The magic beyond genes

Today I’m going to talk about something that many people don’t know...The magic beyond genes. Yes, maybe some people may think that a bunch of molecules of DNA aren’t that kind of spectacular; but in reality they have a great potential to explain many things that happens in the world – specially about health things – but actually, they can also give information about social organization...and that’s what I’m going to talk today.

As you can see in http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/26/india-genetics-genes-science the studies about genes are very big, but can give a lot of information about people, medical history and even social organization.

This news talks about a big investigation at Indian society – the whole subcontinent – so it was about a billion of people that were under the investigation. The investigation was about an analysis of the genome of people from the subcontinent, considering that at the subcontinent there’s a lot of diversity about people; but thanks to the genetics exploration they could discover that most of the people of India comes from two principal groups: one from Europe and Middle East, and other from China.

Also, it’s known that Indian people are so much that is a little obvious to find endogamy at this population, so we could expect a lot of recessive genetic diseases; and the most of the scientists says that it’s because of the marriage system at India: they marriage between cousins. But if you look a little bit closely you can say that’s more complicated than that...

Actually, the reason of the high frequency of recessive genetic diseases it’s more because of the socio-political organization at Indian society: The caste system! Yeah, the fact of been under the caste system makes that even people living in the same town don’t exchange genetic materials – even it’s difficult to see social contact –; so you can say that’s what makes that at India’s genes there’s a high frequency of recessive genetic diseases.

This kind of things, about the influence from culture on biology or biology on culture is what I’m studying and expecting to investigate in future.