magurran).

What  have scientists learned about eye color since I slept through my high school science classes?

•    Blue eyes are increasingly rare in America;  about ½  of Americans had blue eyes in 1910, today 1 in 6— nothing to do with genetics, only partly due to immigration patterns, mostly due to changing marriage patterns (in 1910, 80% of people married within their ethnic group); by 1960,  level of education became the more dominant factor(source: Belkin based on a 2002 study).

•    Blue-eyed people have a common ancestor;  scientists at the University of Copenhagen, after 10 years of genetic detective work, found a single ancestor six-ten thousand years ago whose genetic mutation was responsible for blue eye coloration (source: Science Daily 2008).
 

•    Genetic coding related to eye color is much more complex than originally thought. Scientists from the Netherlands  identified three new genes that, in combination with genes already identified, account for a a range in the color spectrum that can’t be described with the broad terms “brown,” “blue” and “green” (source: Science Daily 2010).

Blue/Blue Kid #2

Unfortunately for our 19th century monk, modern genetics has also  shown that everything we learned in school based Mendel’s notions of dominant and recessive genes is wrong. It has to do with irises, melanin and brown pigment,  Chromosome 15 and Chromosome 19, lipochrome and brown-yellow pigment,  etc. etc. etc. (Source:Bickford).

When it comes to predicting your next baby’s eye color, forget the coin toss and forget Mendel, and throw away the paternity tests.  Hug the kid and love those big blue/gray, hazel with yellow specks, amber with a touch of violet EYES.

 Sources:
 Bickford, Larry. “All About Eye Color.” The EyeCare Reports.
 Belkin,  Douglas.  “Blue eyes are increasingly rare in America.”NY Times Online
 Blue-Eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor
 Magurran, Anne. “Gives Peas a Chance.” Aug 12 2001 NY Times online
      

Megan:

Reflections on The Daily Theme Eye

The idea for this weblog project came from an essay in our book of topics called “The Daily Theme Eye.” The unknown author describes how an assignment from the Harvard English Department to write daily on a topic of his choosing required a natural acuity of both vision and composition.  He was delighted by the project and found that "[i]It became needful, then, to watch for and treasure incidents that were sharply dramatic or poignant, moods that were clear and definite, pictures that created a single clean impression" (23).

I have “The Daily Theme Eye”, but I am incapable of summoning or applying it at will. I have been keeping a journal for more than twenty years, and for the past ten years have directed myself to write daily even if I have nothing to say. I can look up what I was thinking about or doing on this day last year, five years, ten years ago. I have the idea that if I write everything down, I can eventually chip away the excess and find a book.  This, I based on the infinite monkey theorem  which supposes that given enough time, a monkey hitting keys randomly on a typewriter would eventually type the complete works of William Shakespeare. I was so enamored of this idea – which was first presented to me (incorrectly) as an explanation of the chaos theory – that one of the titles of my senior thesis was “The Chaos Monkey’s Shakespeare.”

I haven’t always kept up the daily journaling. Months passed between entries while I worked in the prison when I deliberately chose not to record what I’d seen or done so that I would not remember it. I am sorry for that now, but still, I have managed to fill 40+ sketch-books – tens of thousands of pages -- with the most useless and repetitive self-involved moaning, interrupted occasionally by clear and poignant observations.  Writing on a daily basis, without the benefit or direction of a theme, can be useful and therapeutic, as in the case of an exercise in stream-of-consciousness; but other times it feels more compulsive than creative.

Occasionally, I have manipulated myself or other people into awkward or dangerous situations so that I could write about them later. I have taken other people’s tragedies and spun them into stories. It was a great relief to realize I am not the only writer who has done so, in fact, our anonymous author commented that his daily theme assignment “ …has turned the panorama of existence into a play, or rather a thousand plays, and brought after sorrow or pain, the great comfort of composition” (22). I think of them as stories, rather than plays.  In college, one of my friends was robbed at gunpoint, and another almost died of a rare blood disorder. I used both of those events in my senior project. I justify it because that is what writers do. David Sedaris, who is one of my idols, remarked in one of his stories that his sister had told him a family anecdote and then forbid him to write about it. “But why?” He said, “You’re not going to use it.”

10 years worth of journals

Source:
Essays and Essay Writing: Based on Atlantic Monthly Models. 1927. Ed. William M. Tanner, M.A. Boston Little, Brown and Company. 

Sedaris, David. “Repeat after me.” Dress your family in Corduroy and Denim. Little, Brown and Company, 2004. (page unknown – audio book).