The cream of the crop and the crop is lemon

Ah, the feeling of having finished high school or accomplished that first degree! And if you went to the universities I went to, surely being called "cream of the crop" was part of all the speeches given in your universities while you were there, not to mention the graduation keynote addresses.  As school kids, educators called us "blank slates" and after some time with them, they now call us crème de la crème, almost like congratulating themselves. Education turned out to be a very long expensive process from being "blank" to being the "cream on top" which makes me really wonder what they filled me up with in the middle part. Just like that, I was done! Well sure, being called "cream" felt good, except that one never really entertained the possibility that the crop being propagated were, well, lemons. If so, I guess that makes me a diploma-bearing member of the cream of lemons, worse off than the ordinary lemons.

Being cream of the crop implies that you are a finished project, a done deal. You were already picked, squeezed, representing the extracted essence of the best of them. You will be part of the creamy froths that will be topped and whipped on to society to be among those other alumni from "cream universities" who now head and populate corporate and government enclaves. I would love to be told that I am just a heap of carbon-based skepticism but look at the state we are in now and tell me, if we were all the quintessence of them all. What happened to this continuous march of creamy graduates that this country is now in a collective state of decay that would surprise even the most diligent bacteria? Go seek the other columns in this paper and other newspapers for some social and political answers. This science column thinks it has to do with this pom-pomed cheer: "crème de la crème."

One thing that I love the most about science is that it often begins with "we used to think…" I love that because it signals a change and more often than not, a growth in understanding. The most suffocating and frustrating thing for me is getting stuck when I know I have to move on. We used to think that superiority had basis in race, which people then based on their own mindless prejudices and wishful thinking to serve their own purposes. In 2000, the draft of the human genome at first compared the most common genetic regions of different samples of humans and said that we are all just about the same. But even older than that, we used to think that Homo sapiens, in all its genetic mapping, was the last stop, the promised complete life form in the chain of human life. Now, with more detailed studies of the human genome published in the March 7 issue of the journal Public Library of Science-Biology, it turns out that humans are still evolving. Deep in our genes, lie some genetic regions, numbering about 700, that are still changing!

A team of geneticists in the University of Chicago led by Dr. Jonathan Pritchard has discovered that our human biological story is not yet a closed book by comparing the genes of three distinct human populations: East Asians, Europeans and Yorubans from Nigeria, and the genome of a chimpanzee, our closest biological kin (we are biologically 98.8 percent chimpanzee or you can also say that chimps are genetically 98.8 percent human). This means that in our most fundamental biological make-up, we are not yet a done deal. This also means that if you come from the crème of the current crop from these "cream universities," rejoice because there is hope for lemons!

But I hope these universities, which I also love, really have the stamina and constitution to withstand time because I am afraid the waiting period is not exactly short. The genetic human changes occurred within an average of around 6,600 years and they are in the following general regions which affect broad areas in being human-like: brain size, taste and smell, sperm and egg, bone structure and development, metabolism of carbohydrates and alcohol, resistance to diseases and to other microorganisms that cause diseases as well as toxins. What is very interesting is that all these changes occurred within 10,000 years, which coincided with the start of agriculture. Some anthropologists also suspect that some genes that had to do with increased "cognitive ability" have evolved under fierce pressure from the physical and cultural environment to "select" the genes that would be able to survive the pressures of nascent cities and newborn commerce and trade, brought on by the surplus spawned by agriculture.

But aside from the long wait, hope for lemons may have just been dimmed by another recent finding. We used to think that "altruism" – to do good for no apparent benefit to the doer – is a uniquely human trait. Science seemed to have punched a hole right though that plastic veil of "used to’s" and found that we also share that trait with chimpanzees when they subjected human babies and chimps to an experiment involving "helping out" even when there is no reward. While noting the differences in the way that chimps and humans interpreted a "call for help," and in their "ability to successfully help," the effort to help was nonetheless exhibited by both human babies and chimps which means that this behavior is something deep in us at least six million years ago when we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees. This experiment is published in the journal Science and also reported in BBC News by Helen Briggs last March 3. So if doing good has been hardwired into us at least six million years ago as of last check, why does the world seem like the killing fields now? What happened? Does the story of human evolution that led to Homo sapiens also include "disconnecting" the "altruistic genes" that Nature seemed to have given to us to successfully deal with life back then?

Part of shedding one’s "lemony" nature is to first recognize you are a lemon in the face of the magnitude and richness of what awaits to be discovered and be learned for yourself. The next step I think is to recognize that it is just fitting to express gratitude to the schools that have helped you be the "fruit" that you are. But your school is not who you are now or who you will become. It does not wholly define you; it is your experiences and what you do with them, far deeper and more than the schools that taught you, that should define the person toward whom the graduate will become. In the same manner, genes are an inextricable part of who you are but they do not run the human being that you are. Indeed, you can move on from being a lemon and you do not need 10,000 years to do it.

In a BBC series called "Who Runs Your World" which ran late last year, I was so moved by the story of Reba and Lori Shappell, Siamese twins who live in Philadelphia, conjoined at the left sides of their heads just above the eye, and are connected by bone, tissue and blood. Reba is an award-winning country singer, while Lori is a domestic goddess. Lori even pays to attend the concerts of Reba. Reba says, "Being a conjoined twin does not really run my world. It’s part of our world, but it doesn’t run it." These sisters are conjoined twins and still they can successfully separate themselves from the Siamese twin concept that defines them for other people, while sadly, I know of a lot of my fellow alumni whose alma mater labels (note, labels only) stick to their egos decades after graduation like, well, industrial strength crazy glue.

At graduation, it is just fitting to express gratitude to the schools that tried to educate you. But after that, you express gratitude to everything else by learning to live and think for yourself. After earning my degrees, I consciously stepped on to a life, my life, humbled by the immensity of my ignorance of the larger universe of people, ideas and things. To have a shot at being less ignorant in the days and nights of life after graduation, I found it necessary to keep some of what I learned from those schools but found that I had to shed a lot more. I still do (learn and shed). The only professional compliment I seriously consider is when I am complimented for a good, honest thought unaccompanied by questions like "to whose family do you belong?" or "what degrees do you have and from where?" It would mean that at least for that moment, I was not a parochial resident or puppet of my genes or my alma maters. I am sure I am also an occasional disappointment to my genetic family and to the universities I graduated from but that is further proof of the independence of thought that an adult, after childhood and schooling, should pursue and perhaps, unintentionally cause. 

You are not a done deal, dear graduate. But for better or for worse, and in every sense of the word, there is no other one like you and no other life except this one to make a difference and cultivate some meaning. Make your lemonade and thank your fellow lemons. Your genes are moving on and the universe is expanding. Move with them but for the love of lemons, make sure that you run your own world.

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