After months of planning to – finally watched the entire NOVA on the genome and how it explains the one question Darwin had – that he couldn’t answer: how?
As it turns out – what I did know is that parts of our DNA control how parts of us develop, correlations to traits or features, parts. What was amazing to me was that the other parts that were previously thought to be junk are switches turning these genes on and still others – tell these switches to turn on or off.
My big personal insight was how this is so corollary to what we do in business, life and our own social evolution. Consider how our industry and society has evolved to do just the same things. Some build, others manage and still others lead these managers strategically. The parts of computers and robotics, the CPU’s and the instructions to turn these switches on and off in the CPU and Memory chips. It makes me think – could the same thing be true of all the parts of our brain that we assume to be unused? And even the way we develop software here at Intuit – the happy accident resulting from customer driven innovation and design for delight.
These evolutions in the product come from observation and change based on what works better. The interesting question for scientists I suppose is how they can apply these changes, these bits of insight into forced evolution. Nova touched on this in the end with the treatment of genetic disease. In the show they talked about how this now helps parents to prepare for what they know will be a disability for their children. Is making the change in the embryos the key – or wrong. Now you step into life, creation, evolution and all that – not a battle I want to begin with a I’m conflicted internally as well. But it makes you think – if you have the open mind to do so.
Home