Biology 101: We are what we are.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that family members usually, though not always, tend to bear some physical resemblance to one another. Skin tone, eye and hair color, facial features, height, and even more abstract characteristics such as personal interests or intelligence can contribute to recognizable family traits.

 

A close friend had chuckled when she saw a home movie of my father, whom she had never met, walking on the beach in his swim trunks. My friend found it amusing that I walked with the same rolling, slightly bowlegged gait that my father had. As it was, I was pleased by this connection to my Dad, who had died while I was still a teenager.

Thinking about this link made me realize something else. Since my father had never insisted that I should specifically imitate his walk, I recognized that my body structure—bones and muscles, their particular lengths, shapes and placement—were traits that I’d inherited from my father and caused me to move in a similar fashion.

What I learned from all this was that my resemblance to and variation from other people were due to very definite physical attributes, inherited, not learned. For example, one can not teach a child to change his or her eye color. While this may appear mundane and obvious, there are more subtle applications with much greater relevance that I’ll demonstrate as we go along.

Years later, when I was working in mental health, I had occasion to study brain trauma and its effects. I learned that certain behavioral patterns, called “risk-taking” behaviors, were associated with a higher incidence of brain trauma. In other words, folks who, for instance, liked to drive fast, more often found themselves in head-crashing accidents.

I also read that researchers had identified a genetic marker that is associated with such risk-taking behavior.

That information, coupled with some reading from the extraordinary amount of brain research that had been done world-wide in the 1990s, helped me understand that human brains are as subject to physical and functional similarities and differences as any other body part. Moreover, it was obvious these differences and similarities are largely responsible for normal or anomalous behavior as well.

More specifically, people feel and behave in different ways for the most part because their brains are different.

That has some very significant ramifications. Think about it.